Unemployed social assistance recipients and decentralised active labour market policy

Local governments (i.e., municipalities) have, over the past three decades, assumed an increasingly significant role in Swedish active labour market policy. Despite this, our understanding of the measures provided by local governments and their impact on participants – in terms of self-sufficiency and labour market outcomes – remains limited. A key reason for this is the lack of systematic data collection at the national level regarding local government programmes and their participants.

In this project, we utilise unique data, collected from approximately 100 municipalities, which contain register-based information on participation in local government programmes between 2015 and 2019. These data have been linked to additional sources of data containing information on, among other things, participation in central government programmes, sociodemographic characteristics, and income.

The aim of this project is to examine benefit dependency and labour market outcomes among social assistance recipients who participated in local government programmes, compared to observably similar groups of social assistance recipients who either participated in central government programmes or did not take part in any measures at all.