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Partnering with Spain’s government to build a more inclusive job market

Europe

Posted on:

4 Mayo 2026

Authors:

Inés Torres Rojas

Ana Garcia-Hernandez

Cillian Nolan

A group of women pose in a warehouse wearing neon vests

A group of women participating in the RedLab programme in the Canary Islands. Photo credit: Spanish Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, and REDLAB Canarias

Cash transfers such as minimum incomes, grants, universal basic incomes or food stamps, are a common tool to alleviate poverty. Working with governments, J-PAL researchers are exploring whether combining these transfers with additional resources can help people make better use of cash assistance and achieve healthier, more productive, and more prosperous lives. In Spain, the General Secretariat of Inclusion within the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security, and Migrations launched the Inclusion Policy Lab to study several social inclusion programs. These programs were designed to strengthen the country’s national minimum income scheme, a cash benefit that tops up the incomes of low-income households. The Lab is an innovative model for promoting social inclusion, drawing on Next GenerationEU funds, and partnering with regional and local governments, third-sector organisations, and scientific partners, including CEMFI (Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros) and J-PAL Europe.

To date, the Lab has funded 32 randomized evaluations of programs to promote social inclusion, which aims to improve access to economic and social opportunities for disadvantaged groups. The results of these evaluations are publicly available on the Lab’s website, and there are several academic papers in progress.

Our recent report “Promoting labour market inclusion: Evidence from the Inclusion Policy Lab in Spain and across Europe” highlights key findings from across 18 of these evaluations. In the report, we bring together evidence on labour market inclusion from the Lab and place it in context alongside broader research from labour market policies across Europe. This includes programs that help people access employment opportunities, efforts to improve people’s overall well-being and programs to better prepare people for employment. Many people who are a part of these programs face pressing needs such as mental health challenges, housing instability, or severe poverty, and need foundational support. For that reason, in this report, we look at the intermediate steps that bridge the gap between foundational support and labour market inclusion, such as improving job seekers’ search skills and their ability to use digital devices to look for jobs or access public services.

The 18 evaluations in the report looked at four main types of programs:

Comprehensive social support programs, which provide extensive and personalized support to people by offering different services depending on their needs. These are things like assistance to access social benefits, educational support for children, or guidance on administrative procedures. Social support programs can also have components of job search assistance like CV preparation, digital access, and coaching.
Digital skills training, which focuses on improving participants’ digital competencies, such as online job searching and access to public services.
Adult training programs, which offer training courses to help unemployed people or people with limited formal qualifications update their practical and soft skills and learn new ones.
Targeted programs, which tackle specific needs of particular groups, such as women, youth, people experiencing homelessness, or people with disabilities.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Comprehensive social support programs for families and people at risk of poverty were effective in improving housing conditions, children’s education performance, digital access, and community participation, as well as job search efforts. However, employment prospects didn’t necessarily improve for everyone.
Job seekers at risk of poverty who participated in digital skills training programs improved their technical skills, such as using digital devices and the internet and carrying out administrative procedures online. When these training sessions were paired with help with their job search, job seekers’ improved their search and their chances of securing employment. In some cases, these interventions improved people’s life satisfaction and self-esteem.
Vocational training programs for the long-term unemployed or adults at risk of poverty generally improved their job search skills and their behaviors and attitudes toward job searching, such as proactivity, motivation, and perceived likelihood of finding employment. But these changes did not always lead to better employment outcomes.
Personalised and intensive labour market programs, such as matching firms with people experiencing homelessness or with intellectual disabilities, increased people’s job search efforts and led to more hours worked and more employment contracts. These programs also led to more stable housing situations, improved life satisfaction, and promoted greater social inclusion.

These results offer useful starting points for designing and evaluating similar programs. However, compressed timelines for running these pilot studies under NextGenerationEU funding meant that research teams faced challenges gathering complete data and measuring longer-term outcomes. Academic papers currently underway will enable us to gain a deeper understanding of the results.

More governments should launch efforts to study their social inclusion programs. This collaboration between researchers and governments helps ensure that programs maximize their potential and address key policy questions. Policymakers should also plan for and facilitate the generation of actionable evidence, using administrative data, cost information, and medium- to long-term follow-up, to capture the full picture of program impacts. An interesting avenue for future research is to explore programs that focus on both job seekers and employers. This could open doors to study the needs and demands of both sides of the labour market, particularly for people who are facing very specific challenges.