Public employment services are provided in all developed economies, justified on the basis of a public interest in efficient, effective operation of national labour markets. Although such countries adopt different approaches to delivering these services each offers what I refer to as ‘the three essential roles of a public employment service’. These are labour exchange services, providing job brokerage to labour market participants to enhance the efficiency of the labour market; an equity role, offering assistance to disadvantaged jobseekers to improve their prospects of employment; and a ‘compliance monitoring role’ which contributes to maintaining the integrity of the welfare system by detecting welfare abuse. Informed by a body of research on policies and practices in the OECD I construct a model of a notional public employment service incorporating these three essential roles that I call ‘an OECD model’. The Job Network, an early policy reform of a newly-elected Coalition government, appeared to replicate ‘the OECD model’, insofar as it performed brokerage, offered equity measures and conducted invigilation of welfare compliance. However, it differed from its predecessor, the CES, in two significant respects. First it was created by the bureaucracy as a new ‘market’ in which all employment services were purchased through a competitive tending process from private sector providers; in this, it was unique in the OECD. Second, rather than offering prescribed employment programs and services designed by public officials, private providers were free to determine the needs of clients (within broadly-defined service categories) and devise their own strategies to achieve contractually-defined ‘outcomes’ for which they would be paid. Services were focused particularly on disadvantaged jobseekers who were expected to receive personalised assistance tailored to overcome their complex or multiple barriers to employment. The purpose of my thesis is to discover whether the Job Network (in the period from its inception to the end of the second contract) was an OECD model, by which I mean whether its three roles were conceptualised, constructed and delivered in ways that enabled them to perform the same functions as the three essential roles of the OECD model. I see this question as involving two distinct, but interrelated issues. First, I am concerned to discover whether the three roles of the Job Network share the objectives and priorities of their counterparts in the OECD model, positing that these will shape the design of services. Second, informed by a body of literature which draws attention to a range of issues emerging from privatisation of public services, I consider the impacts that private delivery had on the design and implementation of its services. iv I approach this task from a qualitative perspective to explore assumptions and priorities underpinning the political construction of the issues deemed to require policy intervention and the responses to these as reflected in the design and implementation of services, noting the effects of practices on service recipients. I argue that, together, these are the determinants of the Job Network’s policy objectives and capacities. I take as my data the political discourse, bureaucratic texts, interview materials and texts of service recipients that I have gathered to investigate, in turn, each of the three roles of the Job Network using tools and techniques from the broader field of discourse analysis, selecting those most appropriate to the nature of the data. My analysis concludes that the Job Network’s three roles do not reflect those of the OECD model, first because they are predicated on different policy objectives and second, because privatisation of service delivery affected the design of its services and the priorities of service providers in ways that undermined its capacity to perform the ‘essential roles’. The evidence suggests that ideological-based assumptions and preferences of a conservative government steered the Job Network towards prioritising its role in compliance monitoring, positioning it as a tool of welfare reform rather delivering interventions to enhance efficiency or equity in the labour market such as those predicated of the OECD model.

This thesis is comprised of a series of published papers relating to the evaluation of active assistance measures for the unemployed in Australia. It offers both applied evaluations of active assistance measures as well as critical assessment of the evaluation approaches that have dominated the literature and policy formation in Australia. "Active" assistance for the unemployed is distinguished from "passive" assistance, such as income support.The motivation behind the work lies in the fact that a very large amount of public expenditure is directed to active assistance for the unemployed. Over $2 billion dollars was spent on labour market programs at the height of the Working Nation package in each of 1995-96 and 1996-97, and $1.5 billion was allocated to "labour market assistance to jobseekers and industry" in the most recent (2001-02) Commonwealth budget. Despite this considerable past and ongoing expenditure, the evaluation effort in Australia has been far short of international best practice. As a consequence, there is no convincing empirical evidence as to how effectively these public resources are being used, or of the relative merits of various options in the design of active interventions for the unemployed.Ultimately, the goal of the research is to improve supply-side policies designed to address unemployment. As stated, it aims to do this through original empirical evaluations of programs and through critical assessment of existing evaluations and institutional arrangements.

The thesis deals with an institutional reform of public employment services implemented in the Czech Republic in 2011. By merging social benefits administration with employment services into the newly established Labour Office of the Czech Republic, the right-wing government attempted to reduce the staffing and administrative costs of these services and to improve the governance of local labour offices. Another aim of the reform was to unify the management of employment services. Using the theoretical concept of "policy cycle" and "policy fiasco" the thesis analyses these organisational changes in the functioning of public employment services in the Czech Republic. Data consist of interviews with experts on labour market policy in the Czech Republic and two focus groups with employees of labour offices. The thesis concludes that there appeared several mistakes during implementation of the institutional reform of public employment services in the Czech Republic in 2011 in terms of the policy cycle and it can be referred to as a policy. The reform harmed the reputation and efficiency of employment services.

Über die letzten zwölf Jahre sind globale Indikatoren für Demokratie- und Freiheitsrechte kontinuierlich gesunken. Demokratie ist eine wichtige Triebkraft für wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, daher folgen aus diesem Vertrauensverlust auch Sorgen über die Zukunft des ökonomischen Wohlstandes. Diese Dissertation besteht aus drei Essays und untersucht mögliche Reformen für effektivere politische Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten in demokratischen Systemen: Dezentralisierung und Privatisierung. Das erste Essay überprüft, ob durch Dezentralisierung der öffentlichen Arbeitsvermittlung mehr Arbeitslose in freie Stellen vermittelt werden können. Dafür untersuche ich die Kommunalisierung deutscher Jobcenter im Jahr 2012. Dabei stelle ich fest, dass sich durch Dezentralisierung die Neuanstellung von Arbeitslosen um rund 10% verringern. Es zeigt sich, dass dezentralisierte Arbeitsvermittlungen vermehrt öffentlich geförderte Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen nutzen. Das zweite Essay beschäftigt sich mit finanzpolitischen Wechselwirkungen zwischen Gemeinden in Kolumbien, wo die Verantwortlichkeit für einen großen Teil des Staatsbudgets an die kommunale Regierungsebene übertragen wurde. Es ergeben sich starke räumliche Autokorrelationen im lokalen Ausgabeverhalten. Allerdings zeigt sich durch einen Instrumentalvariablenansatz, dass es keine kausalen fiskalischen Interaktionseffekte zwischen den Gemeinden gibt. Das dritte Essay analysiert, ob Regierungen ökonomischen Effizienzüberlegungen folgen, wenn sie entscheiden, welche staatlichen Firmen für eine Privatisierung ausgewählt werden. Basierend auf der Massenprivatisierung in Folge des Falls der Berliner Mauer untersuche ich Firmendaten, welche mehr als 6.000 Privatisierungs- und Liquidationsentscheidungen umfassen. Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass Privatisierungsentscheidungen weniger politisch, sondern stärker ökonomisch orientiert sind, als dies durch bisherige Studien bekannt ist. / Global indicators of democracy and civil liberties have continually decreased over the past twelve years. Scholars have identified weak public policy-making as an origin for low levels of trust in democratic governance. In three essays, this dissertation studies two reform options to improve policy-making, namely decentralization and privatization. The first essay examines whether the decentralization of public employment services (PES) increases job placements among the unemployed. Using a difference-in-differences design, I exploit unique within-country variation in decentralization provided by the partial devolution of German job centers in 2012. I find that de-centralization reduces job placements by approximately 10% while expanding the use of inefficient public job creation schemes. Essay two explores fiscal interactions in Colombia, a developing country which shifted the responsibility for a large share of public spending from the central to local governments. I find evidence of strong spatial autocorrelation of local public spending. However, an instrumental variable approach reveals that there are no significant causal fiscal interaction effects between municipalities. The third essay studies whether governments incorporate economic efficiency considerations when choosing which firms they select for privatization. Analyzing mass privatizations following the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany, I employ previously unavailable firm data on more than 6,000 privatization and liquidation decisions. The analysis suggests that privatization decisions are less politicized and more efficiency-oriented than found in previous studies.

This thesis deals with policy failure and policy success and aims at introducing this issue into the context of the Czech Republic. The main perspective of the thesis follows approaches to analysis of policy success and policy failure developed by Mark Bovens, Paul 't Hart, and Allan McConnell. Their theoretical assumption is complex, as they evaluate the policies upon the criteria of the more general dimensions (process, program, and politics). The goal of the thesis is not only to utilize their theoretical background but also to refine and reconceptualize current theory of policy success and policy failure, respectively. The thesis is based on case study research design. The chosen case - organizational reform of labor offices - is considered as a typical policy failure. I describe and analyze in detail the selected case with a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods. This reform was extensive and was realized in two stages. The first stage focused on the organizational structure (from decentralized to centralized management). The second stage included changes in the content of the public employment services provided by the labor offices (the newly introduced services were all non-insurance social benefits). The analysis of labor offices reform seeks to answer the following questions,...

Contrairement à ses homologues européens, le Royaume-Uni n'a pas adopté en 1989, le texte de la charte communautaire des droits sociaux fondamentaux des travailleurs abrégée charte sociale. Il s'est tenu, jusqu'en 1997, à l'écart des décisions européennes en matière sociale. Au lendemain de son arrivée au pouvoir, le gouvernement de Tony blair a mis fin à cette exception britannique. Le parti travailliste, fervent opposant à l'adhésion du royaume-uni au marché commun dans les années 1970, a pu rallier ses partisans au chapitre social de la construction européenne deux décennies plus tard grâce à cette charte. Depuis, le Royaume-Uni a su démontrer son engagement européen par rapport aux politiques sociales. Il a approuvé le traité d'Amsterdam qui a vu la mise en place de la Stratégie Européenne pour l'Emploi. Pour autant, il reste toujours celui qui incarne en Europe, le « modèle libéral anglo-saxon », en vigueur aux États-Unis. Il est vrai que malgré cette adhésion, les politiques thatchériennes n'ont pas été modifiées en profondeur par le New labour mais juste infléchies et il existe toujours en Europe, une spécificité britannique au niveau de la législation du travail et des relations sociales. Paradoxalement, malgré cette spécificité britannique, le Conseil européen, en 2002, a estimé que les programmes mis en place au Royaume-Uni sont compatibles avec les objectifs européens pour l‘emploi.Ce travail de recherche s'intéresse aux enjeux que représente la Stratégie Européenne pour l'Emploi au Royaume-Uni. Notre analyse nous amènera à mettre en évidence la situation britannique par rapport aux recommandations européennes en matière de politiques pour l'emploi. L'intérêt de ce travail de recherche est de souligner un paradoxe : à la fois comprendre les spécificités du marché du travail britannique, occupant une position unique en Europe mais aussi se rendre compte que les politiques de l'emploi menées au Royaume-Uni sont tout à fait compatibles avec les recommandations européennes et compatibles avec la Stratégie Européenne pour l‘Emploi. / Unlike her European counterparts, Britain did not sign the Social Charter in 1989 and benefited from an opt out of the social rights included in this Charter until 1997. When the first New Labour government came into office, Tony Blair put an end to this British opt out. The Labour Party, which had been against the British entry into the EEC in the seventies, managed to convince its members to change their views on the European Union two decades later thanks to this Charter. By signing the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, the UK adopted the Social Charter and accepted the changes brought by the “Social Chapter” included in the Treaty. The Treaty of Amsterdam also introduced the European Employment Strategy. Since then, the UK has endorsed the Social Charter and implemented a range of UE social measures. Despite social policies, the UK compared to its European partners is considered as “the Anglo-Saxon model” available in the US because Margaret Thacher's economic policies have not been deeply modified and at the European level, there are British particularities as far as labour law and industrial relations are concerned. Yet despite such disparities, the European Council considered in 2002 that the employment policies carried out in the UK were in accordance with the European Employment Strategy. This thesis examines how the European Employment Strategy is operating in the UK. The analysis focuses on how the European guidelines are implemented in the UK labour market regulation. The aim is to shed light on a paradox: on the one hand, the UK labour market has its own specificities which are not similar to other European countries; and on the other, the employment policies pursued in the UK comply with the European guidelines within the European Employment Strategy.