The Howard government’s Mutual Obligation reforms have placed greater requirements on job seekers, increased compliance monitoring and imposed harsher penalties for failure. Under the restructured employment service, the Job Network, non government for profit and not for profit organizations...

The incidence of very long-term unemployment in Australia has risen by nearly 1 per cent per annum since the late 1970s. Despite concerted active LMPs since then, the level of very long term unemployed has risen to nearly 100 000 people. The majority of these people have been workless for a...

This paper contains an empirical analysis of gross job flows in Finland and of the factors that explain the extensive withdrawal of older workers from employment in the 1990s in Finland. Job flows are characterised in terms of employee age and education. The outflow of workers from employment...

Intensive Support is the label for the major form of assistance provided to jobseekers by private providers under contract to the Commonwealth Government (The Job Network). This paper analyses the effect of this assistance on employment outcomes using data from the Household, Income and Labour...

Debate over regulation of dismissals has been intense in recent years, and renewed in the lead-up to the 2012 review of the operation of the Fair Work Act. This paper reviews the economically relevant aspects of the legislative changes from the Workplace Relations Act which operated from...

During the last intercensal period there was a net transfer of Indigenous Australians to urban Australia from more remote parts of the country. With the withdrawal of a number of Indigenous specific labour market programs, this net migration is likely to intensify into the future. The aim of...

The Netherlands is the only country other than Australia where publicly-financed employment services for disadvantaged jobseekers are now primarily executed by contracted providers operating in a quasi-competitive market. Focusing on Dutch employment services for unemployment insurance (UI)...

As part of the most recent phase of liberalisation in the markets for public and social service provision, non-profit organisations have increasingly been called upon to ‘be strategic’ in a ‘for-profit’ sense. Unlike corporations, however, non-profits face significant barriers to...

This paper reports the preliminary results of a randomised social experiment conducted by the Department of Family and Community Services involving approximately 5,000 Parenting Payment customers. Three samples of Parenting Payment customers were randomly selected. One sample was asked to...