Are Active Labour Market Programmes Least Effective Where They Are Most Needed? The Case of the British New Deal for Young People

One view of Active Labour Market Programmes (ALMPs) is that they are 'most needed in slack labour markets, where more unemployed workers require help finding jobs. But ALMPs might be less effective in such labour markets because there are fewer vacancies with which programme participants can match. In this paper we use data over a nine year period, across 300 local labour markets, to show that the unemployment exit and job entry impacts of participating in a mandatory ALMP for unemployed young people – the British New Deal for Young People (NDYP) – were negatively correlated with unemployment rates.