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More than a quarter of adults in the United Kingdom have low basic skills, which has a negative impact on career prospects, job quality and productivity growth. Furthermore, unlike most other countries, young adults do not have stronger basic skills than the generation approaching retirement. The lack of skills development starts at young ages and continues in secondary education; despite a modest reduction in recent years, the educational attainment gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students remains high. The low participation in lifelong learning of low-skilled individuals puts them at risk of falling behind in meeting the changing skill demands of the dynamic labour market. This paper analyses how job quality and productivity of low-skilled workers can be improved. After assessing challenges faced by the low-skilled worker in the United Kingdom, it first looks at how competencies at the bottom of the skill distribution can be strengthened through education and training. It then looks at ways to make low-skilled workers more productive by reducing skill mismatches and improving labour mobility. Finally, it considers the role of labour market institutions in setting proper incentives for the low-skilled to work and for employers to provide jobs of good quality.

Ongoing reforms to the vocational education and training (VET) system and apprenticeship system should have a positive impact on low-skilled productivity, enabling students to gain the necessary basic skills and for workers to find quality jobs. Improving the targeting of active labour market policies, and ensuring that the ongoing increases in the national living wage are delivered in a sustainable way will also play an important role in improving job quality and reducing the high rate of youth neither employed or in education or training. Policy responses to the rise of non-standard work will also be essential in improving the job quality of the low-skilled.

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Employment is pivotal to strengthening Greece's economic recovery, increasing social welfare and redressing poverty. Jobs are returning, making inroads into high unemployment, but their wages and skill levels are lower than many that were lost during the crisis. Greece's hiring is benefiting from more flexible arrangements. Legislative amendments can maintain this flexibility, ensure wages align with productivity and better protect individuals from labour market risks. Ensuring that workers possess skills that match employers' needs will sustain employment and productivity growth. Improving the education system is a long-term mission and involves raising its pedagogical strength and orientation towards professional needs. A social welfare system dominated by pensions has not been able to prevent a steep hike in poverty among children and the young, risking long-term harm to well-being. Pursuing recent steps towards a better targeted social protection, accompanied by support programmes for jobseekers, will provide a reliable safety net and reduce poverty.

This paper presents priority actions to achieve the complementary objectives of: (1) supporting household incomes through more jobs, as the best means of addressing poverty and improving inclusiveness; (2) ensuring that labour market arrangements for determining work conditions support social dialogue and sustainably improve employment and incomes; (3) quality education that provides individuals with the skills required to realise their potential and to raise their employability, productivity and wages; and (4) protecting households and especially children from income shocks and the risk of poverty through a comprehensive social safety net, combined with effective active labour market programmes.

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This paper reviews policies to strengthen Germany's productivity growth and prepare for changes in labour markets brought about by new technologies. This paper also discusses how social protection and the bargaining framework should be reformed for the future of work. Germany enjoys a relatively high labour productivity level but productivity growth has been modest in recent years. There is room to boost productivity growth by accelerating the diffusion of new technologies throughout the economy. Vigorous entrepreneurship and innovation by small and medium enterprises are key for such technology diffusion while strong broadband and mobile networks widen the scope of data-intensive technologies that can be exploited to increase productivity. Widespread use of new technologies will bring about significant changes in skill demand and work arrangements. As in many countries, Germany saw a decline in the share of middle-skilled jobs in employment. A relatively high share of jobs is expected to be automated or undergo significant changes in task contents as a result of technological change. New technologies are also likely to increase individuals engaging in new forms of work, such as gig work intermediated by digital platforms. Such workers are less covered by public social safety nets such as unemployment insurance than regular employment.

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Using cross-country time series panel regressions for the last two decades, this paper seeks to identify the main policy and institutional factors that explain the share of self-employment across European countries. It looks at the aggregate share of self-employed as well as its breakdown by age, skill and gender. The generosity of unemployment benefits, and to a lesser extent, spending on active labour market policies appear to be robust determinants of the long-term share of self-employed in European countries. No significant relation is found between the stringency of employment protection and aggregate self-employment. However, there are significant, and oppositely signed, impacts on high- and low-skilled self-employed separately. Both the tax wedge and the minimum wage appear to be positively related to the share of self-employed in the long term, but the relation holds for some categories of workers only.

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The Dutch labour market has recovered and the unemployment rate has been converging towards pre-crisis levels. Non-standard forms of work have expanded with a strong trend towards self-employment and an increased reliance on temporary contracts. These developments may reflect a preference of some individuals for a more flexible working relationship, but they could also lower job security and job quality for others. Policies need to protect vulnerable groups in the more dynamic working environment without creating barriers to labour mobility and flexibility of the overall labour market. To improve the fairness of the tax system, policies should ensure a more level playing field between workers on different types of contracts. Regulatory policies should aim at raising labour market mobility to improve the matching of skills to jobs by easing the protection on permanent employment contracts and through a more targeted approach to activation policies for disadvantaged groups. Finally, measures should improve the skills of individuals in vulnerable groups to enhance their opportunities to find better jobs.

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