Enhancing safer working conditions: how can we assess what works and for whom?

Improving working conditions established as a fundamental goal long ago. It is quoted in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and it has been further operationalized through the adoption of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Framework Directive (89/391/EEC). The lack of evaluation studies in this field might be explained by the general recognition of the absolute value of working safety and health, nevertheless understanding effectiveness remains important because even if you do not have the necessity to justify public action, there remains the need to understand what works for whom. For example, the enhancement of OSH has been managed all over the world mainly through regulations enforced through inspections and sanctions; but now there is a growing debate on the role that corporate responsibility could play in raising the bar over the minimum requirements. Another reason for the lack of evaluation studies is connected to the hard methodological challenges connected to this type of economic assessment. Just to quote some of them: oThe fact that the outcome of any policy is connected to risk, which il probabilistic variable (a reduction in the probability to suffer consequences of an aleatory event, such as an accident); oThe problem of performance metrics 1. The difficulty to identify indicators that address outcomes of the policy and that are sensitive (luckily working accidents are a rare event); oThe problem of performance metrics 2. OSH is a multifaced phenomenon. It is difficult to identify a single variable to represent it, while composite indicators are difficult to measure and have the problem of weighting; oThe difficulty to detangle the causal link between the policy/regulation and the desired outcome (latency and accumulation of causes, concurring conditions); oSince most policies are in the form of overall regulation, the lack of a proper counterfactual hampers the possibility of impact evaluation; oThe problems connected to obtaining indicators from administrative data (for example under/over reporting is frequent when reporting is linked to economic consequences as fines or reimbursements). In our paper we will discuss in deep the issues and constraints for making evaluation with this kind of risk, explore some methodological options. The reflection will rely on examples deriving from an extensive research project on the effectiveness of incentives for OSH in Italy. In fact, in 2008, a system of economic incentives has been introduced, providing SMEs with grants to invest in the OSH field. This represents a sort of revolution, leveraging corporates' social resposability towards their workers. Inail (the Italian OSH insurance body) financed the most important intervention, both in terms of beneficiaries and amounts: since 2010, Inail "ISI calls" supplied about 2 billion euros. This represents a huge budget in a quite long pilot experimentation, but at the policy level the balance is still leaning in favour of "sticks" rather than carrots. Up to now, the evaluation analyses performed by Inail on ISI calls concerned implementation processes and performance monitoring, reporting, and accounting. Recently, the need for an ex-post evaluation of impacts emerged. Therefore, Inail is funding a research project aimed at identifying appropriate models to assess the impact of ISI incentives and to highlight their strengths and criticalities as an economic support to SMEs.