This paper explores the influence of the policies in Spain aimed at attaining the specific targets for employment rate for older women and men in the 2010 EU Agenda. In particular, we focus on the measures to encourage employers to hire older workers on a regular basis by means of a large reduction in firms' social contributions. Given that such benefits increase with the age and are greater for women than for men, we propose a gender pseudo experimental approach for the beneficiary age groups

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... f 55-64 and 45-54 years, with the non affected central ages of 35-44 years as the control population group. From the point of view of dual labor markets, we estimate the inflows to (re)employment, open ended contracts and inactivity separately from unemployment and temporary employment with the sliding panel between 1Q2000 and 4Q2004 provided by the matched EPA. We use competing risk duration models focusing on two statistics: the cumulated flow into specific destinations during the first year of the current spell and the marginal effect of particular independent variables. The results reveal that the 2010 targets are unattainable for Spain and they also show the significant effect of GDP growth and a weak influence of these measures, since the flows to open ended contracts improve only slightly more than alternative employments and thus we do not find substitution by older workers of middle ages workers that we might have expected. Furthermore, the retirement flows do not sufficiently diminish and the unsatisfactory performance of the training system is verified which calls for complementary measures. JEL codes: J6, J5.