Active Labour Market Programmes and Poverty Dynamics in Ireland: 1994-2001

Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs), which provide training and subsidised employment to the unemployed, are an important part of Ireland’s welfare state. While a good deal of existing research is concerned with the effect of these policies on employment chances and on wage rates, none addresses the connection between poverty and ALMPs. Do these policies have an effect on poverty? That is, first, to what extent do these policies serve the low-income population, as a consequence of and in addition to their focus on those in precarious labour market situations? Second, to what extent do these policies function to lift people out of poverty in the medium term? To address these issues we use longitudinal data from the Living in Ireland Survey (1994–2001) and examine how the respondents’ situation in one year predicts participation in employment and training schemes in the next year, and then how participation in these schemes affects poverty status in the following year. Participants on both sorts of schemes are much poorer than the population average, and those on employment schemes (but not training schemes) are even poorer than one would expect given their observed characteristics. Employment schemes and training schemes serve different purposes and different populations. A conventional logistic regression analysis seems to suggest that employment schemes (but not training schemes) positively increase the risk of poverty in the following year. This finding is not considered reliable, but rather it reflects the selection processes whereby those on employment schemes are in particularly vulnerable situations, in respects that are not picked up in the data set. A more rigorous analysis, using propensity score matching, reveals that employment schemes are neutral on poverty risk. Training schemes have a weak but insignificant protective effect. Considering the risk of poverty approximately one year after participation begins, employment schemes (and to a lesser extent, training schemes) do not provide a mechanism for immediately exiting poverty. We add the caveat that it may be desirable to consider outcomes two or more years into the future, were data available, and that other outcome measures of quality of life should also be taken into account. Ultimately, with regard to both labour market and poverty outcomes, we find no evidence that participants of training schemes or employment schemes have either raised their employment chances or reduced their risk of poverty in the year following their participation.active labour market programmes; ALMP; propensity score matching; employment policy; Ireland

Active Labour Market Programmes and Poverty Dynamics in Ireland

Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs), which provide training and subsidised employment to the unemployed, are an important part of Ireland’s welfare state. While a good deal of existing research is concerned with the effect of these policies on employment chances and on wage rates, none addresses the connection between poverty and ALMPs. Do these policies have an effect on poverty? That is, first, to what extent do these policies serve the low-income population, as a consequence of and in addition to their focus on those in precarious labour market situations? Second, to what extent do these policies function to lift people out of poverty in the medium term? To address these issues we use longitudinal data from the Living in Ireland Survey (1994–2001) and examine how the respondents’ situation in one year predicts participation in employment and training schemes in the next year, and then how participation in these schemes affects poverty status in the following year. Participants on both sorts of schemes are much poorer than the population average, and those on employment schemes (but not training schemes) are even poorer than one would expect given their observed characteristics. Employment schemes and training schemes serve different purposes and different populations. A conventional logistic regression analysis seems to suggest that employment schemes (but not training schemes) positively increase the risk of poverty in the following year. This finding is not considered reliable, but rather it reflects the selection processes whereby those on employment schemes are in particularly vulnerable situations, in respects that are not picked up in the data set. A more rigorous analysis, using propensity score matching, reveals that employment schemes are neutral on poverty risk. Training schemes have a weak but insignificant protective effect. Considering the risk of poverty approximately one year after participation begins, employment schemes (and to a lesser extent, training schemes) do not provide a mechanism for immediately exiting poverty. We add the caveat that it may be desirable to consider outcomes two or more years into the future, were data available, and that other outcome measures of quality of life should also be taken into account. Ultimately, with regard to both labour market and poverty outcomes, we find no evidence that participants of training schemes or employment schemes have either raised their employment chances or reduced their risk of poverty in the year following their participation.active labour market programmes; ALMP; propensity score matching; employment policy

The Role of Active Labour Market Programmes in Employment Policy

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the Irish labour market since approximately 1980 with a particular focus on the central role of active labour market programmes in public policy. Active labour market programmes (ALMP) is an umbrella term for all measures aimed at increasing either the supply of or demand for labour. We will outline the theoretical rationale for labour market programmes and discuss their implementation and development in the Irish context. Specifically we will outline the levels of expenditure and throughput on labour market programmes and attempt to place Ireland in a comparative international perspective. Briefly we will examine some of the attempts which have been made to evaluate the effectiveness of labour market programmes in terms of the employment and income outcomes of participants. We will pay particular attention to long-term unemployment which was such a key feature of the Irish labour market throughout the 1980s and 1990s.Public Policy, Employment Policy, Active Labour Market Prorgammes, Active Labor Market Progams, ALMP, Ireland

Becoming a homeowner in Britain in the 1990s

We model the hazard of first entry to owner occupation, using a sub-sample of the British Household Panel Study consisting of young adults not yet in owner occupation. Our interest is to assess the importance of social inequality, measured as socio-economic class using the new ONS-SEC, while taking account of the direct effects of age, household formation, education and labour market situation of the individual (and his/her spouse, where appropriate). Socio-economic class has a very strong bivariate effect but this persists, with some modification, into the multivariate analysis. Higher professionals and managers have by far the highest rate of entry, with the unemployed and students having the lowest, even when controlling for income, education, employment status, age, gender and household formation, all of which have strong effects of their own. On a smaller sample we investigate some effects of class of origin, and of spouses class but with few significant effects. Some features of this modelling lead us to speculate that access to social housing, as a competing destination, may be patterning entry to owner occupation. The class gradient may reflect as much the compensatory effects of state provision as market-related advantages. Also, the effect of childen on entry to owner occupation is strongly negative. We investigate this by fitting parallel models on the rate of entry to social housing, and find that this seems to be the case: while the age and partnership effects are very similar, the class effect is reversed (except for students, whose low rate of entry to ownership is not associated with disadvantage) and the effect of children is strong and positive

Class, status and the stratification of residential preferences amongst accountants

"Using data from the 1911 Irish Census, and adopting a Weberian focus, this paper investigates the separate explanatory power of class and status in the stratification of outcomes. We find that both class and status have independent explanatory power in terms of the geographical residential patterns of various occupations, including accountants, in early twentieth-century Dublin, Ireland. We also demonstrate the usefulness of considering the experience of accountants in a comparative context." (author's abstract

Cohabitation in Ireland: evidence from survey data

non-peer-reviewedCohabitation has grown strongly in Ireland over the last decade. We use large-scale surveys to characterise its extent and nature. We find it has almost tripled in incidence between 1994 and 2002. It is associated with being young, urban and in the labour market. Most cohabitations are short, and a high proportion end in marriage. Over 40% of new marriages are now preceded by cohabitation, making it close to a majority practice rather than the deviant behaviour it would have been a generation ago. In this respect it seems to be developing as an adaptation of marriage rather than an alternative to it

Who marries whom in Great Britain?

We investigate educational assortative mating, or homogamy, by modelling the hazard of entry to first marriage for a sample of residents of Great Britain. Using marital, and imputed educational, life-histories drawn from the British Household Panel Study, we estimate first a set of competing-risk models where the outcome variable is defined as respectively hypogamy, homogamy and hypergamy. Age, educational participation and cohort have very strong effects, in directions that may be expected. Time gap between leaving education and marrying shows some signs of the hypothesised effect (that a greater time-lag means less homogamy). Cohort differences suggest men are decreasingly likely to marry down and women decreasingly likely to marry up. We also fit a second set of competing-risk models, where the outcomes are marriage to individuals of specific educational levels. We argue that these are more stable models, and that they provide more insight into the actual marriage patterns. In both sets of models we attempt to control for the changing opportunity structure by including estimates of the educational distribution of single people in an appropriate age range. While this is obviously a necessary control variable, and while it has strong effects on other covariates, its own parameter estimates are hard to interpret. We cannot therefore claim that the effect of changing marginal distributions has been fully removed, but we feel our estimates are nonetheless improved

Job opportunities for whom? Labour market dynamics and service sector employment growth in Germany and Britain

"This report examines structural change in employment and the development of servicesector jobs in Germany and Britain between 1993 and 2002. During this period the British labour market was buoyant, while the employment situation in Germany can only be described as dismal. There is much political interest in the potential for creating new jobs in the service sector. But these developments raise a number of controversial issues when this involves the potential expansion of low-skill, low-wage service jobs, especially in a country such as Germany which has traditionally enjoyed a high-skill, high-wage equilibrium. The project was designed to compare the characteristics of service employment, using comparable longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel. The analysis covered the different patterns of growth in service occupations and industries in the two countries and the quality of these jobs in terms of wages and working hours. We were interested in finding out what kind of jobs had been growing and what kinds of people have been taking them up. In particular, we were interested in tracking transition patterns between non-employment and employment, as well as in examining how far, and for whom, service employment is precarious." (author's abstract)"In der vorliegenden Untersuchung werden der Strukturwandel in der Beschäftigung und die Entstehung von Arbeitsplätzen im Dienstleistungsbereich in Deutschland und Großbritannien in den Jahren 1993 bis 2002 analysiert. In diesem Zeitraum erholte sich der britische Arbeitsmarkt beträchtlich, wohingegen die Beschäftigungssituation in Deutschland nur als trostlos bezeichnet werden kann. Es gibt ein großes politisches Interesse an dem Potential für neue Arbeitsplätze im Dienstleistungsbereich. Doch führen diese Entwicklungen auch zu Kontroversen hinsichtlich einer möglichen Ausweitung von niedrig qualifizierten und niedrig bezahlten Tätigkeiten, vor allem in einem Land wie Deutschland, das lange Zeit ein Gleichgewicht von hoch qualifizierten Tätigkeiten bei hohen Löhnen hatte. Die Untersuchung war angelegt auf einen Vergleich charakteristischer Merkmale der Dienstleistungsbeschäftigung, dazu wurden vergleichbare Längsschnittdaten des British Household Panel und des deutschen Sozioökonomischen Panel genutzt. Die Analyse untersuchte die unterschiedlichen Wachstumsmuster von Dienstleistungstätigkeiten und Dienstleistungsbranchen in beiden Ländern und die Qualität dieser Tätigkeiten hinsichtlich Entlohnung und Arbeitszeitregelungen. Es sollte herausgefunden werden, welche Arten von Tätigkeiten zunahmen und wer sie annahm. Insbesondere ging es darum, Übergangsmuster von Nichtbeschäftigung in Beschäftigung nachzuvollziehen und dabei zu untersuchen, inwiefern und für welche Personen sich die Beschäftigung im Dienstleistungsbereich als prekär erweist." (Autorenreferat

Comparing the Labour Market Effects of Childbirth in Ireland, Sweden, the UK and Germany. ESRI WP170. April 2006

In this paper we examine the effect of welfare state policy in shaping the impact of childbirth events on labour market outcomes. The paper builds on sociological research on the labour market in Europe over the last ten years which has highlighted the critical role of childbirth and child-rearing in shaping women’s participation patterns and reproducing gender inequalities in employment (e.g. Rubery et al 1999) and earnings (Albrecht et al 1999; Barrett et al, 2000; Waldfogel, 1997) . It also builds on research which has shown that the extent of these effects is strongly influenced by the nature of the welfare regimes operating within countries (e.g. Stier et al. 2001; Gornick et al. 1997, 1998; Esping-Andersen 1999). The paper extends previous longitudinal research in the this area which has outlined the factors that influence the duration of childbirth interruptions in single country studies (Jonsson & Mills, 2001; contributors to Blossfeld & Drobnic, 2001; Russell et al. 2002). It also extends the literature on the effects of duration of breaks on occupational outcomes which has tended to focus on first job after return and is largely restricted to the US and the UK (Macran et al 1996; Waldfogel, 1997a 1997b; but see Ziefle 2004). The comparative longitudinal data used in this paper provide a strong basis for further investigating the important question of the effects of childbirth on women’s labour market careers in different institutional settings