Designing and Targeting Public Employment Programs to Improve Long-Term Outcomes Among the Urban Unemployed
Public works programs are popular worldwide as a strategy for reducing poverty and creating growth-enhancing infrastructure. There is growing evidence supporting their short-run benefits, but still scarce or mixed empirical evidence on urban programs, on programs offering non-manual work experience, and on whether public employment experience offers a stepping stone to better job opportunities in the formal labor market in the long run.
This study will investigate the City of Cape Town’s Expanded Public Works program, which since 2010 has provided almost half a million work opportunities to beneficiaries randomly selected from a pool of nearly 1 million registered jobseekers. Surveying beneficiaries with program experience from up to ten years ago, the researchers will assess whether public employment programs can improve long-term post-program outcomes, including skills, employment, earnings, and mental health, and how this varies over job type, duration, location, and over recipient characteristics, including gender.