Book Reviews
| Published date | 01 December 1997 |
| Date | 01 December 1997 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8543.00074 |
British Journal of IndustrialRelations
35:4 December 1997 0007–1080 pp. 645–656
BOOK REVIEWS
International Handbook of Labour Market Policy and Evaluation, edited by
Gu¨nther Schmid, Jacqueline O’Reilly and Klaus Scho¨mann. Edward Elgar,
Cheltenham, 1996, xix A954 pp., £150.
Crude and poorly targeted Keynesianstrategies for job creation in the 1970s, such as
marginal employment subsidies, are now largely discredited because of their
significant deadweight and displacement effects. Deadweight loss occurs when
policies result in job creation that would have occurred anyway, and displacement
losses when others lose employment to make room for the policy-targeted group.
Consequently, in the last fifteen years or so therehas been a gradual transformation
in most industrial economies towardscarefully costed and specifically targeted active
labour market policies. However, the political and institutional background within
which labour market policy is determined and conducted varies enormously, and so
it is impossible to assess policy effectiveness in isolation from this background. The
need to account much more carefully for fiscal disbursementon labour market policy
has generated a ‘science’ of labour market policy evaluation,which ranges from the
quasi-experimental to basic forms of cost–benefit and impact assessment analysis.
Alongside this has arisen a substantial academicliterature, drawn from the range of
social science disciplines, which addresses, criticizes and attempts to refine this
science.
This rather grandly titled handbook provides a set of specially commissioned
original surveys of this literature. The scope of the book is broad and so it runs to
nearly a thousand pages, and includes contributions from many of the key
contributors in the area. It is aimed at both academic and policy practitioner
audiences.
The editors of the book, in their int roductory chapter, make the point that the
traditional approach to policy evaluation is a top-down, programme-orientated
approach, which compares stated policy goals with measurable programme out-
comes. Their criticism of this approach is that it takes the labour market and its
associated institutional structures as a ‘black box’ and ignores the way in which the
adoption of policy instruments affects agent incentive structures and behaviour.So
the editors propose, as an alternative, a target-orientated policy evaluation. In a
sense, the motivation for a different approachreflects the changing nature of extant
labour market interventions, rather than some ambitious attempt to induce a
paradigm-shift in evaluation methodology. As labour market policy has become
more carefully targeted, particularly to groups of labour market participants (or
potential participants), so it becomesimportant to address the question of the extent
to which a particular policy has affected the behaviour of its stated target group.
¥ Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd,
108 Cowley Road,Oxford, OX4 1JF, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
To continue reading
Request your trial