A review of interventions to support young workers : findings of the youth employment inventory

This Youth Employment Inventory (YEI) is based on available documentation of current and past programs and includes evidence from 289 studies of interventions from 84 countries in all regions of the world. The interventions included in the YEI have been analyzed in order to (i) document the types of programs that have been implemented to support young workers to find work; and (ii) identify what appears to work in terms of improving employment outcomes for youth. This report synthesizes the information from this inventory and a set of background reports to document the global experience with youth employment programs. As background, Section B provides a brief summary of the situation of young people in labor markets world-wide, and also reviews the existing literature on policies to address youth employment problems. Following this, we turn to the underlying framework and methodology used to assemble the youth employment inventory in Section C. In Section D, we consider the coverage of the YEI, which represents the sample of youth programs identified in our global search of the available documentation. In addressing the question of"what works", it is critical to pay close attention to the quality of the evaluation evidence. This is discussed in Section E. The study then turns to the analysis of the effectiveness of the interventions included in the inventory. The descriptive evidence is presented in Section F. In addition, the study undertakes an econometric meta-analysis to more systematically identify the determinants of program success and the results of this analysis are presented in Section G. Finally, conclusions and implications are drawn in Section H.