Q&A on the Global Employment Policy Review 2025

The Global Employment Policy Review (GEPR) was introduced in 2020 as a biennial publication of the Employment Policy, Job Creation and Livelihoods Department of the International Labour Organization (ILO). It deepens the ILO’s contribution to global employment policy debates by giving greater visibility to ongoing policy-oriented research and new policy-oriented research. In this Q&A we speak to David Kucera and Dorothea Schmidt-Klau, co-editors of the GEPR, who explain why this latest edition places particular emphasis on the role of impact assessments, diagnostics, and social dialogue in addressing the question: “Do employment-responsive policies work?

Q1. What is the latest edition of the GEPR about?

While the first two editions of the GEPR focused on structural transformation and macroeconomic policies, this edition focuses on the role of impact assessments, diagnostics, and social dialogue in addressing the question: “Do employment-responsive policies work?” .

The review also addresses the role of dialogue in policy-coordination among different entities within governments as well as among international organizations working on impact assessments.

Jobs have been central to the ILO’s mandate since it was founded more than 100 years ago. In recent years, other leading international institutions have reoriented their policies to also prioritize jobs. What distinguishes the ILO in this regard is its comprehensive view of jobs and employment-responsive policies. These views are guided by the ILO’s Decent Work agenda and its Employment Policy Convention, 1964 (No. 122), which advocates policies “designed to promote full, productive and freely chosen employment,” and by other ILO Conventions and Recommendations.

The ILO provides a unique setting for social dialogue, which allows the development of employment-responsive policies to be informed by the indispensable experiences and perspectives of the ILO’s tripartite constituents: workers, employers, and governments.

Q2. For whom is the GEPR intended?

The GEPR is intended for anyone interested in the creation of decent jobs, including researchers and academics, other international organizations, and members of general public. Given the publication’s themes, we hope that the publication will prove particularly useful to policy makers in government and to employers and workers and their respective organizations.

Q3. Can you explain what impact assessments are, why they matter, how they link to diagnostics, and how they help support the creation of decent and productive work that includes everyone? And how would you say this edition of the GEPR connects to global initiatives such as the 2030 Agenda?

Good employment policies are essential to any effort to create more jobs and better-quality ones, help reduce inequalities and poverty, and empower people, especially women, the young and the most vulnerable. What is more, these policies also help address decent work deficits and are critically important to the realization of the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG 8) on promoting sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all. Impact assessments that include a variety of tools for evidence-based policy development can accelerate achievement of these global goals.

And as I mentioned earlier, this edition of the GEPR delves deeply into impact assessments, most explicitly in Chapters 1, 4, 5 and 6. The key concept and challenge of impact assessments is attribution. In other words, when we are assessing impact, even when causality can be established from employment-responsive policies to desired outcomes, how much of the change in outcomes that we can identify are in fact either a direct or indirect result of these policies? How can we attribute the change to the policies, and not other factors that also affect outcomes? In this sense, impact assessments provide the most direct answer to the question of the extent to which employment-responsive policies do indeed work.

Yet impact assessments and diagnostics are closely allied. As the GEPR shows, in chapters 2 and 3 of the report, diagnostics provide guidance on the design and financing of employment-responsive policies, while impact assessments are necessary to measure their effectiveness.

Q4. You mentioned the role that employment-responsive policies play in impacting labour markets, and the tools and programmes that the ILO makes available to its constituents and partners for evidence-based policy making for job creation. Can you expand on these, and on how the ILO supports the growing demand of countries for impact assessment?

There are many types of employment policies. A whole set of them can be found on our Employment Policy Action Facility on-line platform. The important thing is that we understand that we need to have tools to help countries create jobs, but also to upskill the workforce so that people living in those countries can take up newly created jobs and improve institutions that match the skilled workforce with available jobs. We have also invested in tools that help countries assess the impact of policies on labour markets. Such employment impact assessment helps us to ensure that scarce financial resources are used as efficiently as possible, and that policies have maximum impact.

Chapter 1 of this report provides a review of nearly 100 employment impact assessments undertaken by the ILO and cited in the ILO’s Reference Guide on Employment Impact Assessment (EmpIA), second edition). This review is based on the coding of their substance as well as the extent to which they document social dialogue. This is followed by a section summarizing interviews with ILO colleagues in headquarters and regional offices, based on their experiences undertaking impact assessments and working to institutionalize them at the national level, with an emphasis on the role of social dialogue in doing so.

Chapter 1 then describes key aspects of the work of the Employment Policy Department’s STRENGTHEN2 project, which is a joint initiative of the European Union (EU) and the ILO. This project has played a central and strategic role in the work of the Department and the ILO’s work on EmpIA, focusing on its dialogue with financial institutions (FIs) through a series of workshops. The chapter also describes a series of training events on EmpIA undertaken by the International Training Centre (ITCILO), the training arm of the ILO, as well as STRENGTHEN2. These training events aim to fulfil ILO constituents’ growing demand for impact assessments and to build capacity to support their institutionalization at the national level.

Q5. Finally, you have mentioned how this edition of the GEPR delves deeply into impact assessments, most explicitly in the introductory chapter and in chapters 4, 5 and 6. Can you highlight the various chapters of the report?

There are seven chapters in the GEPR:

• Chapter 1: Employment impact assessment: An ILO perspective
• Chapter 2: Macroeconomic policies for structural and social transformation: From diagnostics to dialogue
• Chapter 3: Financing development: The role of pro-employment budgeting and employment-related public expenditure reviews
• Chapter 4: Assessing the economic and social dimensions of policies: Some applications of the Structural Model for Sustainable Development (SMSD)
• Chapter 5: Economic and social impacts of transport corridor investments: A GIS data analysis for Kenya and Zambia
• Chapter 6: The impact of trade union rights on trade: An industry-level approach
• Chapter 7: Building skills ecosystems for sustainable productivity improvements.