Silvia Duranti, Maria Luisa Maitino, Valentina Patacchini, Nicola Sciclone (p), Carla Rampichini

Elena Ragazzi

In the last years, the trend towards activation has been one of the major issues in welfare and labour market reforms in Europe. Italy has lacked for a long time a strong net of activation policies for the unemployed, but the latest reforms have placed great emphasis on the need to invest in Public Employment Services to make labour market more inclusive. At the same time the European Union, through the European Social Fund, has made available the necessary financial resources to promote active policies, especially those related to training, considering them crucial for the development of human resources in a knowledge-based economy.
Italian Regions play a major role in the planning and managing of training activities for the unemployed and this role became strategic with the upsurge of the economic crisis and the increasing needs of reskilling jobseeker.
The increasing relevance placed on training and activation policies calls for a need to develop a culture of evaluation that with reliable statistical methods can identify the effects of the interventions and provide guidance on how to target them. In particular, in the case of training courses for the unemployed, an impact evaluation by type of users can provide guidance for the development of users segmentation systems in order to direct every unemployed person to the more effective training program for his rapid (re-) employment placement.
This paper proposes an impact evaluation of training courses for the unemployed financed in an Italian region (Tuscany) by the European Social Fund. In particular, the evaluation is carried out for four different types of users, identified on the basis of a profiling system which summarizes each jobseeker’s distance from the labour market. The aim is to identify, for each profiling group, if the attendance of different types of training courses improves the chances of re-employment.

Lisa Sella, Elena Ragazzi (p), Igor Benati, Valentina Lamonica

Nicola Sciclone

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