The questions on the UB scheme include the availability and maximum duration<sup>6</sup> of UB after one, five, and ten years of employment, the minimum contribution period to be eligible for UB, and eligibility requirements as stipulated in the labor laws of the country. The questions on ALMP include the availability of PES and the types of PES offered; the availability of a national skills/training fund, and government incentives for firms to provide training to their employees.

It is important to note that there is no notable change in UB and ALMP indicators from 2019 to 2020. This can be attributed to two factors. First, data is based on labor laws, which typically do not undergo frequent changes. Second, data collection cycle spanned from May of the preceding year to May of the subsequent year for both years. Consequently, the 2020 data does not adequately capture the majority of the UB and ALMP reforms related to the Covid-19 crisis, which commenced in March 2020. Moreover, the bulk of the UB and ALMP reforms implemented between March and May 2020 fall outside the scope of this dataset, including changes in UB amounts, wage subsidies, public works initiatives, and unemployment assistance, among others. The data collected in 2020 captured reforms in 12 economies between May 2, 2019 and May 1, 2020. Ten of these economies undertook reforms in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, but they did not lead to a significant change in the overall data.<sup>7</sup> Therefore, to examine the UB and ALMP reforms carried out during the Covid-19 pandemic, the paper utilizes the comprehensive Social Protection and Jobs Policy Inventory of the World Bank collected during March 2020-January 2022.

Table 1 provides the descriptive statistics of UB and ALMP indicators in 2019.<sup>8</sup> As seen from the table, 47.6 percent of 191 economies have UB schemes and 38.7 percent offer UB after one year of contribution. As expected, eligibility conditions for UB schemes vary across countries. Average minimum period of contribution to become eligible for UB is 11.6 months and about 11 percent of countries with UB schemes do not require a contribution. Periodic reporting on active job search is the most commonly required eligibility condition (80.2 percent of economies), followed by participating in training sessions assigned by PES (74.7%) and registering with PES (73.6 percent). While not as widespread as the above three eligibility conditions, many countries also require accepting a suitable job offered (50.5 percent), proof job loss through no fault of the employee (48.4 percent), and proof of no other income source (37.4 percent).

Unlike UB schemes, which are available only in 91 out of 191 economies (47.6 percent of economies), ALMP are available in 163 economies (85.3 percent) and PES are available in 156 economies (81.7 percent). The most prevalent employment services PES provide are training and skill enhancement programs (84.6 percent), vacancy database/labor market information (84 percent), and job placement (83.3 percent) followed by counseling/vocational guidance (75 percent), internship/apprenticeship programs (69.2 percent), and support for geographic mobility in connection with a job search (36.5 percent). Both national skills/training fund and government incentives for training are available in fewer countries (52.9 and 53.9 percent, respectively) compared to PES. Governments mostly use tax deductions

> 6 Henceforth, “maximum duration of UB” will be used interchangeably with “duration of UB” or “length of UB”.

> 7 See Box A1 in the appendix for details on these reforms. New data captured the changes in UB and ALMP indicators listed in Table A1 in the appendix. Social Protection and Jobs Policy (SPJ) Inventory collected by Gentilini et al (2022) captures a wide range of UB and ALMP reforms from March 2020 to January 2020. These reforms are reported in Section 3.3 of this study. 8 Both the descriptive and econometric analyses of the new data are based on the 2019 data, as there were no significant changes in the 2020 data, and it coincided with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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