Good intentions and Matthew effects: access biases in participation in active labour market policies

ABSTRACT

The objective of this contribution is to investigate whether active labour market policies manage to reach the most disadvantaged individuals or are subjected to Matthew effects in the shape of access biases. We investigate this question for two typically disadvantaged groups of unemployed people: the low-skilled and immigrants. Our analysis is based on a systematic review of 87 evaluations of active labour market policies (ALMPs) covering 14 different countries and a time period of 15 years (1998–2013). We use information on participants and non-participants to ascertain whether or not access biases are present in these programmes. Our results provide evidence that a Matthew effect is present only in some programmes and in conservative welfare states but not in the Nordic countries. Our conclusion is that policies are generally explicitly targeted on the most disadvantaged (good intentions) but other factors limit their participation (Matthew effects), something which explains the mixed pattern that we observe.

KEYWORDS:

• Access bias
• active labour market policies
• Matthew effect
• social investment

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Emmanuele Pavolini, Delia Pisoni, Flavia Fossati, Daniel Auer and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. A special thank goes to the editors of this collection for their valuable feedback whilst writing this contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Giuliano Bonoli is professor for social policy at the University of Lausanne.

Fabienne Liechti is a PhD candidate at the chair of social policy, University of Lausanne.

ORCID

Fabienne Liechti http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5509-3353

Notes

1 On the labour market disadvantages suffered by the low-skilled, see, for example, Abrassart (2013); DiPrete (2005); Solga (2002). On the disadvantages suffered by migrants, see Auer et al. (2017); Heath and Cheung (2007).

2 The reference is to a verse in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away’ (Matthew 25:29, English standard version)

3 Heckman and Smith (2004) have argued that the process of participating in a labour market programme is made up of a number of stages: eligibility; awareness; application; acceptance; and enrolment. Access biases at different stages may reinforce or, on the contrary, offset each other. The programme they study is voluntary, and in order to be eligible one must be considered as ‘economically disadvantaged’. Interestingly, this highly targeted programme combines both positive and negative access biases for disadvantaged people. Low-skilled people, for example, are overrepresented at the eligibility stage, but their advantage is largely offset by underrepresentation at the stage of awareness, application and acceptance (Heckman and Smith 2004: 245).

4 See the Online Appendix for a more detailed description of the systematic review.

5 The extracted variables for each study can be found in the Online Appendix.

6 See the Online Appendix for a more detailed description of the calculation of the access bias.

7 Conservative welfare states include Germany (13 evaluations), Austria (1) and Switzerland (1). Social democratic welfare states include Sweden (3), Norway (2) and Denmark (3). For a theoretical justification of the notion of welfare regimes, see Esping-Andersen (1990).