The system of public employment services in Tuscany

Public Employment Services (PES) act as operating arms of active labour policies. This is why in recent times they have given rise to a particularly heated debate about their mission and the way to make them more effective tools for promoting employment. A special attention has been paid, among others, to the issues of the different types of services PES are meant to provide, and to the timescale on which these should be supplied. This study focuses on Tuscany’s PES, analyzing and evaluating the data drawn from an administrative database (the Employment Information System, Sistema Informativo Lavoro – SIL) and from an ad hoc sample survey. The first part of this work reports the monitoring data for the volume of activities carried out by PES in between 2008 and 2013, especially in terms of services provided. The second part concentrates on the profiling of users who apply for jobs at PES. Finally, the third part presents a proper impact evaluation of PES performance on the employability of job seekers who address the services, which compares – even with reference to specific user profiles – their effectiveness with that of alternative practices, and evaluates the advantages of modulating services in shorter time spans.