Disabled People from Welfare to Jobs: A Decision Support Tool

Despite repeated statements from successive governments in Norway, disabled people employment rate remains unchanged since 2000. A range of studies to describe and analyse the situation qualitatively and quantitatively have been performed, however we have not been able to find any study containing a decision support tool focusing on this issue. This paper presents a simulation model, built using the System Dynamics methodology. The model focuses on enabling disabled people to move from welfare to work, incorporating attitudes of disabled people and employers. The model is designed to cover selected factors that are believed to enable and encourage disabled people to take up jobs. It is intended to be used by policy makers, disability organisations, and individual citizens, and support more targeted discussions among them. To build the underlying model we have conducted an extensive literature review, and two surveys on attitudes of disabled people and employers. The paper contains a description of the model structure, and its behaviour.