Institutional Capacity for Employment Policy Beyond Digital Modernisation: Greece’s Public Employment Service in European Comparative Perspective

Public employment services (PESs) combine matching, activation and benefit administration, but their institutional capacity varies across Europe. This study examines Greece’s Public Employment Service (DYPA) after its 2022 reorganisation and introduces the concept of asymmetric institutional capacity. The concept denotes the uneven development of capacities that can change through discrete projects, such as digital channels and formal organisation, and capacities that depend on recurrent resources, such as staffing, financial transparency and evaluation. The analysis combines a descriptive comparison of PES Network capacity reports for 2016–2025 with a bibliometric map of 146 journal publications covering the European Union and the European Economic Area. Before the reform, Greece combined a high workload per client-facing staff member with an unusually large unexplained expenditure category. After it, the front-office staff share rose well above the median for reporting PESs while total staffing fell, and services supported by artificial intelligence and interoperability tools were adopted without evidence on their employment effects. The Greece-focused publications in the retrieved journal corpus do not estimate the employment effects of the post-2022 staffing and digital-service changes. The evidence documents uneven organisational change but does not yet distinguish persistent capacity asymmetry from delayed adjustment or changes in staff classification. We derive priorities for workforce reporting, expenditure reconciliation, assisted access and independent evaluation.