Public Sector Sponsored Continuous Vocational Training in East Germany : Institutional Arrangements, Participants, and Results of Empirical Evaluations

After unification of the East and West German economies in July 1990 the public sector devoted substantial resources to train the labour force of the former centrally planned East German economy. In this paper we describe the basic trends of the rules and regulations governing these efforts. We supplement this description with empirical stylized facts. Additionally, we report evaluations of the effects of this policy for training participants beginning their training between mid 1990 and early 1993. These evaluations are based on micro data from the Socio-economic Panel (1990-1994) which allows us to follow the individuals' labour market status before and after training on a monthly and yearly basis, respectively. Our general findings of these evaluations suggest that there are no positive effects on such measures as post-training unemployment risk or earnings.