Measures of Active Labor Market Policy are widely used in European countries, but despite many econometric evaluation studies no conclusive cross-country evidence exists regarding "what program works for what target group under what (economic and institutional) circumstances?". This paper results from an extensive research project for the European Commission aimed at answering that question using a meta-analytical framework. The empirical results are surprisingly clear-cut: Rather than contextual factors such as labor market institutions or the business cycle, it is almost exclusively the program type that matters for program effectiveness. While direct employment programs in the public sector appear detrimental, wage subsidies and "Services and Sanctions " can be effective in increasing participants ' employment probability.

The basic aim of this paper is to investigate the impact that educational level of individuals and participation in training programmes have on their job prospects in Southern Greece (namely the regions of Southern Aegean and Crete) during the implementation of the first Community Support Framework (1989-1993). We try to see whether the educational level itself and participation in training programmes increased the chances of finding a job. More specifically, we research what are the social and demographic characteristics that increase the chances of someone in the examined population finding a job, how those chances change (if they do) after the introduction of training courses and, also, whether University graduates, in contrast to most of the rest of the EU member states, face greater difficulties in finding a job than non-University graduates, as a series of studies or statistics for Greece conclude. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyse individual anonymised records (micro-data) from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for both employed and unemployed in those two regions at NUTS 2 level.

Measures of Active Labor Market Policy are widely used in European countries, but despite many econometric evaluation studies no conclusive cross-country evidence exists regarding "what program works for what target group under what (economic and institutional) circumstances?". This paper results from an extensive research project for the European Commission aimed at answering that question using a meta-analytical framework. The empirical results are surprisingly clear-cut: Rather than contextual factors such as labor market institutions or the business cycle, it is almost exclusively the program type that matters for program effectiveness. While direct employment programs in the public sector appear detrimental, wage subsidies and "Services and Sanctions " can be effective in increasing participants' employment probability.

2. The role of the active labour market policies in