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The real responsibility for coping with change will be increasingly shifted from Government to the individual, and it will become increasingly important to reorganise educational, labour market and social insurance institutions to facilitate this change. This is the reality of the currently very serious labour market situation in Europe, facing the prospect of jobless growth or the possibilities that investments will go elsewhere, to places offering a potentially more competent, flexible and less expensive labour force. The reform necessary to put the stagnating mature industrial economies back on a growth path thus has to incorporate, as a key feature, new institutions allowing individuals to take significantly increased economic responsibility for their own economic future and welfare, and to remove the same responsibilities from government, i.e. shifting a significant part of the financing of education, retraining, labour market insurance and social insurance from taxes to mandatory charges on the individual.