All OECD countries, except the United States, provide nationwide paid maternity leave. Over half also offer paternity leave to fathers right after childbirth. By enabling fathers to take on a greater share of the childcare burden, parental leave can support women’s careers.

Regional disparities in the supply and demand of skills do exists in many OECD countries. Local level actors need to be equipped with the right tools and capacities to develop innovative employment and job creation strategies tailored to their local conditions.

Discussion on how technology helps measuring skills shortages in real time

Openness to change and a continuous questioning of the way we work are the keys to being prepared for the Future of Work. This advice comes from Mark Keese, Head of the Employment Analysis and Policy Division at the OECD, and we catch up with Mark following the OECD's Future of Work Forum in January 2016.

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

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and J.P. Morgan through its Foundation today launched a new project “Adapting to Changing Skills Needs” to fill knowledge gaps in the assessment of skill mismatches and to identify international best practice in addressing them.

Today the OECD is launching a new project with JP Morgan and Chase Foundation to measure and analyse skills needs in a harmonized way across countries. Experts from various countries and fields of discipline are meeting at the OECD to discuss methodological issues involved in developing a cross-country indicator of skill needs. By informing policy, this new data tool will make strides towards addressing skill shortages.

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.

Analysis relying on a new OECD measure of the routine intensity of occupations shows the extent to which countries differ in the share of employment accounted for by routine jobs. It finds that while technological innovation is always associated with higher employment, ICTs correlates positively with employment in all occupations but not in high-routine jobs. Finally, offshoring need not hurt routine-intensive workers.

The OECD LEED Programme launches this "Call for Initiatives" to extract what local authorities and other actors know works, what the new scenario is demanding and how equipped they are to respond. We are interested in learning from the experiences of EU member countries, the wider OECD area as well as other countries.

Sweden should address housing shortages, begin integration activities early, and improve the support for those with low skills to speed up the effective integration of refugees, according to a new OECD report.

Recent fires in Fort McMurray draw attention to a town that has been a prime destination for internal mobility in Canada over the past decades. This post discusses the role that geographical internal mobility can play in improving the matching of skill demand and skill supply in a national labour market, while also noting some of the barriers to labour mobility and potential economic and social costs.

11th edition of Trento Festival of Economics: the arena where economists, political and institutional stakeholders, researchers and journalists from all over the world, will exchange views and investigate the topic “Where growth takes place”.

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.

This study will analyse how selected local areas/industry clusters identify the specific skills needed to support green growth and how related skills policies and practices can be made more effective in supporting their provision and accelerating transition to a low-carbon economy.

A range of OECD analysis has been exploring 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. This post focused on a recent paper on Automation.

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.

The purpose of the seminar is to provide the practical information about how to implement SIBs in Poland using international experiences. The seminar is addressed to the potential applicants interested in the implementation of SIB within the call for proposals planned to be launched by the Ministry of Economic Development.

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.

The European Union should reform its legal labour migration policies to get its fair share of the global talent pool, according to a new report published by the OECD.

A more skilled population ahead: age or cohort effects? Evidence from PIAAC and the differences in policies approach.

A three-year programme of co-operation between the European Commission and LEED on self-employment and entrepreneurship in Europe.

The demand for soft skills is increasing, and recent evidence suggests that the supply does not seem to keep up. The benefits from further development of these skills go beyond better labour market outcomes, as soft skills have been shown to contribute to overall well-being.

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.

This OECD report was developed in collaboration with the United States, Mexico and Canada, for consideration by the three Leaders in the context of the 2016 North American Leaders Summit.

Although Lithuania’s growth has been impressive, inequality is high, the risk of poverty is one of the highest of European countries, and life expectancy is comparatively low and strongly dependent on socio-economic background.

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.

Labour markets are continuing to recover from the crisis and employment is set to return to pre-crisis levels in 2017, but wage growth remains weak, according to a new OECD report.

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.

Despite unprecedented progress over the past century, gender gaps in the labour market persist throughout the world and are especially marked in emerging economies. While the quantity of jobs held by women has increased in many countries, female workers continue to have worse jobs than men.

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.

Despite unprecedented progress over the past century, gender gaps in the labour market persist throughout the emerging world and are accompanied by important skill gaps. Women tend to perform worse in STEM subjects, have lower financial literacy and business knowledge than men. The OECD Employment Outlook 2016 paints an up-to-date picture of gender gaps in 16 emerging economies and outlines a comprehensive set of policy recommendations.

The Netherlands should improve its policies to attract and retain highly skilled migrants in order to address labour shortages and strengthen its position as a knowledge-based economy, according to a new OECD report.

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.

The OECD has just released a new working paper by Thor Berger and Carl Frey which provides a systematic overview of the literature examining the impact of digitalisation on labour markets. The paper highlights some well-known as well as some lesser-known facts about digitalisation, deindustrialisation and the future of work.

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

The Regional School of Public Administration (ReSPA) has devoted its 9th Annual Conference to opening direct channels of discussion on experiences, methodologies and innovative practices in the process of optimization of public administration in the Western Balkans.

OECD unemployment rate stable at 6.3% in September 2016

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

In a majority of OECD countries, GDP growth over the past three decades has been associated with growing income disparities.

Widespread increases in inequality over the past three decades have raised the question of the distribution of the growth dividends.

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.