By providing guidance, concrete methodologies and macro-economic tools, it will be designed to help public authorities assessing current policies as well as shaping new ones. As such, the project will notably address the following issues on an ex-ante and ex-post basis: job creation, transfer from the shadow to the formal economy, net job creation, sustainability/optimal level of public investment, return on investment, etc.

Main steps in the IMPact project

In a first stage, IMPact will identify and define evaluation and monitoring criteria to be used for assessing policies supporting the formal provision of PHS, through a SWOT analysis focusing on the results and methodologies used in existing national studies on PHS in Europe.

This work is to be presented during a seminar held in January 2015, in Brussels, bringing together partners, experts and political representatives from all over Europe. It will lead to the establishment of a set of evaluation criteria and indicators, which will be tested in a second phase: the evaluation of public policies implemented in France, Belgium and Sweden.

Based on this testing phase, a harmonized list of criteria and analytical grid to be taken into account while assessing national PHS measures will be validated by the partners in the framework of a second working seminar, which will be take place in Prague, in July 2015.

Both tools will then be integrated into a hands-on toolkit, which will also include a European macroeconomic model allowing the 28 Member States to put in place an evaluation system in terms of employment and budgetary impact of measures promoting the formal provision of PHS. The toolkit will be evaluated and validated during a final working seminar, to be held in Madrid in January 2016.

The results of the project will be presented at the occasion of a European conference which will take place in Brussels in March 2016.

IMPact project partners

IMPact is co-funded by the European Commission through the PROGRESS programme (European Union Programme for Employment and Social Solidarity).

The project is coordinated by the European Federation for Services to Individuals (EFSI) and gathers seven other organisations or networks established in Belgium, Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden:

• Censis (Italy)
• IDEA Consult (Belgium)
• Oxford Research (Sweden)
• Panteia B.V. (The Netherlands)
• POUR LA SOLIDARITÉ (Brussels-based organisation)
• Research Institute for Labour and Social Affairs (RILSA, Czech Republic)
• Unión de Profesionales y Trabajadores Autónomos (UPTA, Spain)

IMPact in short

• Kick-off meeting - Brussels, 27 October 2014
• 3 working seminars - Brussels, Prague, Madrid
• A set of evaluation criteria and an analytical grid for public measures supporting the provision of formal Personal and Household Services
• A final report and a hands-on toolkit
• A final conference - Brussels, March 2016

*Full name of the project: IMPact - Improving Measurement of Public support to Personal and Household Services