Effectiveness of MSD employment assistance 2022/2023

The annual Employment Assistance Effectiveness summary report summarises the Ministry’s evidence on the effectiveness of its employment assistance (EA) expenditure up to the end of the 2022/2023 financial year.

EA evidence catalogue

The EA evidence catalogue has information on 305 EA interventions and case management services operating from 1990. For detailed information on specific EA interventions, please visit the catalogue.

Effectiveness ratings

Effectiveness is based on whether the intervention improves participants outcomes relative to a comparison group. Outcomes include employment, income, justice, qualifications, and welfare. For interventions that we can evaluate, they are classified into one of the following categories:

• Effective: the intervention has significant positive overall impact on one or more outcome domain and no negative impacts for any other domain.
• Promising: impacts across outcome domains indicates the intervention is expected to have a significant positive overall impact over the medium to long term.
• Mixed: the intervention has both positive and negative impacts on different outcome domains (e.g. positive impact on income support payments, but a negative impact on overall income).
• Makes no difference: the intervention makes no significant difference on any outcome domain.
• Likely negative: based on the trend in intervention impacts we expect the intervention to have a long-term negative overall impact on one or more outcome domains.
• Negative: the intervention has a significantly negative overall impact for one or more outcome domain and no positive impacts for any other.

Not rated interventions fall into either:

• Too soon to rate: there has been insufficient time to judge whether the intervention is effective;
• Not feasible: it is currently not technically possible to evaluate the effectiveness the intervention using non-experimental evaluative methods.
• Not rated: we have not yet assessed the effectiveness of the intervention, applies to new interventions or where required information on who participates is not yet available for analysis.

Key Findings

In the 2022/2023 financial year, we estimate that MSD spent $952 million on EA interventions (excluding Apprenticeship Boost). This was an increase of 14.6 percent ($121 million) from 2021/2022.

In 2022/2023, almost forty percent ($367 million) of EA expenditure was evaluated for effectiveness using formal statistical modelling techniques. For spending on evaluated interventions, around 90 percent ($332 million) was on programmes that were found to be either promising or effective. The remainder of this spending was on programmes with a mixed ($33 million) or making no difference ($1.7 million) rating. There were no funded programmes in 2022/2023 that were rated as negative or likely negative.

For the EA spend that was not evaluated, it was split between programmes that have not been rated yet ($162 million) and those where evaluation is not feasible ($423 million). Almost half of not feasible to evaluate expenditure was on interventions related to childcare assistance ($198 million). The second largest share was on in-house employment related case management ($88 million), and the third largest was the Māori Trades and Training Fund ($62 million). The not rated expenditure includes a number of new and large initiatives, including: Jobs and Skills Hubs ($9 million) and Whakawātea te ara Poutama ($14 million).

Technical documentation

For more detailed information on the data and methodology used in estimating the impact of EA interventions and how we rated each intervention’s overall effectiveness, please see the accompanying technical report.