Impact of Active Labor Market Programs on Employment: Albania’s Case

High variation of unemployment level in Albania for more than a decade shows that unemployment still remains a problem to solve. Given the conditions, the focus of employment policies is on increasing employment opportunities, in order to make unemployed people active in the labor market. This is the reason of applying many employment programs and making expenses for their funding. Most evaluation studies of active labor market policies (ALMPs) focus on micro-econometric evaluation. Only a few studies of ALMPs focus on macro-econometric evaluation. Also, most of the facts of evaluation belong to developing countries. During the last years, data on the analysis of the progress of these policies in transitional countries, Albania included, are made available. Our study focuses on the theoretical and empirical analysis of different types of active policies. Data used for the empirical analysis are those on employment policies in Albania during 1999 – 2010. Our study evaluates the impact of active labor-market programmers in Albania on the whole economy. The evaluation focuses on vocational training and on subsidized employment programmers in order to compare them. In analyzing the data, we drew the conclusion that a professional training program is a program with a positive impact on the level of employment (reducing unemployment), followed by a program of promoting employment through work education.