The growing awareness that knowledge-based capital (KBC) is driving economic growth is prevalent in today’s global marketplace. KBC includes a broad range of intangible assets, like research, data, software and design skills, which capture or express human ingenuity. The creation and application of knowledge is especially critical to the ability of firms and organisations to develop in a competitive global economy and to create high-wage employment.

Translators are at the forefront of global communications and knowledge. Yet their work has not always been helped by the information revolution. Here are the challenges.

You paint a positive picture of Turkey’s economy in terms of growth of GDP and employment (OECD Observer No 290-91, Q1-Q2 2012). Nevertheless, the interview states that for the future of the Turkish economy, “labour market reform is key, especially to encourage the shifting of resources from the informal to the formal sector: a more flexible labour contract is needed and minimum wage setting should be decentralised”

High female participation in the workforce has a decisive effect on a country’s performance, as Norway shows. 

Two years after Israel joined the OECD, Sharon Kedmi, Director General at the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, is leading a delegation to an important OECD Employment Labour and Social Affairs Committee meeting on 26 October. He spoke with the OECD Observer.

Young, skilled, well-educated, well-travelled and yet jobless: these are the characteristics of the so-called “lost generation”. The challenges young people in Europe face today are many, and vary from region to region and from person to person. Many are facing high levels of unemployment; some need to fight for their basic freedoms; others for their right to build up representative youth structures, or face different types of discrimination. There are plenty of indignados out there! 

Israel’s labour market is a reflection of the country’s complicated demographic patchwork. This brings strengths and weaknesses.

Canada’s labour market was spared some of the more dramatic peaks and troughs of the economic crisis. Why?

The crisis has had a huge impact on jobs and may have changed the labour market forever. John Martin, OECD Director of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, explains the challenges facing policymakers in the years and decades ahead.

Job market: a gender approach.

“Being unemployed is frustrating, demeaning and, at this point, frightening”. Anyone who has any doubt about the devastating effects unemployment can have will learn a lot from statements such as this one, captured in a recent survey undertaken by the John. J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University in the US.

Off to a Good Start? Jobs for Youth says that young people are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as the average worker. This is a waste of resources that today’s economies can ill afford.

Unemployment soared in the crisis, and creating jobs is now a major policy priority. But jobs alone will not be enough. A greater emphasis on skills will be needed for the recovery to last. Investing more in lifelong learning is a good way to secure one's place in the job market and contributes to business competitiveness.

With unemployment soaring, it may come as a surprise to learn that there’s also a shortage of qualified people to fill job vacancies. In fact, companies in Europe have around three million unfilled vacancies, says David Arkless of Manpower Inc.

A country’s education system has the potential to develop innovation skills in young people at an early age (“What a lasting recovery needs”, OECD Observer No 279, May 2010). Comments I’ve read on the topic seem to assume that business thinking starts after leaving school, say, with 16-18 year-olds.

Healthcare must be maintained as an essential public good

A weekly catch from behind the headlines on oecd.org, No 1

Leaders et the OECD; Jobs; Spanish bull; Web sense; Fish

As technology progresses, so do labour market needs. For economies today, maintaining competitiveness means that skills must adapt and keep pace. 

The latest phase of the economic crisis presents a dilemma: many governments judge it necessary to enter a phase of fiscal austerity while unemployment remains intolerably high, a high risk combination. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka calls for a different way forward. 

Among the employment challenges exacerbated by the economic crisis, long-term joblessness and youth unemployment are especially troubling as their effects can linger long after the job market has recovered.
Governments would do well to focus on these problems now.

From housework and homemaking to gardening and local community work, both women and men do so-called “unpaid work” on top of their paid jobs.

Slower activity ahead?; Economy; Soundbites; Roundup; Corruption work praised; iLibrary launched; Israel joins the OECD; Secretary-General reappointed; Plus ça change...

When Chile became the first South American country to join the OECD in 2010, the event was greeted as a seal on years of progress, not to mention hard work. Still, challenges remain, including in the fight against poverty, as Minister of Planning Felipe Kast explains in this interview with the OECD Observer.

Entering the workforce for the first time is a challenge for most people, but can be even more difficult for immigrants. Recent data collected across OECD countries reveals that children of immigrants experience higher unemployment and have more difficulty finding jobs than children of native parents. Even when they are born and raised in their country of residence, the employment rate of children of immigrants can be as much as 20% lower than their counterparts.

In 2007, even before the economic crisis hit, and before employers started shaving working hours to spare jobs, one in four women and almost one in ten men in OECD countries worked part-time. Most of them did so because they wanted to, not because they had to. In the Netherlands, for example, where the share of people working part-time is particularly high at almost 37%, less than 4% of part-timers would rather work full-time.

As the world economy splutters back to life, policymakers have been focused on ending the jobs crisis. But despite the arsenal of policies aimed at assisting young people, the long-term unemployed and the unskilled, one of the most vulnerable groups of workers risks being forgotten.

The crisis has bitten deep, but unemployment in Germany has fallen. How?

Health spending rises; Round up; Soundbites; Benvenuto!; Economy; Food speculation question; Chinese flexibility welcomed; Slovenia joins the OECD; Plus ça change...

Despite signs of recovery, make no mistake: this crisis is far from over. We are in the midst of the most serious jobs crisis since the Great Depression and the economic recovery is still very weak and fragile.

Unemployment has risen sharply during  the recession, and young people have been  particularly hard hit. Even in good times,  unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds  can be two to three times that of adults, but  youth unemployment has increased much  more rapidly during the crisis. In Germany,  which has a successful apprenticeship  programme, young people are now one and  half times more likely to be unemployed  than prime age workers, while in Sweden  their risk is four times greater.

More women go to work today than 40 years ago, but their pay has not kept pace with men’s. Some 58% of women on average in the OECD area worked in 2008, up from 45% in 1970, ranging from 70% of women in the Nordic countries to less than 50% in Greece, Italy, Mexico and Turkey. Indeed, with fewer women staying at home, dual-earner families are now commonplace in most OECD countries; only in Japan, Mexico and Turkey are single-income families more common. However, men are often still the main earners in dual-earner families because so many women work part-time and for lower wages than their husbands. In the Netherlands, a relatively egalitarian country, 60% of women work part time, compared with 16% of men.

Unemployment in the OECD area is predicted to reach some 10% in 2010, up from about 5.6% in 2007. Men have been hit harder than women: across the OECD area, male employment has fallen by 3% since the recession started, while the decline for women stood at a tenth of that, at 0.3%. Hence the “mancession” tag bloggers and commentators have used to characterise the jobs crisis.

Income levels of sons are often influenced by the income levels of their fathers, OECD research shows. The height of each bar on the graph measures the extent to which sons’ earnings levels reflect those of their fathers. The correlation is strongest in the UK, Italy and the US, and much less so in Denmark, Australia and Norway.

Could today's jobs crisis end up scarring the hopes of an entire generation? Even in the best of times, many young people have a hard time getting a foothold in the labour market, with youth unemployment often two to three times higher than for adults. In recessions, finding work gets tougher still. Moreover, many of those young people who have work are on short-term contracts and commonly find themselves first in line when it comes to lay offs-some 35% of workers aged 15-24 in the OECD area held temporary contracts in 2008. In this recession, there is extra cause for concern.

When the OECD was mandated to develop a Green Growth Strategy this June, ministers specifically referred to the "green jobs" that such a strategy would support. But what exactly are "green jobs"?

Jobs crisis or no, it's best to invest in education. As this year's edition of Education at a Glance shows, men and women who have university-level degrees earn far more over the course of a lifetime than those who don't. In fact, men with higher education in Italy and the US can earn over US$300,000 more than their counterparts who do not have a university degree. Rewards tend to be lower for women, with Korea and Spain the exceptions.

In most OECD countries, unemployment protection systems don't provide adequate social security during a severe economic crisis and periods of high and persisting unemployment. Not only that, benefits can even run out within much less than a year and often before unemployed workers can find new jobs. Also, income support in many countries barely ever covers more than half a worker's previous salary, and sometimes much less.

Thanks to prompt and significant government responses to the crisis, many economies are experiencing initial signs of recovery. However, there is still much uncertainty concerning what lies ahead and unemployment is still rising in many countries. The OECD unemployment rate reached a post-war high of 8.5% in July 2009, with an OECD estimated 15 million extra out of work since the start of the crisis. In contrast, unemployment across the OECD was at a 25-year low of 5.6% in 2007.

One of the most widely heard accusations against immigrants is that they take jobs from locals, usually-it's claimed-because they are willing to work for less. How true are such claims, and do immigrants really harm the job prospects of natives?

As G20 leaders and OECD employment ministers turn their focus to solving the unemployment crisis that has gripped the world economy, they should spare more than just a thought for the particular plight of developing countries. Global unemployment has increased sharply, by 39 million workers, to judge by ILO central projections for 2009. But particularly for developing countries, unemployment is just one dimension of the challenge. Developing countries are also characterised by large numbers of informal workers who have no social or legal protection, and extremely low pay. They, their families and the wider communities to which they belong are exposed to all sorts of health and safety risks too.

With the crisis and sharp rise in unemployment, you might think anyone with a job these days should consider themselves lucky. Well, that depends.

Unemployment is rising to unprecedented high levels. There are several good policies governments can deploy to tackle it, but there are risks to avoid too.

"Being unemployed is frustrating, demeaning and, at this point, frightening." Anyone who has any doubt about the devastating effects unemployment can have will learn a lot from statements such as this one, captured in a recent survey undertaken by the John. J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University in the US.

Respond to the needs of the newly unemployed while continuing to engage with people who are disadvantaged within the labour market: this is the major challenge facing employment ministers today.

To be useful in helping countries to move out of the crisis, it is necessary for the OECD to look at its own history as an organisation and draw the right lessons for the future.

The main victims of severe economic downturns tend to be workers and their families, so governments are rightly stepping in to help job losers weather the storm. But while the severity of the unfolding jobs crisis may require extraordinary policy responses, how can governments avoid the wrong ones?

Where there's money, there's also time for relaxing.

Productivity had been plummeting in OECD economies for a few years before the advent of the financial crisis.

In times of crisis, people don't look just to their governments to help them out, they look to each other. Giving money and time to non-profit groups working in health, education, social services and the arts helps others while making those who contribute feel good about themselves.

“The Chinese government rightly advocates firm opposition to trade and investment protectionism, as emphatically stated by Premier Wen Jiabao on several occasions in the past few weeks. As it did a decade ago during the Asian crisis, China has set itself firmly against inward retrenchment in the face of economic downturn. We celebrate this commitment at OECD.

The financial and economic crisis has already put millions of people out of work in the OECD area alone, and the unemployment figures are going to get far worse. What can governments do to ease the suffering? 

The OECD and IMF forecasts for 2009 suggest that for the first time since the 1930s GDP will fall in the industrialised economies that make up the OECD. Yet even these forecasts are based on relatively optimistic assumptions that the financial markets begin to stabilise in the months ahead and that there are not other major “shoes to drop” in terms of negative financial shocks.

The credit crunch could usher in a new paradigm of stewardship for pension fund trustees and the dawn of a more accountable capitalism.

The developing world needs millions of trained health workers immediately just to provide the most basic healthcare, yet doctors are leaving poor countries to go to richer ones.

The effect multinationals have on wages and working conditions can be positive, but there are conditions to bear in mind, not least for policymakers wishing to attract foreign direct investment.

While OECD countries compete to attract high-skilled immigrants, the 2008 International Migration Outlook finds that employers increasingly rely on immigrants for low-skilled work. Just a fifth on average of the low-educated workforce in 21 OECD countries in the report is foreign-born, whereas the EU25 average is 14.1%.

Long ago I gave up trying to break through the so-called “glass ceiling” that has kept women like me out of higher management. Instead I decided to create new enterprises in which management could be reinvented by women. On 8 March 2005, I launched a business incubator devoted exclusively to projects by female entrepreneurs.

Just how significant is international migration in the light of other globalisation developments? One obvious starting point for answering the question is to ask how many of the current world population of 6.7 billion people are international migrants, defined as persons living outside their country of birth.

The gloomy image that has for so long hung over the world’s largest continent may at last be lifting.
Conflict and disease remain a bane, and there are challenges in areas like governance and transport, but as we reported in our last issue (No 255, May 2006), the OECD Development Centre’s latest African Economic Outlook is upbeat about future economic growth there.

Striking a balance between going to work and raising children is not just a concern for families. Getting the balance wrong reduces birth rates, labour supply and gender equity, and can even harm child development. It puts the shape of society in the future in question.

Europeans, particularly women, generally work fewer hours than their US counterparts. How does this difference help explain the transatlantic gap in incomes?

You rightly point out that “the supply of medical staff reflects global movements of labour” (No 262, Databank, July 2007). But many of us might disagree with your upbeat headline: “Healthy immigration”. In a report published in 2005, the Royal African Society argues that while recruitment of African medical professionals has shored up western health services, it has left the health sector in sending countries facing permanent crisis or even complete collapse.

Both the size and the relative incidence or frequency of the foreign-born population have increased in all OECD countries since 1995. So while there have been large increases in traditional migration countries such as the US and New Zealand, there have also been sharp rises in Denmark, Korea, Ireland, Italy, Norway and Spain, where inward migration has recently taken off.

Work and family constraints can lead to too few children and too little employment, affecting quality of life and economic performance. Yet many parents would like to go out to work more, while others would like to spend more time raising their children. What can policymakers do to help parents achieve a better work/family balance? The OECD’s Babies and Bosses series offers some lessons.

There are roughly 45 million disabled people living in Europe, but how do they and elderly people like to get around? They would call a taxi. The combination of the personal service that taxis offer, their wide availability and door-to-door operations enable them to respond particularly well to this population’s special travel needs. Although several countries have made progress in improving the accessibility of taxi services, much remains to be done.

The supply of medical staff also reflects global movements of labour. Indeed, there were some 1.3 million foreign born health professionals–nurses, doctors, pharmacists, dentists, etc.–living in OECD countries in 2000, according to a special report in the latest International Migration Outlook.

Offshoring and Employment: Trends and Impacts.

Remember The Travels of the T-Shirt in the Global Economy? As we reported in these pages, this award-winning book tracked the circuitous making and marketing of a T-shirt, from the cotton fields of Texas and a factory in China to a used-clothes bazaar in Africa (“Global yarn”, in No. 251, September 2005, search www.oecdobserver.org).

City managers are important economic players, handling as they do billion-dollar budgets and thousands of employees. In its second territorial review in a series on competitive cities, the OECD explains that in the last few decades, city managers have recognised that inner city problems could not be resolved by throwing more money at them.

Minimum wages are hotly debated as ways of improving equity and boosting the wages of lower skilled workers. All OECD countries apply some kind of wage floor. Do they achieve their goals?

Balancing globalisation is not just about narrowing the gap between countries as winners and losers, but also how the gains and costs of globalisation are distributed within each country. The trouble is, though migration may increase interaction between ethnic groups, racial inequality still persists in the workplace, as an October 2005 report by the Canadian Labour Congress shows.