Public Works Program, Korea

Impact. By the first quarter of 1999, the program was providing 832,000 temporary jobs, though the number of applicants for such jobs was more than 1 million. Around 2.5 times more people benefited from the public works program than from unemployment insurance. The total cost of 

Lessons. The public works program provided an effective and timely social insurance mechanism in response to the needs of vulnerable, able-bodied, unemployed people. 

What all programs covered in this review have in common is an emphasis on creating employment and providing income transfers for a selected group of poor beneficiaries. 

The second step is to select projects, opting for those with the highest possible labor intensity while achieving cost-effectiveness. Public works departments typically favor equipment intensity rather than labor intensity, because they perceive it to be superior and to facilitate more rapid project completion. However, equipment-intensive projects may offer greater opportunities for rent seeking (Stock and de Veen 1996), and if the work has been entrusted to private contractors, the outcome with respect to labor intensity is unpredictable. At the same time, public work projects also suffer if inadequate provisions have been made for materials and equipment, as occurred in Ethiopia s Employment Gen- 

FOR PROTECTION AND PROMOTION THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF EFFECTIVE SAFETY NETS 

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