This systematic review found a significant research gap in terms of studies providing empirical evidence on the impacts of employment creation interventions on poverty and stability in fragile states. It identified only seven studies meeting the inclusion criteria. These all concerned programmes that directly created short-term/emergency employment, six examining the impact on poverty, and one on stability. This limited evidence indicates that short-term receipt of a wage through public works employment serves to temporarily enhance consumption in fragile states.
An initial engagement with the literature suggested that three broad categories of ‘employment creation’ could be identified; emergency employment creation, long-term employment creation through enabling macro-policies, and self-employment. However, a lack of evidence on the impacts of long-term employment creation and self-employment meant that the documents included in the final analysis were limited to analyses of programmes offering emergency employment, and for this reason the impacts identified are primarily micro-economic impacts on household level income poverty and food security, rather than impacts on aggregate poverty, or stability.
This limitation in the evidence base is largely due to the inherent difficulties of assessing the impact of large-scale employment creation programmes in fragile states, where longitudinal survey data are unlikely to be available – only one included study made use of longitudinal data – and the fact that causality and attribution are difficult to assess in such programmes generally.
Despite the centrality of employment creation as an instrument to promote stability in the fragile states policy discourse, no robust qualitative or quantitative evidence was found to illustrate this relationship in the literature. Currently there is not a strong evidence base from which to assess the efficacy of direct employment, enabling macro-policies, or the promotion of self-employment on stability. This absence of evidence is generally acknowledged within the policy community. This review was conducted in June-July 2010, and includes only literature published prior to this date.
The key conclusion drawn in the systematic review is that there is a significant research gap in terms of studies providing empirical evidence on the impacts of employment creation interventions on poverty and stability in fragile states. There is therefore a need to develop a future research agenda which adopts robust qualitative and quantitative methodologies to assess the impact of different types of employment creation programmes. A series of more detailed recommendations also arise from the systematic review process regarding the future research agenda. There is a need to:
- disaggregate the term ‘fragile states’ in the literature to promote analytical coherence and meaningful policy and programming insights
- develop a common understanding of ‘stability’ and identify adequate proxy indicators to enable analytical work to be carried out into the relationship between employment creation and stability
- move away from an evaluation culture in relation to job creation, which focuses on output indicators such as the number of jobs created, to one which assesses i) the distribution of employment in terms of targeting and incidence (who gets the jobs which are created) and ii) outcomes, i.e. the impact of employment on poverty and stability at micro-, meso- and macro-levels
- evaluate impacts in the medium and long term, rather than focusing on immediate assessment.
