Activation and labour market conditions

In many respects, Switzerland can be expected to provide an ideal terrain for successful activation polices. First, its labour market is rather unregulated. In international comparison of employment protection legislation, Switzerland is always classified together with Anglo-Saxon countries rather than with Continental 

If the overall labour market conditions seem rather promising, the lack of a tradition in activation may also mean that the adoption of a truly activation-oriented policy for non-working people will take time before it is adopted and can deploy its impact. This may be one key reason why, in spite of the overall favourable conditions, the performance of those activation polices that have so far been evaluated is at best mixed. Our hypothesis is that activation has been introduced half-heartedly so far, often more in response to the political need to do something about unemployment rather than with a clear employment maximisation objective. This is probably more the case in activation measures developed within the social assistance system or, in those cantons where such programmes exist, in unemployment assistance programmes (see Sect. 4.3.2 and Bonoli and Bertozzi 2007). 

---