Abstract:

This article presents a relatively simple and transparent accounting-type approach to measuring employment impacts that can be applied by practitioners and policy analysts. This method uses program-generated employment impacts as a starting point and then adjusts these figures to account for the issues outlined in the text. These adjustments are performed using a variety of readily available indices and coefficients that are generated by some of the stock tools of regional analysis. The workings of this approach are then illustrated using data on a regional small business assistance program operating in Israel. The results emphasize the discrepancy between program-declared employment outcomes (gross employment impacts) and those "distilled" from the data on the basis of the procedure outlined below (net employment impacts). The conclusions relate to the need for methods and tools that will give analysts and practitioners the capability for performing rigorous yet straightforward evaluations of public policy.

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