Targeting Jobs to Local People: the British Urban Policy Experience

The paper compares the effectiveness of a number of employment-generating schemes in terms of the proportion of jobs created going to locally resident unemployed workers. Whilst the paper establishes that considerable leakages do occur, a wide range of experience is identified which may in part be due to the differing methodologies used by the policy analysts concerned. This is due to the often inadequate attention paid to the study of local labour market institutions and dynamics. Some categories of workers continue to be systematically discriminated against, and policies which are currently being developed may help some of these workers overcome obstacles but without identifying and dismantling labour market barriers.