Alcázar, L., Jaramillo, M. y Távara, F. (2023). Promoviendo el empleo y la empleabilidad durante el COVID-19: evaluación de cuatro experiencias en América Latina. Lima: GRADE. Avances de Investigación, 43.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures to control it had a strong impact on the Latin American labor market. As a result of this crisis, the region experienced a rapid decline in its employed population and a significant rise in unemployment, which hit women and youth the hardest. In this context, Latin American countries implemented a series of policies and programs aimed at cushioning the effects of this crisis and promoting the recovery of employment, especially formal employment.

This paper takes stock of four evaluations of labor dynamization interventions in response to the impact of the pandemic on employment. These evaluations, which were conducted in the framework of the Building Back Better project, analyzed (i) a virtual training program to strengthen entrepreneurship with a gender focus in Argentina, (ii) a youth employment subsidy program in Ecuador, (iii) a labor intermediation program in Colombia, and (iv) a digital and soft skills training to improve employability, implemented as part of the temporary employment program in Peru.

Based on this stocktaking, the article draws lessons that, in the future, can inform the implementation of these types of interventions and evaluations. In particular, it assesses the efforts and mechanisms for joint work between academia and governments in the design and evaluation of public interventions. Likewise, different obstacles to the implementation of interventions are identified, including those generated by the pandemic itself and the restrictions it implied. The lessons on how to deal with the attrition of the beneficiaries of the interventions are highlighted, as well as those related to the use and potential of virtuality both in the interventions themselves and in their evaluation. Finally, it highlights the effort to implement evaluations using rigorous methodologies, which continue to be a scarce practice in the region.