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.

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.

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.

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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.

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. 

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

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

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! 

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.

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

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.

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.

Healthcare must be maintained as an essential public good

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.

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.