Publication: Soft Skills or Hard Cash? The Impact of Training and Wage Subsidy Programs on Female Youth Employment in Jordan
Date
2012-07
ISSN
Published
2012-07
Author(s)
Abstract
Throughout the Middle East, unemployment
rates of educated youth have been persistently high and
female labor force participation, low. This paper studies
the impact of a randomized experiment in Jordan designed to
assist female community college graduates find employment.
One randomly chosen group of graduates was given a voucher
that would pay an employer a subsidy equivalent to the
minimum wage for up to 6 months if they hired the graduate;
a second group was invited to attend 45 hours of
employability skills training designed to provide them with
the soft skills employers say graduates often lack; a third
group was offered both interventions; and the fourth group
forms the control group. The analysis finds that the job
voucher led to a 40 percentage point increase in employment
in the short-run, but that most of this employment is not
formal, and that the average effect is much smaller and no
longer statistically significant 4 months after the voucher
period has ended. The voucher does appear to have persistent
impacts outside the capital, where it almost doubles the
employment rate of graduates, but this appears likely to
largely reflect displacement effects. Soft-skills training
has no average impact on employment, although again there is
a weakly significant impact outside the capital. The authors
elicit the expectations of academics and development
professionals to demonstrate that these findings are novel
and unexpected. The results suggest that wage subsidies can
help increase employment in the short term, but are not a
panacea for the problems of high urban female youth unemployment.
Citation
“Groh, Matthew; Krishnan, Nandini; McKenzie, David; Vishwanath, Tara. 2012. Soft Skills or Hard Cash? The Impact of Training and Wage Subsidy Programs on Female Youth Employment in Jordan. Policy Research working paper ; no. WPS 6141. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/11970 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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