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Sections » Society » Labour
  • Making labour markets inclusive

    In this time of chronic unemployment, it is all too easy to lose sight of the single greatest trend underlying the long-term labour market: the demographic time bomb in the developed world. Indeed, the defining employment challenge of the future will be not the surplus, but the shortage, of appropriate labour. 

    More...

  • ©Reuters/Andrea Comas

    Spain’s youth unemployment lessons

    Few countries have suffered the scourge of high youth unemployment as much as Spain has. There, the unemployment rate for under 25-year-olds exceeded 50% in 2012, nearly three times the OECD average. However, the crisis has not been the only cause of this; in fact, high rates of youth unemployment are not a recent phenomenon in Spain.

    (345 words)
  • ©Blend images/Alamy

    Can youth entrepreneurship work?

    Larry Page and Sergey Brin were young doctoral students when they created the company we now know as Google. Virgin’s Richard Branson started out in business as a teenager selling records. These big names are just part of a long list of young entrepreneurs that made it in business, a list that could include the founders of Facebook, e-Bay, France’s Free telecom and more.

    (633 words)
  • ©Guri Dahl/Scanpix–Office of the Prime Minister

    Meeting our challenges

    How can we increase employment and strengthen social cohesion? The prime minister of Norway argues that we need urgent action to ensure that an entire generation of young people remains connected to the labour market. We must also address the issue of income distribution to protect the vulnerable and guarantee greater equality of opportunity across our societies.

    More... 

    (60 words)
  • ©Vanderlei Almeida/AFP

    Growth is not enough

    Brazil’s labour leaders have long argued against pursuing economic growth for its own sake. What matters most, they believe, is not the size of the economic pie but how it’s carved up. In recent years, calls for social justice have increasingly informed policy in Brazil, bringing about a veritable “revolution” in the economy.

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  • ©Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP

    Give youth a chance

    Young people are being excluded from economic life by a combination of joblessness and barriers to the creation of start-ups. Unleashing the energy, entrepreneurial spirit and technological genius of the young is not just a moral imperative, but an economic necessity.

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  • Action for youth

    The current crisis has continued to affect people’s lives across the world, and nowhere is this more evident than in the deteriorating labour market in many countries. Young people have been hit particularly hard and risk being permanently scarred from joblessness and even exclusion.

    (856 words)
  • Education for all

    Young people from poorer families are badly underrepresented in higher education. That risks exposing them to a lifetime of reduced earnings and undermines the foundations of wider economic growth. What can be done? Economically disadvantaged students benefit from a mix of grants and loans in third-level education, but they also need better support from the earliest years of their school careers.

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  • ©Reuters/Jason Lee

    Asia’s Challenges

    The forces driving Asia’s rapid growth–new technology, globalisation, and market-oriented reform–are also fuelling rising inequality. Some income divergence is inevitable in times of fast economic development, but that shouldn’t make for complacency, especially in the face of rising inequality in people’s opportunities to develop their human capital and income-earning capacity.

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  • ©DR

    The new performance frontier

    By helping emphasise the importance of a “better life” as a key component of societal progress, the OECD has made considerable efforts in recent years to help promote a school of thought that places people’s well-being at the heart of economic growth. After examining the issue of growth and productivity gains, and recognising the question of the environmental cost of our economic activity, the time has come to turn our attention to another area that is equally crucial: fostering a more human economy.

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  • ©OCDE

    Knowledge is growth

    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.

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  • The changing art of language

    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.

    (1103 words)
  • Readers' views: Labour advice

    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”

    (319 words)
  • ©Rune Kongsro

    Women in work: The Norwegian experience

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

    (966 words)
  • The Friday fish

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

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

    (491 words)
  • ©Govt. of Israel

    Israel reports progress

    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.

    (1661 words)
  • ©Reuters/Albert Gea

    Europe: Investing in youth

    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! 

    (835 words)
  • Charles Fadel

    Charles Fadel ©OECD

    Skills for innovation

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

    (935 words)
  • R.Trumka

    R.Trumka ©OECD

    Occupational risk: the global jobs emergency

    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. 

    (849 words)
  • Bo Smith

    Bo Smith

    Help wanted

    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.

    (1086 words)
  • Unfinished business: Investing in youth employment


    (1386 words)
  • Unemployment still high

    (278 words)
  • ©Ronen Engel/Israel Sun

    Immigration and employment: A complex challenge

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

    (1620 words)
  • Click to enlarge

    Addressing non-paid work

    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.

    (223 words)
  • A labour market with few wrinkles

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

    (790 words)
  • Working for the recovery

    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.

    (1228 words)
  • Mancession?

    Job market: a gender approach.

    (233 words)
  • ©Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

    Out of work: A portrait

    “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.

    (543 words)
  • Looking after the future

    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.

    (590 words)
  • Boosting jobs and skills

    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.

    (797 words)
  • Don’t forget, employees make healthcare work

    Healthcare must be maintained as an essential public good

    (498 words)
  • BBC-OECD skills Debate

    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.

    (237 words)
  • Skilling up

    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.

    (272 words)
  • Click for bigger graph

    Racial gap?

    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.

    (204 words)
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NOTE: All signed articles in the OECD Observer express the opinions of the authors
and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the OECD or its member countries.

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