Effectiveness of MSD employment assistance

The Employment Assistance Effectiveness 2014/2015 summary report summarises the Ministry’s evidence on the effectiveness of its employment assistance (EA) expenditure up to the end of the  2014/2015 financial year.

Key Findings

For evaluated EA interventions, the majority of expenditure was effective or promising

Of evaluated expenditure ($190 million):

• $121 million (63%) was invested in effective or promising employment assistance
• $66 million (35%) was invested in EA interventions with mixed effectiveness (i.e. had both positive and negative effects)
• $2.9 million was invested in interventions that either made no difference or had a negative effect.

Shift to more effective EA interventions under the Investment Approach

There has been a continued shift in expenditure towards ‘effective’ and ‘promising’ EA interventions between the 2010/2011 and 2014/2015 financial years. Conversely, the expenditure on EA interventions that make no difference or have negative effects has fallen to very low levels ie MSD is investing more in effective and promising programmes, and less in ineffective programmes.

MSD could not rate the effectiveness of all EA interventions

MSD could not evaluate the effectiveness of all EA expenditure in the 2014/15 financial year ($272 million) for one of three reasons:

• it was too soon to assess some EA intervention’s effectiveness ($45 million) because there had been insufficient follow-up time to judge whether an outcome had been achieved.
• some interventions were implemented in such a way that they could not be evaluated for effectiveness ($223 million), the majority of which were related to childcare assistance ($201 million)
• the analysis had not been done ($4 million) largely because these EA interventions were small scale.