Apprentices were more likely to be employed after the subsidy ended (McCasland and Hardy, 2016). However, Ghana may be unique. Apprentices in Ghana typically finance a portion of their training, and this self‐investment is used as a signal of the applicant’s quality or motivation as a job seeker. The program, which targeted lower‐income youth, substituted a cognitive test plus the commitment of time (showing up to several job‐matching sessions) for a fee as a signal of motivation. These arrangements allowed low‐income youths to get an apprenticeship. Since firms that did not get apprentices through this program did not hire other apprentices, while those that did kept theirs on, it is possible that displacement was low, and lowering the search or screening costs encouraged firms to hire apprentices they would not have considered otherwise, thus moving out demand.

**Incentives for job search.** Understandably, job seekers get discouraged (or run out of money to finance the search). Two interventions suggest that it is possible to incentivize job seekers to search harder: transportation subsidies and wage subsidies. In Ethiopia, the transportation subsidy experiment showed no overall employment or earnings effect, but it did show a formal employment effect (participants were more likely to get a formal job, which did not pay more but perhaps had other benefits). In Bangladesh, the transportation subsidy encouraged rural workers to go to cities in the off‐season in search of work and resulted in increased employment and earnings. In South Africa, a wage subsidy scheme appeared to have the unintended effect of encouraging workers to apply and firms to hire them, even though the firms did not take up the subsidy. In all of these cases, however, it is highly likely that the effect was purely displacement. In Ethiopia, less educated job seekers benefitted the most, suggesting that there may have been a small positive redistribution effect.

**Summing up.** Overall, the results on supply‐side interventions are not particularly encouraging. While short term results for participants appear in some impact evaluations, these tend to disappear and may be mostly or entirely at the expense of others. One reason may be that urban labor markets (where most wage jobs are located) are actually pretty efficient at connecting job seekers and firms looking to hire entry‐level employees.<sup>9</sup> In other words, labor market symptoms such as the unemployment of educated youth or presence of a large informal economy are caused by factors outside the labor market. _They are caused by the lack of firms and jobs, not by the characteristics of the job seekers_ . While the Ghana apprenticeship experience and the Ethiopia transport experiment suggest that low‐cost efforts to match disadvantaged workers with employers may deserve more testing as an income redistribution measure, overall, the real need is to increase the supply of jobs on offer – which requires continued transformation. There is no shortcut.

# 3.2.2 **Does gender matter?**

In some countries, women face strong barriers to employment and income earning opportunities. These are not issues of structural transformation, but norms and traditions which limit economic activities and behavior of women (World Bank, 2012). Should interventions tailor their approach to these constraints? The idea that training efficacy may have a gender‐differenced effect is not consistently supported by evidence. Studies suggest that in the short‐to‐medium‐term, there may be some differences, with female beneficiaries responding more positively to training than male counterparts.

With gains to employment disappearing in the follow up, it may be that training accelerates entry for females, relative to males (in some cases), but not that it is necessarily preferred for women. Additionally, accelerating entry through training programs may not be the most cost‐effective approach for increasing women’s labor force participation. Studies that have directly tested for gender

> 9 I am grateful to David McKenzie for first drawing my attention to this conclusion. He makes this point as well in his recent survey of the evidence for training programs (McKenzie, 2017).

13