Chapter 78 Quasi experimental Evaluation of Regional Employment Subsidies Although certain government policies might be tested in controlled experiments during a pilot phase such tests are rarely undertaken. Ideally a policy could be tried when feasible and meaningful on a random subset of areas firms or consumers exposed to the policy and be compared with the remaining subset over a significant period of time. The results reported here are from a test where the Swedish government introduced a regional employment policy in a limited part of a fairly homogeneous area with high chronic unemployment hence creating a non random division into an experiment region and a control region. Once the decision was made to introduce the policy a quasi experimental evaluation of the policy was proposed to the government; and as a result the government agreed to leave the two regions intact for a period of three years to allow this evaluation to take place and cover a non trivial period of time a quite unusual perhaps unprecedented step for a government to take.