conflict and improve economic security and employment opportunities for individuals in conflict-affected regions.<sup>4</sup> Increasingly, the focus of public works programs is to improve medium-run employability, assets, and resilience to future shocks (Gehrke and Hartwig, 2018). Besides providing short-term employment or income support, these programs also aim to open pathways to productive employment after participants exit the program. This is often done by combining the public works experience with additional interventions, such as vocational training or micro-entrepreneurship support.<sup>5</sup> This paper reviews experimental evidence on public works programs, including a wave of recent studies, and provides directions for future research. We use a meta-analysis model to estimate the average impact of public works programs on individuals’ earnings and employment. We use data from all countries for which a published paper, working paper, or project report was either publicly available or made available by the authors as of December 2021. As such, the review is based on 11 randomized control trials across 9 countries––Comoros (Gazeaud et al., 2019), Côte d’Ivoire (Bertrand et al., 2021), DRC <mark>(Brandily-Snyers et al., 2021;</mark> Mani and Mvukiyehe, 2021), Djibouti (Devoto et al., 2017), the Arab Republic of Egypt (World Bank, DECRG; Croke et al., 2023), Ethiopia (Abebe et al., 2021), the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (World Bank, EAPGIL, 2020), Sierra Leone (Rosas and Sabharwal 2016), and Tunisia (Leight and Mvukiyehe, 2022) – see Appendix Table A1 for details.<sup>6</sup> We complement earlier work by Subbarao et al. (2013) and Gehrke and Hartwig (2018) in several important ways. First, we focus on public works experiments. Recent experimental studies provide causal evidence on the impacts of public works programs on individual participants and their households in diverse contexts, thus offering both greater internal and external validity. In contrast, existing reviews of public work programs are mostly based on quasi-experimental studies. This is a potential concern, as there are significant differences in findings generated by experimental and non-experimental evaluation methods (LaLonde, 1986; Smith and Todd, 2005; McKenzie, 2017; Card et al., 2018; Millán et al., 2019). The issue may be particularly salient for public works programs

> 4 Comoros rolled out a Social Safety Net Project (SSNP) that provided public works opportunities to poor households (Gazeaud et al., 2019). Public works programs in Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, and the Central African Republic were also introduced to facilitate post-conflict recovery (Rosas and Sabharwal, 2016; Bertrand et al., 2021; Brandily-Snyers et al., 2021; Mani and Mvukiyehe, 2021; Alik-Lagrange et al., 2023).

> 5 To achieve these broader objectives of transitioning workers from workfare to regular employment, during 1998-2000, Argentina’s Proempleo experiment provided specialized training or vouchers that entitled employers of workfare participants to a sizable wage subsidy (Galasso et al., 2004). The public works in Côte d’Ivoire included complementary micro-entrepreneurship or job search skills training (Bertrand et al., 2021). In Urban DRC, the public works program was complemented with incentivized savings and skills training ( <mark>Brandily-Snyers et al., 2021)</mark> . Similarly, the World Food Programme increasingly implements food-forassets interventions that seek to put a greater emphasis on asset creation and environmental outcomes, together with providing complementary market access or livelihood support (World Food Programme, 2016). In recent innovations, digital public works have been piloted to also foster digital skill acquisitions.

> 6 A study from Malawi (Beegle et al., 2017) was not used, as it did not report results on employment and earnings in ways that are readily comparable to the other studies. A study from the Central African Republic did not have a report available at the time of the review, although it was recently published (Alik-Lagrange et al., 2023).

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