A discussion on how can we reconcile the apparently contradicting views of labour market demand for soft skills versus technical job-specific skills.

Australia should provide early access to more intensive employment services for disadvantaged laid-off workers to help them find a new job more quickly, according to a new OECD report.

OECD analyses have begun to understand the relationship between digitalisation, jobs and skills, the magnitude of potential job substitution due to technological change, the relationship between globalisation and wage polarisation, as well as the changes to the organisation of work.

Prince William did it, Justin Timberlake did it, and so did David Cameron and Mark Zuckerberg. All four took paternity leave to spend time with babies George, Charlotte, Silas, Florence and Max. These trailblazers are great role models in combining family and work–at least when a new baby arrives–but men around the world are still too slow in following their example.

Ongoing innovation in technology is changing labour markets worldwide. To understand the future of work in the digital era, we need to move away from the traditional economic classification of manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors.

Workers can be mismatched by qualifications while their skills are, in fact, adequate for their jobs. This situation, ‘apparent’ qualification mismatch is more common in certain fields of study than in others and speaks to the need of strengthening the links between employers, education providers and students to share information on the true skills, to avoid true skills mismatch.

When nearly a million Vietnamese “boat people” fled their country in the late 1970s and early 1980s and sought refuge elsewhere, they were typically seen as a burden and often turned away. Eventually, many were allowed to settle in the US. Most arrived speaking little or no English and with few assets or relevant job skills. Yet Vietnamese refugees are now more likely to be employed and have higher incomes than people born in the US.

Tax incentives are used widely across OECD countries to incentivise individuals to invest in education and training, but are they effective? Recent evidence from the USA highlights the risk of creating overly complex systems in which the embedded incentives are no longer fully understood by individuals. This carries an important lesson for other countries in designing their own tax measures for skills investments.

New research points to the role of field-of-study mismatch in explaining the long-term effects of cyclical labour market shocks. It suggests that policy effort ought to be directed not just towards the NEETs, but also towards youth who find employment during recessions, given their higher risk of prolonged field-of-study mismatch and lower wages if mismatch is accompanied by overqualification.

Today, the OECD publishes "Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills", the Second International Report for the Survey of Adults Skills, which covers a further nine countries and sub-national entities – Chile, Greece, Indonesia (Jakarta), Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia and Turkey– that collected data in 2014-15.

In 2015 the Lithuanian government launched an ambitious Social Model reform agenda aimed at balancing flexibility of the labour market and security provided through the system of social protection.

This chapter analyses how skills are used at work, why skills use matters for workers and economies and its key determinants. It draws on data for the 28 OECD countries participating in the Survey of Adult Skills.

Denmark was hit harder by the global financial crisis than its neighbouring countries and the OECD area, but is now slowly recovering. In the first quarter of 2016, the employment rate was still 4.8 percentage points lower than before the GFC with only minor improvement since 2013.

The recently published Second International Report for the Survey of Adults Skills looks in detail at the extent to which proficiency in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments matters for the well-being of individuals and nations. The answer that emerges is clear: proficiency is positively linked to a number of important economic and social outcomes.

The labour market recovery in the Netherlands is lagging behind. As of the last quarter of 2015, the unemployment rate stood at 6.7%, just one percentage point lower than its cyclical peak and three percentage points higher from its level at the start of the global financial crisis. As a result of the sluggish recovery, the unemployment rate in the Netherlands is now slightly higher than that for the OECD as a whole.

Skill requirements are changing rapidly as a result of structural shifts. Workforce employability is essential to turn structural change into an opportunity for all. Education and training systems, labour markets, workers and workplaces will have to become more adaptable. A set of concrete actionable measures is proposed to improve the employability of each economy’s workforce.

Low birth rates have become a pressing issue in Italy and many young Italians feel they do not enjoy the necessary economic stability to plan ahead and start a family. Education that matches the skill needs of employers leading to work-based learning in the form of apprenticeships can be useful to help young Italians plan ahead and to sustain the much needed increase in the birth rate.

The post-crisis recovery in entrepreneurial activity remains mixed across countries, but new data released today by the OECD provides tentative signs of a turning point, with trends in enterprise creation rates pointing upwards in most economies.

OECD employment rate increases further to 66.9% in the second quarter of 2016

OECD unemployment rate stable at 6.3% in September 2016

This paper delivers a broad assessment of income inequality in Denmark.

Reforms that boost growth by enhancing economic flexibility often meet strong opposition related to concerns that they may imply adverse consequences for categories of workers. This study investigates how making product or labour market regulation more flexible changes workers’ risks of moving out of employment and jobless people’s chances of becoming employed.

OECD unemployment rate down to 6.2% in October 2016

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are profoundly changing the skill profile of jobs. Skill development policies need to be overhauled to reduce the risk of increased unemployment and growing inequality.

Skill requirements in the labour market have significantly changed over the past two decades. The restructuring of the economy is making the labour market increasingly knowledge-based.

Malaysia has sustained over four decades of rapid, inclusive growth, reducing its dependence on agriculture and commodity exports to become a more diversified, modern and open economy.

Productivity growth is essential to providing sustainable increases in living standards. Malaysia has reached a development stage where growth needs to be driven more by productivity gains than the sheer accumulation of capital and labour inputs.

Malaysia has followed a comparatively equitable development path, largely eliminating absolute poverty and greatly reduced ethnic inequality.

OECD unemployment rate stable at 6.2% in November 2016

OECD employment rate increases to 67.0% in the third quarter of 2016

This paper provides a quantitative description of decoupling in OECD countries over the past two decades, with the results suggesting that it is explained by declines in both labour shares and the ratio of median to average wages (a partial measure of wage inequality).

OECD unemployment rate stable at 6.2% in December 2016

OECD unemployment rate down to 6.1% in January 2017

Australia’s strong economy has helped drive a healthy job market. But to avoid a future shortage of labour as the population ages, further efforts are needed to help older women, indigenous Australians and mothers with young children into work, according to a new OECD report.

New Zealand should extend access to income support and introduce a longer minimum notice period for all workers to help disadvantaged laid-off workers find a new job and maintain their job quality and living standards, according to a new OECD report.

OECD unemployment rate stable at 6.1% in February 2017

OECD employment rate increases to 67.2% in the fourth quarter of 2016

Brazil’s old-age pensions have reduced old-age poverty below OECD levels, but pension expenditures of 8.2% of GDP are expected to rise rapidly as the population ages. A pension reform is necessary to ensure the financial sustainability of the system.

Lending volumes and credit conditions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have gradually improved, according to a new report from the OECD, but demand-side obstacles such as a lack of financial knowledge are contributing to holding back a stronger recovery.

OECD unemployment rate falls to 6.0% in March 2017

The slowdown in productivity growth - already underway before the crisis – combined with sluggish investment, continued to undermine rises in economic output and material living standards in recent years in many of the world’s economies, according to a new report released today by the OECD.

The talk of the town this year has truly been the so-called fourth industrial revolution–and rightly so. Digitalisation causes an increasing interconnectivity of people, production and processes. Combined with the rapid development in artificial intelligence, self-learning machines and robot technology it heralds a new time of revolutionary technological progress.

Recent debates of Basic Income proposals shine a useful spotlight on the challenges that traditional forms of income support are increasingly facing, and highlight gaps in social provisions that largely depend on income or employment status. Reforms towards more universal income support would need to be introduced in stages, requiring a parallel debate on how to finance a more equal sharing of the benefits of economic growth.

Japan should step up efforts to improve young people’s job prospects and reduce the share of 15-29 year-olds who are not in employment, education or training (the “NEETs”), according to a new OECD report.

The German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the OECD are jointly organising a High-Level Policy Forum on the New Jobs Strategy which will take place on 13 June 2017 in Berlin. The Forum will be hosted by Minister Andrea Nahles together with Secretary-General Angel Gurría.

The job market continues to improve in the OECD area, with the employment rate finally returning to pre-crisis levels. But people on low and middle incomes have seen their wages stagnate and the share of middle-skilled jobs has fallen, contributing to rising inequality, according to a new OECD report.

OECD unemployment rate stable at 5.9% in April 2017

The OECD LEED Trento Centre organised a working group session on "Cultural heritage as catalyst of local development " on Thursday, 22 June, 2017 - 12.30 to 15.30 in the context of ArtLab 17 in Milan.

OECD unemployment rate stable at 5.9% in May 2017

Kazakhstan’s strong economic growth since the 2000s has helped the country sharply improve people’s living standards, reduce poverty and income inequalities, and boost employment. Kazakhstan should now focus on improving employment opportunities for vulnerable people.