Warsaw, 12 December, 2016 – Labor offices in Poland will learn new approaches to impact evaluations of labor market measures so that they can activate the unemployed and put them back to work more effectively. In a project implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Economic Development international experts from the World Bank will conduct a series of workshops for the staff of labor offices from selected regions of Poland, and will provide practical assistance in putting the new solutions in place.
“The unemployment rate in Poland now is the lowest since the transition, but a large group of people remain unemployed for long periods,” says Emilia Skrok, World Bank Acting Country Manager in Poland. “On the other hand, employers often have problems with finding workers. We need to find out which instruments work well and which do not work so well putting unemployed people back to work. The purpose of our project is to build this capacity in Poland.”
In cooperation with the World Bank, labor offices will learn how to design and conduct impact evaluations. Impact evaluations allow verifying whether activities have triggered the desired outcome, in this case whether those who received support from a labor office actually fare better that those who did not. Thanks to evaluation based on a counterfactual methodology, which is also applied in many European Union countries, public officials will be able to decide which forms of support should be maintained and which ones should be withdrawn or modified.
“Each year in Poland, the amount of nearly two billion euro is allocated to labor market services,” says Matteo Morgandi, Senior Economist in the World Bank. “Monitoring indicators currently in place tell us that many of the participants of labor programs in Poland find a job six months after completing a specific intervention, but we still don’t know if this result can be attributed to the intervention itself. We need to understand which forms of support really help activate the unemployed most effectively.”
In the first stage of the World Bank project, labor offices from Pomorskie will be involved.
"Those activities are intended to increase the share of counterfactual evaluation, so an impact assessment, which is currently becoming an international standard for investigating effectiveness of active employment policy instruments. This pertains in particular to effectiveness and relevance of activities supported from the European Social Fund. We expect that cooperation with the World Bank will improve competence of employees in labor offices and help us to offer the most effective support to the unemployed," says Deputy Minister of Economic Development, Paweł Chorąży.
