How effective and efficient is the public support granted to social enterprises?

Social entrepreneurship accounts for an important share of employment in the European labour market.Social enterprises, however, are mainly funded by public budgets. Based on the data of 307 individuals who received EU-funded support and a control group of the same size, we estimated the effect that this support had on the employability. To perform this task, we used a propensity score matching approach. We found a positive effect of 7.8% increase in the likelihood in employment of supported group. Women benefited with an estimated 11.6% increase, and people older than 40 years of age with an estimated 14.7% increase in employment. The timespan needed for the payback time is more than 13 years.