Evaluation of the Australian Wage Subsidy Special Youth ...

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accepted part of the labour market, so employers may have continued to use the
programme as they had done so in the past, under the new name of Jobstart.
The net impact analysis in 1993 used a survey of a sample of programme participants
approximately 6 months after programme participation, and matched these on age, sex
and unemployment duration to a similarly surveyed sample of CES registrants who had
not been placed in that programme. The mean employment outcomes of the matched
treated and comparison groups were then compared to create the impact measure. Two
comparison groups were constructed, of those with no programme experience and of
those who had received training assistance instead of Jobstart. Jobstart was found to have
a net impact of 30 percentage points above those who had no programme assistance. It
was found that Jobstart had a similar impact to other programmes of training assistance
such as Jobtrain, Skillshare and Jobclub when compared to a comparison group of those
who had taken part in a training programme and then found employment (DEET (1994):
42). Relative to training programmes, Jobstart was concluded to be the most successful
programme for raising post-programme employment.
In reviewing the 1993 Jobstart evaluation, it is unclear that non-response was accounted
for in analysing the survey data, but it is presumed that it was not. The method of directmatching
can only account for the factors used in the matching, in this case only 3 i.e. age,
sex and unemployment length. Although these might presumably have been considered
the most important variables, it is likely there were restrictions on the information
available in the data, and also limits on the number of variables it was possible to match
on. The general difficulty of direct matching is that it becomes increasingly difficult to
find matches as the number of factors is increased, so curbing the number of variables
chosen. Thus there were constraints on the number of variables that could be accounted
for. The aim of the matching is to control for observed differences in pre-programme
characteristics between the treated and comparison groups. Matching on these three
variables would eliminate bias due to non-random selection from other sources only to
the extent that those other factors are correlated with these 3 variables. Any other
variables are not controlled for entirely, even if they are observed, and so strong