to incentivize firms to provide training to their employees (67 percent of economies), followed by subsidies (53.4 percent), and cost reimbursement (46.6 percent).

# **3.2. Patterns of UB and ALMP across income groups and regions**

Among the 91 economies with UB schemes, only 8 percent, all of which are HIC, require unemployed persons to meet all six criteria, and 5 percent require just one criterion. The most commonly used number of eligibility conditions is four, followed by three, five, and two (30, 22, 19, and 16 percent, respectively). According to the Jaccard index of similarity,<sup>9</sup> periodic reporting on active job search and participating in training offered by PES are most likely to be used together (with a Jaccard similarity index of 81 percent), followed by registration with PES and periodic reporting on active job search (68 percent), and registration with PES and participation in training offered by PES being used together (61 percent).<sup>10</sup> Regarding the six services provided by PES reported in Table 1, training, vacancy database, and job placement are the most commonly used services. Among the 156 economies that have PES, 29 percent offer all six services, 27 percent offer five services, and about an equal percentage of countries, at about 13 percent, offer 4, 3, and 2 employment services. Only 0.4 percent of economies offer just one employment service. The highest percentage of countries offering all six services are from HIC, at 42 percent of HIC, compared to 26, 22, and 13 percent of UMIC, lower-middle-income countries (LMIC), and low-income countries (LIC), respectively. Interestingly, the largest share of economies offering five services are from LMIC (at 31 percent of LMIC) followed by HIC (27 percent) and UMIC (26 percent), and the majority of countries with only two services are from LIC (at 38 percent). As for the pairing of these services, job placement services and a vacancy database are most likely to be offered together (with a Jaccard similarity index of 81 percent), followed by job placement and counseling services (78 percent), and counseling services and training (77 percent).<sup>11</sup> Out of the three types of training incentives offered by the governments of 95 economies (tax reductions, subsidies, and reimbursement of training costs), 24 percent use all three incentives (38 percent of HIC, 19 percent of UMIC, and 9 percent of LMIC), 33 percent use two incentives (5 percent of LIC, 33 percent of HIC, 25 percent of UMIC, and 36 percent of LMIC) and 43 percent use one incentive (56 percent of UMIC, 55 percent of LMIC, 29 percent of HIC, and 5 percent of LIC). Subsidies and reimbursement of training costs are more likely to be offered together (with a Jaccard similarity index of 51 percent), followed by subsidies and tax reductions (41 percent).

As expected, both the availability of UB schemes and the average duration of UB increase with income levels, while the minimum duration of contribution tends to decrease (Figure 1a). Out of 30 LIC in the study, only Tanzania, Nepal, and Tajikistan<sup>12</sup> have UB schemes (10 percent of LIC), while in other income groups, the share of countries with UB scheme is much higher, (30, 47, and 81 percent in LMIC, UMIC, and HIC, respectively). Similarly, the average maximum UB duration is the lowest in LIC (13 weeks, although

> 9 The Jaccard index, developed by Jaccard (1912), is a statistic used to evaluate the similarity and diversity of sample sets. 10 See Table A2 in the appendix for all Jaccard similarity coefficients of all six eligibility criteria for UB.

> 11 See Table A2 in the appendix for all Jaccard similarity coefficients of PES.

> 12 Tanzania transitioned from LIC to LMIC in July 2022, after the data collection process in 2020 was completed. Therefore, it is classified as LIC throughout this paper.

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