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Getting youth into productive employment is an urgent policy issue for countries around the world. Many governments in low and middle-income countries are actively engaged in policies to help youth attain the skills they need to do well in work and in life, as well as to find suitable employment. The involvement of the private sector in youth skills development and employment is a complex issue because the nature of the firms and their motivations vary significantly. Multinational corporations operating in low and middle-income countries may be motivated by direct productivity or profit objectives - to secure a skilled workforce, or reliable suppliers - but also, or even primarily, by corporate social responsibility (CSR) factors. Firms that supply training or employment services will be driven by profit considerations when entering these markets and deciding what services to offer and to whom. The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to provide a comprehensive look at the way the private sector is involved in youth skills and employment in low- and middle-income countries, considering the broad range of program types and firm types; (2) to present and interpret the available evidence of the effectiveness of this involvement; and (3) to understand where the private sector has been most effective at promoting young people’s labor market success, and what can be done to enhance the role of the private sector to achieve this objective. The report is organized as follows: chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two provides background to the analysis of the private sector role in youth employment in low- and middle-income countries. In chapter three the authors characterize the private sector’s role more systematically using the youth employment inventory, a global database of interventions that are designed to integrate young people into the labor market. Chapter four reviews the evidence of effectiveness of youth interventions involving the private sector. Chapter five briefly draws together strands from the previous review, as well as from the broader literature, to gain an understanding of the institutional and other factors leading to (and in other cases preventing) successful public-private partnerships for youth employment. Chapter six summarizes the main findings of this review, and is followed by a discussion of key gaps in knowledge on the role of the private sector in different types of youth employment intervention that future research should attempt to address, and a review of the main lessons for policy and programming emerging from the study.

This paper focuses on the question of whether improving the competence of new business founders by means of coaching and training programs enhances the duration of self-employment. In our analysis we focus on support activities that are provided in addition to a financial subsidy and which mainly focus on providing external expertise for founders who started a business from a position of unemployment. We find that the inflow into the related schemes is strongly determined by regional patterns and time while individual characteristics are less important. This reflects a particular regional specialization in the set-up of the promotion of self-employment. A statistical matching approach is used to control for selectivity and is performed in a way that explicitly takes into account differences across regions and over time. The results show that treatment effects tend to be insignificant in statistical and economic terms. We also find evidence that external expertise reduces the duration of self-employment. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage ob Maßnahmen mit dem Ziel einer Verbesserung der Qualifikation von Gründern zu einer Erhöhung der Erfolgschancen von Gründungsprojekten führen. Untersucht werden nicht-finanzielle Förderinstrumente bei Gründungen aus der Arbeitslosigkeit. Deutschland hat hier in den letzten Jahren zahlreiche neue Instrumente geschaffen, die unter anderem an der Qualifikation der Gründer in der Vor- und der frühen Nachgründungsphase ansetzen. In der Untersuchung zeigen sich starke regionale Unterschiede in der Eintrittswahrscheinlichkeit - in zahlreichen Regionen finden sich sogar gar keine Fördereintritte. Dies deutet bei der Vergabe von Förderleistungen der ergänzenden Gründungsförderung auf eine sehr hohe Bedeutung regional spezialisierter Förderstrategien hin. Bei den Vergleichsanalysen werden diese Besonderheiten im statistischen Matchingansatz berücksichtigt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass unabhängig von der Modellspezifikation, Stichprobeneinschränkungen und Art der Erfolgsmessung, im Aggregat keine statistisch signifikanten Effekte bei der ergänzenden und qualifikationsspezifisch ausgerichteten Gründungsförderung erwartet werden können.