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The recent and currently fragile economic recovery has not yet been able to create new jobs and the social situation in the [European Union] EU shows little signs of improvement so far. The improved outcomes in the EU labour markets are still at best modest. Employment showed the first signs of stabilising in 2013, with a 0.1 per cent growth in the second half of the year. This analysis also points to an expected increase in poverty levels and a slight improvement in the impact of social protection expenditure in 2013, even if its support effect remains very weak. The situation for households remains serious. The income that households have at their disposal is lagging behind the growth of gross domestic product. It provides also empirical evidence that the crisis at its height had the strongest adverse impact on labour market transitions of men and young people.

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Germany's labor market responded only mildly to the Great Recession. Important factors for this development include the strong economic position due to recent labor market reforms, the crisis affecting mainly export-oriented companies, the extension of short-time work, time buffers due to working time accounts, the behavior of social partners, and automatic stabilizers. We emphasize the important interaction between short-time work and long-term shortages of skilled workers in sectors particularly affected by the crisis. Although Germany's experience is in stark contrast to the United States, we identify and discuss common challenges at the center of the future jobs debate.

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In the wake of the vote to leave the European Union it seems likely that the UK will adopt a new immigration regime, moving away from the current free movement of people within the EU and possibly extending the current points-based-system that applies to those outside the European Union. Given the government's promise to bring net migration down it is fair to assume that the new regime will place greater restrictions on immigration. The numbers of migrants entering the country grew significantly over the last decade. As this coincided with stagnant and then falling earnings it is fair to assess how far migration contributed to this. This note finds that while it is wrong to say that migration had no effect in reducing earnings, specifically for those in low-paying occupations, the effects are small and reducing migration will not reverse the earnings squeeze.

However, reduced migration will throw up a number of significant new challenges for the labour market. In the short-term the government will need to ensure that the right to work of existing migrants is guaranteed to avoid serious harm being done to some sectors heavily reliant on such labour. In the medium-term its much heralded new industrial strategy will need to focus on helping these industries adjust to lower migrant availability, for example by investing in labour saving technology. Finally, with a likely rise in temporary workers and a greater risk of illegal migration the government will need to rethink the UK's current light touch approach to labour market enforcement.

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Theoretical arguments and previous country-level evidence indicate that immigrants are more fluid than natives in responding to changing labor shortages across countries, skill-groups or industries. The diversity across [European Union] EU member states enables [the authors] to test this hypothesis across various institutional, economic and policy contexts. Drawing on the [European Union Labour Force Survey] EU LFS and [European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions] EU SILC datasets [the authors] study the relationship between residual wage premia as a measure of labor shortages in different skill-industry-country cells and the shares of migrants and natives working in these cells. [The authors] find that immigrants' responsiveness to labor market shortages exceeds that of natives in the [European Union 15] EU15, in particular in member states with higher unemployment rates, higher levels of (recent) immigration, and more open immigration and integration policies; but also those with barriers to citizenship acquisition or family reunification. Whereas higher welfare expenditures seem to exert a lock-in effect, a comparison across different types of welfare states indicates that institutional complementarities neutralize that effect.

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The effects of the 2009 economic downturn in Australia, followed by a comparatively rapid recovery, have seen a surprising growth in the number of older workers in employment. If this increase in older workers is the harbinger of permanent change in the labour market, it can only come about if employers modify their traditionally negative attitude towards mature employees. In the first comprehensive overview of the literature and case studies, this paper explores employers’ attitudes towards older workers and finds that most of the stereotypical myths are readily overcome in the current labour market. If a labour shortage drives employers to offer more flexible working conditions as first seen in the Global Financial crisis, they will be taken up by the largest working cohort - the baby boomers - and the problem could be largely averted.

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Clustering theory assumes that companies gravitate towards each other on the basis of locally and regionally specific resources and supply chain characteristics, which lead in turn to innovation and high-value economic development. In line with such thinking, UK government policy has devolved certain functions to regional development agencies such as the encouragement of linkages and systems to facilitate knowledge transfer and address skills needs within regional clusters. Within this broad context, the research reported here focused on the analysis and development of an action plan for the development of marine and maritime sector skills within the South West region, which led to the establishment of a new institutional framework of three sub-regional centres of excellence based on industry and training collaboration to provide demand-led vocational training. The overall issue here is how sector skills shortages can be tackled by strategic intervention at a regional level and collaboration between stakeholders at a sub-regional level.

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The transition economies of Eastern Europe, Central and East Asia face major challenges as they seek to compete within an increasingly globalised economy. For many of them, tourism is seen as providing one of the key areas of economic opportunity. This is certainly true of the three Asian countries considered in this paper, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Uzbekistan. Within any economy seeking to operate competitively in the international tourism marketplace, the appropriate human resources, especially the skills, to deliver products and services of appropriate quality, are essential.

This paper reports a labour market and skills study of the three Asian countries, based on two surveys of the accommodation and wider tourism sub-sectors. It identifies the key structural features of these tourism labour markets and addresses current and predicted skills shortages with respect to each of them. The paper draws conclusions with respect to the key issues facing tourism in the three countries, specifically in terms of their labour markets and skills requirements.

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Based on existing studies of disasters, one can see that human capital and being on the path to growth are the two keys to recovery of the disaster-afflicted areas. If human capital outflows due to the nuclear power plant accident are also taken into account, the damage to human capital in Fukushima Prefecture has been immense, and given that the underlying trend of they economy was somewhat stagnant even before the disaster, one would expect that it will take longer to achieve recovery there than in the other two prefectures, and that it will be difficult to regain its previous population and scale of employment. On the other hand, the scale of the damage to human capital in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures was about the same scale as that seen in Kobe as a result of the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake. It is anticipated that the post-disaster reconstruction of Miyagi Prefecture, which was on the path to growth to some extent before the disaster, will progress rather more smoothly than it will in Iwate Prefecture, where the pre-disaster economy was somewhat stagnant. In fact, if one looks solely at trends in employment, the economic climate and population, one can see that the path to recovery from the aftermath of this disaster through to the present day has followed a path that runs broadly in line with projects.

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This report provides a comprehensive picture of the current state of the tourism labour force and associated skills demand and shortages forward to 2020. The report is based on two related exercises: (1) a survey of tourism businesses to provide a snapshot of current conditions in the tourism labour market. The focus of the survey was on the extent of recruitment, retention and skills deficiencies experienced by businesses; and (2) modelling that projects the shortages of labour out to 2020 based on forecast visitor numbers and training completions. These two exercises build on the 2011 Australian tourism labour force report [indexed in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 108.1482] which contained a survey of the sector at that point and projected shortages out to 2015. The approach and methodology employed in this update are consistent with the 2011 analysis and the findings are therefore comparable. Findings from this research provide policymakers and the industry with detailed, localised information on where deficiencies currently exist, where they are likely to materialise in the future and their origins and impacts.

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There is a looming labour market shortfall in Canada as the aging population advances towards retirement, signifying a decline in the proportion of population in the prime working years (15 to 64). At the same time labour market requirements are also changing. With the emergence of a knowledge economy, the proportion of labour force requiring some form of education or training beyond high school will increase dramatically. The likelihood is there will be large numbers of unskilled workers looking for jobs that require skills they do not possess, and a large number of jobs that will go unfilled. This report discusses the intersection of these two mega-trends and strategic, pro-active policies that could be adopted to encourage a better outcome.

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