Suchergebnisse

We analyze the effectiveness of a vocational training (VT) programme targeting unemployed youth in Latvia, contributing to the scant literature on active labour market policies in transition countries. The programme we analyse is part of the Youth Guarantee scheme (2014–2020), the largest action launched by the European Union to combat youth unemployment after the 2008 financial crisis. Although the programme was targeted to youths aged between 15 and 29, priority was given to those younger than 25 years of age. We exploit this eligibility rule in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design framework to estimate the impact of VT participation on the probability of being employed and gross monthly labour income at given dates after the training. Using rich administrative data, we find that the age priority rule increased programme participation for the youngest group by about 10 percentage points. However, participation in the programme did not lead to statistically significant positive effects in labour market outcomes. We argue that this result could be due to some specific characteristics of the programme, namely the voucher system (potentially inducing lock-in effects) and the type of training (classroom instead of on-the-job training). Moreover, the programme was targeted at ex-ante low-employable individuals (e.g. without vocational qualifications), a fact that is confirmed by our analysis of the characteristics of the population of compliers with the age priority rule.

This paper evaluates the impact of a vocational training programme on the labour market outcomes of unemployed youth in Latvia. The programme is part of the Youth Guarantee scheme for the period 2014-2020, the largest action launched by the European Union to reduce youth unemployment rate and to support young people aged between 15 and 29 who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs). To estimate the causal effect of participating in the programme on the employment outcomes, we exploit a rule that gives priority for participation to unemployed people under the age of 25 using a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design setup. The estimated effects of the programme on the probability of being employed and monthly income up to 3.5 years after registering in the programme are positive but not statistically significant, although we find a strong positive effect of the priority rule on programme participation. This is the first evidence on the impact of a programme within the current Youth Guarantee scheme in Europe and our findings are in line with those from the literature on the evaluation of active labour market policies targeting youth.