Effects of Youth Employment Policies on Employability in the Congo

This article analyzes the effect of public employment policies on the employability of young people in the Republic of the Congo. An ordered multinomial logit model with correction for selection bias was used on survey data regarding the improvement of youth employment policies in French-speaking Africa carried out in 2018 in the Republic of the Congo. The results show that participation in the employment program improves the employability of young people in the Republic of the Congo but that its effects are limited. Similarly, beyond the effects of employment policies on employability, variables such as sex, age, marital status, religion, and enrollment in the Office National de l’Emploi et de la main-d’Oeuvre (ONEMO), currently the Agence Congolaise Pour l’Emploi (ACPE), influence participation in employment programs in the Republic of the Congo. These results give rise to implications for economic policy.


Introduction
In Central Africa, the number of unemployed youths aged 15 to 24 increased by almost one million in 2019 compared to 2010, when the number of unemployed youths was approximately 2 million (ILO, 2020). This increase has led most countries to implement constructive macroeconomic policies, thereby contributing to positive economic growth (Wohlmuth et al., 2021). Despite, the increase in economic growth recorded in these countries, macroeconomic policies in general and employment policies, in particular, have not contributed much to the improvement of the labor market situation of young people.
In view of this outlook for the labor market in Central Africa, it would be difficult for these countries to achieve the objective outlined in Agenda 2063, which is in line with goal eight (8) of the Sustainable Development Goals (Adams, 2017), which consists of the promotion of youth employment, education and training by 2030 by African governments. To this end, the consideration of macroeconomic policy reforms in general and public employment policies for young people in particular, which, focus on improving their level of employability, is a way to address the problem of youth unemployment (ILO, 2014(ILO, , 2010Kasekende & Brownbridge, 2011).
To this end, Republic of the Congo has initiated several employment programs during the period from 2000 to 2019, supported by the National Development Plan (NDP) -2022(African Development Bank, 2018. Despite these efforts to improve employment in general and youth in particular, the unemployment situation remains a major challenge, especially among young people aged 15 -29 (30%) (African Economic Outlook, 2018).
Moreover, the Survey on the Improvement of Employment Policies in the Congo (EAPE), which was conducted in 2018 showed that the youth unemployment rate represents nearly 32% and 16%, in Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville, respectively. Similarly, the Congolese labor market is faced with a downgrading situation since 29.05% of young people have been downgraded (EAPE-C, 2018).
In view of the above information, it can be observed that the implementation of these policies seems to be less effective in resolving employment issues in the Congo. This lack of effectiveness justifies the importance of this research on the analysis of youth employment policies and employability in the Congo.
In the economic literature, the effects of public employment policies on the employability of young people are controversial at both the theoretical and empirical levels. At the theoretical level, the analysis of the effects of public employment policies on the employability of young people has developed around three approaches: The first approach presents public employment policies as a means by which to improve the ability of applicants to obtain a job (Charlot, 2005;Dufour & Frimousse, 2006). The second approach, which is based on the theory of professional insertion, explains this relationship by evoking the idea that public employment policies developed in collaboration with companies help to reduce the duration of unemployment for young beneficiaries (Hicks, 1932;Pigou;1933). The last approach revolves around the hypothesis that public employment policies promote the construction of social networks between appli-F. C. Lekouka, R. I. M. Mokombi cants and company managers (Granovetter, 1973).
At the empirical level, the work of Makosso (2013) on entrepreneurship in the Congo showed the existence of a strong relationship between business creation and unemployment. According to this study, if unemployment increases by 10%, then the number of businesses created increases by 19.23%. Similarly, the work of Ndinga et al. (2020) showed that public employment policies have an effect on the access to employment of young people in the Congo. The work proposed in the Republic of the Congo regarding the issue of employment is limited to problems related to access to employment and youth entrepreneurship on the one hand (Ngassa, 2018;Makosso, 2013) and the relationship between public employment policies and their effect on access to employment on the other hand.
Few studies have addressed the question of the effects of public employment policies on the employability of young people in the Congo.
The resolution of this problem can help to reveal the importance of the relationship between public employment policies and the educational system in the Congo. In the Congo, the issue of the adequacy between the education system and the labor market is opposed with acute closeness; according to the results of ETVA-2015, nearly 52.1% of young workers are underqualified; while 41.4% feel inadequate with their level of training. Similarly, the results of the EAPE-C survey, which was conducted in 2018, show that the mismatch between training, education and employment is a source of downgrading. In view of the above, only one question can be asked: What are the effects of public employment policies on the employability of young people?
The main objective of this study is to analyze the effects of public employment policies on employability in the Congo. Thus, in this work, we support the hypothesis that public employment policies improve youth employability.
This work is structured in five (5) sections. In addition to the introductory section, the second section is devoted to the literature review. The methodology is the subject of the third section. The fourth section deals with the presentation and interpretation of the results obtained. The fifth section is devoted to the conclusion and the implications of the suggested policies.

Literature Review
The debate on the effects of public employment policies in the economy can be structured around three main approaches. The first approach revolves around the idea that public employment policies increase the ability of beneficiaries to obtain a job through improved employability (Charlot, 2005). This thesis is supported by the idea that investment in human capital must be continuous for job seekers; therefore, it improves the employability of young job seekers. This idea highlights the relationship between public employment policies and the education system; it implies that public employment policies influence employability through the human capital dimension of job seekers' education (Dufour & Frimousse, 2006). This approach has been the subject of several works (Dufour & Frimousse, 2006;Thiaw, 2020;Ndinga et al., 2020), which have revealed the existence of a positive relationship between public employment policies and the employability of young job seekers based on education. The study of Dufour & Frimousse, (2006), evoked the hypothesis that at the end of the school system, young people with a low level of education present difficulties related to finding a job. Hence, the transition to an employment program improves access to a job, i.e., increases the employability of beneficiaries (Gasquet, 2002). Moreover, the study by Thiaw nization between public employment policies and the education system. The second approach revolves around the hypothesis that public employment policies that are developed in collaboration with companies reduce the duration of unemployment of young beneficiaries of these policies. This approach is based on the positive relationship that exists between the theory of professionals (Hicks, 1932;Pigou, 1933) and the theory of human capital . Indeed, according to , there are two main sources of knowledge acquisition, namely, training on the job and training through school which corresponds to the individual's initial training. The main idea of this approach is that public employment policies through subsidies to companies, favor the creation of jobs in the labor market and the integration and non-dismissal of young people (Gautié, Gazier, & Silvera, 1994;Chapple et al., 1996). Similarly, policies related to bonuses for young trainees allow job seekers who receive financial bonuses to reduce their period of unemployment simply because they were chosen to participate in the experiment (Meyer, 1995). According to this logic, the presence of young applicants in the company helps develop their employability and contributes to the company's performance (Ben Hassen, 2011;Saint-Germes, 2004).
As a result, several studies have shown that on-the-job training increases the employability of young people. Among these studies, there is the job-related work of Crépon, Duflo, Gurgand, Rathelot and Zamora (2013), which showed that search support policies have very significant effects between treatment and control groups; this work used matching methods. Similarly, in the case of Côte d'Ivoire, Kouakou (2011) examined the relationship between active employment policies and youth employability in the city of Abidjan using a Weibull-type du-ration model with instrumentation. This study showed that employment programs have significant effects on the exit of youth from unemployment. In addition, the work of Magnac (1997Magnac ( , 2000 evaluated the effects of paid internships on the employment stability of French youths aged 18 to 29 using a multinomial logit model. Overall, the results showed that paid internships have little effect on groups experiencing difficulties integrating into the labor market, particularly young women and young people from families in which the initial educational capital is low. On the other hand, the study by Magnac (1997) used the effect of training courses in favor of young people. The author used a panel of the 1990, 1991 and 1992 employment surveys and the 1992 complementary youth survey from the INSEE supplementary survey of young people in France. He useds a model of transitions between states from one period to the next that took into account unobservable heterogeneity to estimate the impact of the internships. The variable of interest was the ease of transition from internships to different states (CDI, CDD, unemployment, education, inactivity). The results obtained showed that employment policies do not have significant effects on the integration of young people.
The third approach revolves around the hypothesis that public employment policies promote the construction of social networks (Granovetter, 1973). This approach puts forward the theory of self-determination, which refers to the idea that public employment policies develop the need for social belonging for beneficiaries within reception structures (Deci & Ryan, 1995). Economic theory states that employability depends on several factors among which are relational factors (Béduwé & Mora, 2017;Van Der Heijden, 2006). To this end, employment policies also develop an individual's sense of belonging to society or social capital (Loufrani-Fedida & Saint-Germes, 2015;Zgoulli et al., 2016). This approach leads to the conclusion that public employment policies help to expand the network of young job seekers. Empirically, many studies have highlighted the effects of public employment policies on the employability of young people from the aspect of social capital improvement. The study by Kloman-Kouakou et al.
(2020) was conducted from the database of the CREMIDE-CRDI survey conducted in 2017-2018 in Côte d'Ivoire. The results obtained from a generalized Tobit model of type 2, showed that social capital favors obtaining a job but negatively influences wages.
From the literature presented above, two lessons can be suggested. The first lesson is related to the problem of bias (selection and endogeneity) in the participation of young people in the employment program. Indeed, at this level, the results obtained remain controversial and vary according to the methods and fields of study (Kloman-Kouakou et al., 2020;Ndinga et al., 2020;Thiaw, 2020). Indeed, the use of analytical tools recently developed through the various works of (Magnac, 1997;Thiaw, 2020); in the consideration of the problem of selection bias from the two-stage estimation method of Heckman, extended to the case of several alternatives (Torns, 1995;Maddala, 1983;Dubin & McFadden, 1984) seems important in the case of Republic of the Congo. The use of this methodo-logical approach constitutes an empirical contribution in the case of developing countries in general and Republic of the Congo in particular.
The second lesson concerns the existence of factors favouring the effects of employment programs on youth employability (human capital, social capital).
Rare are the works that analyze the question of the effects of youth employment programs on the employability of young people by taking into account these factors (human capital and social capital). Thus, this work, which focuses on the analysis of the effect of public employment policies on the employability of young people in Republic of the Congo, places particular emphasis on these factors. The consideration of these factors in this article constitutes a contribution to the literature on the analysis of the effect of public employment policies on youth employability in developing countries.

Methodology
This section is structured in three main points. The data and construction of the employability indicator will be the subject of the first point, the second point will present the methodological approach and the last point will present the estimation results and discussion. Indeed, the treatment of missing data was done using the deductive imputation method (Kalton et al., 1983), which consists of deducing the missing data from the other questions by checking the consistency of the answers to the related questions.

Construction of the Employability Indicator
The concept of employability appeared at the beginning of the 20th century.
This concept basically refers to the capacity to be employed, which often translates into the probability of an individual holding a job (Cart & Toutin, 1996). In fact, the measurement of employability is based on three fundamental elements (Hillage & Pollard, 1999). These elements can be defined as the ability to obtain initial employment as conditioned by the educational system, among other things; the ability to keep one's job and to make transitions between jobs and roles in the same organization; and the ability to find another job, if necessary, which is as understood as the ability and willingness of individuals to manage job transitions between organizations and within them (Finot, 2000). with four (04) homogeneous groups. That is, "very low employability", "low employability", "average employability" and "high employability".
The dimensions chosen for the construction of the employability indicator were established by the work of Finot (2000); and Roger (2004). These authors define employability by referring to skills, creativity and organizational capacity.

Methodological Approach
The objective of this article is to analyze the effects of employment programs on the employability of young people. In the economic literature, some studies have used probit and logit models to analyze the effects of public employment policies (Magnac, 1997;Issehnane, 2009). In addition, other studies haves used experimental models to evaluate the impact of policies (Kouakou, 2011;Ndinga et al., 2020). In the case of this article, we will focus on the use of an ordered logit model with selection bias correction.

Theoretical Framework of the Ordered Logit Model
It is assumed that each individual i has to choose one possibility from among the n possibilities. To this end, we seek to study the single decision of an individual among a number of ordered alternatives. In an ordered choice model, individual i will compare the different levels of utility associated with the various choices, and then choose the one that maximizes his utility among the J choices. For individual i, the utility of choice j is as follows:

Specification of an Ordered Logit Model
To analyze the effects of public employment policies on employability, we drew on the work of Thiaw (2020), who categorized employability on a scale ranging from very low employability to high employability. This can be written as follows: The model specification is as follows: where β is a vector of parameters to be estimated, i X is a vector of the socioeconomic characteristics of participants i i µ is an error term distributed according to a logistic law and i Y * is an unobserved latent variable.
The observed probability for the values of X is given by: where F is the distribution function of μ. In the ordered probit, F is normal with The correct assessment of the role of the explanatory variables is made from the marginal effects. These effects are obtained through the following expressions: The marginal effects when are always of the opposite sign of β . By the same logic, the marginal effects in the other two cases are in the same direction as the sign. Since the sum of the three probabilities is equal to unity, the sum of the marginal effects is equal to zero. It is therefore sufficient to present two of the marginal effects to deduce the last.
The process of estimating an ordered logit makes it possible to model the assessment of the level of employability as follows: very low employability, low employability, average employability and high employability. Similarly, the use of Heckman's two-step estimation method, as extended to the case of several alternatives (Torns, 1995;Maddala, 1983;Dubin & McFadden, 1984), will make it possible to resolve the problem of selection bias related to participation in the employment program. Thus, the first step of the empirical analysis will be to estimate the probabilities of choosing to participate in the different programs. This will make it possible to construct Mills' ratios which are used in the second stage as additional explanatory variables in the employability equations. These new corrected equations are then estimated using the maximum likelihood method.

Description of Variables
Empirical work on the question of the effects of public employment policies has developed several variables; among which we have: marital status. This variable significantly influences the labor market, as being married is a determinant of the behavior of individuals (Spierings et al., 2008). Similarly, household size and having a child affects the labor market behavior of young people (Samuel et al., 2012). Indeed, the work of Ndinga et al. (2020) and Ngassa (2018) has shown that social capital is a determinant of access to employment. Moreover, Kolev and Fluitman (1989) proved that the level of education has an effect on access to employment.
The analysis of Table 2 shows that approximately 71.53% of the young people who participated in the employment program in the Republic of the Congo have a very low level of employability. On the other hand, 10.95% of the population in our sample has a high level of employability. This is due to the fact that most of the employment programs in the Congo focus on early school leavers. Similarly, the gender results show that participation in the employment program seems to be skewed toward men. This finding is corroborated by the fact that the proportion of men who participate in the employment program (86.86%) is higher than that of women (13.14%). In addition, participation in the employment program is more interesting for those who have knowledge of ONEMO (80.79%) than for those who do not have knowledge of ONEMO (19.21). ONEMO. These different points justify the need to analyze the effects of employment programs on the employability of young people.

Econometric Results and Discussion of the Results
This section will first deal with econometric results and then discuss the results obtained after the estimations are made.

Presentation of Econometric Results
The results in Table 4 reveal that participation in the youth employment program is influenced by several factors. Indeed, the overall quality of the model  Distance between your home and the employment office 1385 1 7 Source: Elaborated from data from EAPE-C (2018).  estimate is good, and the chi-square of the model is 81.172 and significant at the 1% level. The pseudo-R squared is 0.079. Similarly, the results in Table 5 show that the variable of Pmr controls for the selection bias associated with participation in the employment program. Indeed, the selection coefficient associated with participation in the employment program is negative and significant. This result reflects the fact that the characteristics that encourage participation in the employment program have an effect on employability.    Overall, the analysis of Graph 1 shows a better discrimination for the model. Indeed, we can see that the curve deviates from the bisector and the air of the surfaces is between 0.7 and 0.9. This situation raises the quality of the estimated model.
To this end, the analysis of the estimation results will be organized into two points. The first point will discuss the determinants of participation in employment programs and the second point will discuss the effects of employment policies on employability.  Determinants of participation in employment programs Analysis of the results in Table 4 shows that gender, age, marital status, religion, and enrollment in ONEMO in affect on the participation of youth in employment programs. Indeed, the results reveal that the above variables are significant at the 10% level.
With regard to the variable gender, the results obtained show that men are more likely to participate in public employment programs than are women. This result can be explained by the importance of the unemployment rate at the level of men (29%) than at the level of women (24%), as revealed by the results of the EAPE-C (2018). Moreover, while age has positive and significant effects on the probability of participating in an employment program, this probability increases at a decreasing rate. That is, all else is equal, if age increases by one year, then the probability of participating in the employment program increases to a level at which the probability becomes negative. These results confirm those obtained by Attanasio et al. (2015) in Colombia and Ndinga et al. (2020) in the Congo, who showed that the effectiveness of employment programs is greater for women than for men.  (2017); Kluve et al. (2017) and Ndinga et al. (2020) have shown that participation in an employment program promotes access to employment for young people.
Second, the problem of the limited effects of employment programs, is that although they have positive effects on employability, these effects are limited.
These results can be explained by the low use of public employment services, only approximately 3.2% of unemployed individuals make use of public employment services (PND/DSCERP, 2012. To this issue, we add the problem of the level of education and training areas of the candidates. These results can be explained by the phenomenon of the mismatch between the education system and the labor market, thus highlighting the importance of public employment policies and the education system (EAPE-C, 2018). These results are confirmed by the work of Dufour & Frimousse (2006). Similarly, the work of Kloman- Kouakou et al. (2020) in Côte d'Ivoire and Ndinga (2020) andNgassa (2018) in the Republic of the Congo has shown that social capital favor obtaining a job.

Conclusion and Policy Implications
The objective of this article was to analyze the effects of public employment policies on the employability of young people in the Republic of the Congo. Thus, to achieve our objective three steps were followed.
The first stage consisted of a theoretical review of the effects of public employment policies on the employability of young people. To this end, the different related theories were reviewed. This task highlighted three main approaches: 1) the approach based on the idea that public employment policies increase the ability to obtain employment for beneficiaries through the improvement of employability (Charlot, 2005); 2) the approach based on the hypothesis that public employment policies develop the spirit of entrepreneurship for the beneficiaries and 3) the third approach revolves around the hypothesis of job creation.
The approach revolves around the idea that public employment policies increase the ability of beneficiaries to obtain a job through improved employability (Charlot, 2005).
In the second stage of this article, a composite indicator of young people's employability is constructed on the basis of the various dimensions selected (Finot, 2000;Roger, 2004;Hillage & Pollard, 1999).
Finally, in the third step, this article used an ordered logit model with a correction for selection bias to analyze the effects of public employment policies on employability. From the results obtained after the estimation, we can suggest the following: 1) Participation in the employment program improves the employability of young in the Republic of the Congo, but its effects are limited. This result confirms the fact that human capital is a source of income improvement.
2) Variables such as gender, age, marital status, religion, and ONEMO registration, influence participation in employment programs in the Republic of the Congo.
In view of these results, it appears that the public employment policies that have been implemented to promote youth employment in the Congo are effective since they are shown to improve the employability of young people with a low level of employability, however, their effects are limited in regard to solving the problem of unemployment. To this end, the state, in collaboration with private sector employers, should encourage and sustain these policies to considerably reduce unemployment in the Congo. Since knowledge of the agency influences participation in employment programs, the state should develop a system aimed at raising awareness of employment agencies among beneficiaries.