Evaluation of the Australian Wage Subsidy Special Youth ...

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2: Australian literature review
This analysis focuses on wage subsidies, and in particular the Australian SYETP program.
Although there have been a few past reviews, these have proceeded with the general aim
of summarising labour market programs in Australia from various historical economic or
socio-political perspectives [Edwards (1987), Ross (1988), Stretton and Chapman (1990),
Webster (1998) Harris (2001)], including governmental reviews [OECD (2001), BLMR
(June 1984)]. Some of these have also tried to assess the effectiveness of the programs by
canvassing the evaluation evidence to date. The focus here is on extracting information
about wage subsidies only and in particular SYETP.
The chief intention is to summarise the results and critically assess the micro-evaluation
evidence. Some effort is made to retain detail of the data, methods and variables used to
achieve the evaluation results, as these can have some bearing on the outcome and can
help place our results amongst the evidence to date. The empirical literature covered is
limited to microeconomic evaluations. These evaluate programs by looking at the effect
on the participant and can establish whether the program changes the outcome for the
selected individuals after the program has ended, mainly examining employment. An
important aspect of evaluations of this type is that they try to establish whether the
participant would have a job anyway, and try to assess this using information about what
happens after the program has ended. The brevity of the evaluation review reflects the
paucity of formal evaluation in the Australian literature.
Empirical evidence for Australian wage subsidies is treated in several parts. Only recent
work completed during or after 1980 is included, as this corresponds to the period of
SYETP analysed later, but also because this is when published evaluations first occurred
in Australia. Australian wage subsidies other than SYETP are firstly briefly treated.
Because of the broad extent of SYETP, there were few other subsidies and this section is