Active labour market policies and activation strategies

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Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) to help unemployed people back to work include job placement services, benefit administration, and labour market programmes such as training and job creation.
OECD's advocacy of active labour market policies dates back to 1964 and 1976 Council Recommendations which set out a broad agenda for investment in human resource development, strategies for employment creation and improved working conditions, encouraging geographical mobility, forecasting of future occupational requirements, helping marginal groups into employment and ensuring income security during unemployment. This approach emphasized resource shifts from passive to active labour market measures. The original 1994 OECD Jobs Study and the Restated 2006 Jobs Strategy also emphasized the importance of the Public Employment Service, the promotion of active job search, and the influence of benefit entitlements and benefit administration, in line with the attention now given to “activation”.

Activation Strategies help ensure that jobseekers have a better chance of finding employment. Key features of such strategies are to enforce work-availability and mutual obligation requirements, meaning that benefit recipients are expected to engage in active job search and improve their employability, in exchange for receiving efficient employment services and benefit payment. In recent years, the OECD countries have placed increased priority on the effective co-ordination of ALMPs with the administration of benefits and make-work-pay policies, so as to implement coherent activation strategies for recipients of unemployment benefits and other working-age persons who are outside the labour market.

The OECD Secretariat is currently involved in reviews of activation policies in seven participating countries. Country reviews  on Australia, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are being published as Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers and put on this website as soon as they become available.  Consultants’ reports on public employment service were also prepared for the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic and Poland.

The OECD is also involved in publishing annual statistics, together with Eurostat, on Public Expenditure and Participant Stocks in Labour Market Programmes

For further reading ...

Key reports:

• Long Time-Series for Public Expenditure on Labour Market Programmes (2008)
• Activating the unemployed: what countries do (2007)
  Further material: Compendium of National Replies to the OECD Questionnaire on Interventions in the Unemployment Spell
• From inactivity to work: The role of active labour market policies (2006)
• Labour market programmes and activation strategies: evaluating the impacts (2005)
• Public employment services: managing performance (2005)
• Benefits and Employment, Friend or Foe? Interactions Between Passive and Active Social Programmes (2003)
• Labour Market Policies and the Public Employment Service. Prague conference july 2000

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Country reviews:

	Activation Policies in Ireland (2009)
	Activation Policies in Norway (2009)
	Main features of the Public Employment Service in Poland (2009)
	Main Features of the Public Employment Service in the Czech Republic (2008)
	Main Features of the Public Employment Service in the Slovak Republic (2008)
	Activation Strategies and the Performance of Employment Services in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (2006)
	Innovations in Labour Market Policies: The Australian Way (2001)
	Pushing Ahead with Reform in Korea: Labour Market and Social Safety-net Policies (2000)
	Public Employment Services in the United States (1999)

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Statistics:

• Access the online database on Public expenditure and participant stocks on LMP

Websites:

• Employment policy related websites