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Sweden has a long tradition of ambitious active labour market policy with employment offices and many different labour market policy measures. The aim of the policy is to create durable higher employment and lower unemployment. When we evaluate labour market policy, its effects on unemployment and employment are thus in focus.

The evaluations are of two kinds: we study both the effects of the programme on participants (individual effects) and the effects that can emerge for other people than participants (macro effects).

Participant effects

The evaluations of individual effects deal with comparing programme participation with non-participation in order to thus be able to form a conclusion about what the effects of programmes are. The researcher can, for example, compare how quickly individuals in the respective group become employed, the share of individuals on social security in the respective group or the annual income of the groups in the following years.

Macro effects

Labour market policy also has a large number of possible effects on other people than the participants. Macro evaluations study what are the effects of the programmes on:

--matching between the number of vacancies and the number of job seekers

--direct crowding out (that programme participants get jobs that would otherwise have been regular jobs)

--wage formation

--labour force participation

--total unemployment through all the above mentioned channels.