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Facing a youth bulge - a large influx of a young labor force - the Pakistani economy needs to create more jobs by taking advantage of this relatively well-educated young labor force. Yet, the educated young labor force suffers a higher unemployment rate, and there is a concern that the current education and training system in the country does not respond to skill demands in the private sector. This paper provides new descriptives about labor markets, particularly skill demand and supply, by using online job portal data. The paper finds that although there is an excess supply of highly educated workers, certain industries, such as information and communications technology, lack workers who have specialized skills and experience. The analysis also finds that the exact match of qualifications and skills is important for employers. Job applicants who are underqualified or overqualified for job posts are less likely to be shortlisted than those whose qualifications exactly match job requirements.

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Technical education and training has been dramatically expanding in Brazil recently. However, there remains no evidence on the cost effectiveness of this alternative track to a more general education. This paper quantifies the wage returns of completing technical and vocational education and training compared with the returns of completing the general education track, for individuals with similar observable characteristics. Exploring data from the Brazilian National Household Sample Survey, the paper profiles the students taking up this track and quantifies the impact of different types of technical and vocational education and training courses on individuals’ hourly wages. After controlling for selection on observables with propensity score matching, the analysis shows positive and statistically significant wage premiums for students completing technical school at the upper secondary level (on average 9.7 per cent) and for those completing short-term training courses (2.2 per cent on average). The paper also documents significant heterogeneity of impacts depending on the courses and the profile of students. For realistic unitary costs of providing technical and vocational education and training, the evidence suggests technical education is a cost-effective modality. The courses offered by the publically financed and privately managed 'Sistema S', together with courses in the manufacturing area have the highest positive impacts.

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Firms that provide on-the-job training do so when it is critical to their productivity - and when productivity is critical to their survival. This paper begins by confirming a significant and positive return from on-the-job training on wages and productivity, as well as the presence of positive externalities from on-the-job training, while discussing the methodological considerations at play. The paper then reviews and validates the presence of market failures such as information asymmetries within the firm as a result of low-quality management practices that dampen firm demand for on-the-job training. Lack of competition in the firm's external environment appears to undermine adoption of on-the-job training and other complementary productivity-enhancing activities within the firm. The literature suggests that for most firms, a comprehensive policy approach that resolves external constraints to becoming more productive is likely to have a positive impact on the provision of on-the-job training and adoption of complementary policies. More direct forms of firm-level support to improve management capabilities could also alleviate under-provision of on-the-job training. Where societies have improved welfare as a goal, public policy measures would be needed to complement on-the-job training for some specific groups of workers (older, less educated, women). In essence, the paper highlights the importance of demand-side constraints for firms, rather than supply-side constraints, for the provision of on-the-job training.

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Most high and middle-income countries showed symptoms of skill-biased technological change in the 1980s. India, a low income country, did not, perhaps because India's traditionally controlled economy may have limited the transfer of technologies from abroad. However the economy underwent a sharp reform and a manufacturing boom in the 1990s, raising the possibility that technology absorption may have accelerated during the past decade. We investigate the hypothesis that skill-biased technological change did in fact arrive in India in the 1990s using panel data disaggregated by industry and state from the Annual Survey of Industry (ASI). These data confirm that while the 1980s were a period of falling skills demand, the 1990s showed generally rising demand for skills, with variation across states. We find that increased output and capital-skill complementarity appear to be the best explanations of skill upgrading in the 1990s. Skill upgrading did not occur in the same set of industries in India as it did in other countries, suggesting that increased demand for skills in Indian manufacturing is not due to the international diffusion of recent vintages of skill-biased technologies.

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The objective of this paper is to study the evolution of the incidence and profile of nonstandard workers in selected countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe and Central Asia in the past two decades. The analysis of the profile of this group of workers focuses on three key characteristics that could approximate their productivity: education level, labor income, and task content (manual/cognitive or routine/nonroutine) performed by the workers in their occupations. While in Latin America most of the countries show a stable prevalence in recent decades, in Europe and Central Asia there is not any common pattern across countries. In contrast, from the point of view of the profile of nonstable employment, there are several common characteristics among these types of workers across countries, such as improved level of education, performance of more intensive nonroutine cognitive tasks, and higher variance of labor income. The findings suggest that nonstandard workers are a heterogeneous group. The increase in the incidence of nonstandard employment and its heterogeneity generates concern about the lower level of insurance against certain risks that workers face. Therefore, a greater understanding of the trends in the prevalence and characteristics of nonstandard workers is needed to design regulation and policies oriented to these types of workers.

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In Kosovo, employers report significant skill shortages, which limits firm growth and job creation. To understand the labor market dynamics and employer needs in real time, this paper analyzes the content of job postings using data from major online job portals from 2018. The findings show that the skills that are most in demand are socioemotional skills (especially related to extraversion), foreign language skills, and computer skills. The importance of these skills is transversal, cutting not only across occupations and industries, but also universally demanded in all education fields. The need for these skills is expressed more often and more explicitly in postings for jobs requiring higher levels of experience. Moreover, job platforms are used almost exclusively for filling high-skill occupations, especially in Kosovo's capital city, Pristina, whereas many low- and medium-skill jobs and jobs outside the capital are filled through informal channels. Overall, online data can be a useful tool for policy makers and other stakeholders to help align career services, training programs, and educational curricula with the skill needs of firms in real time.

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This paper addresses the economic impact of the labor force training program (PAFPA) developed for the informal sector in Cote d'Ivoire. The data contain a subsample of the participants in the agricultural sector, tailoring sector, and the electronics sector and a comparable control group of nonparticipants. The data have been analyzed by use of standard program evaluation tools, namely difference-in-difference estimators, in order to detect potential program impacts. We find positive economic impacts as a result of training received for some groups, namely women, the agricultural and electronics sectors, firms employing 1-3 individuals and firms with 10 or more employees.

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Discussions of high-skilled mobility typically evoke migration patterns from poorer to wealthier countries, which ignore movements to and between developing countries. This paper presents, for the first time, a global overview of human capital mobility through bilateral migration stocks by gender and education in 1990 and 2000, and calculation of nuanced brain drain indicators. Building on newly collated data, the paper uses a novel estimation procedure based on a pseudo-gravity model, then identifies key determinants of international migration, and subsequently uses estimated parameters to impute missing data. Non-OECD destinations account for one-third of skilled migration, while OECD destinations are declining in relative importance.

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Educators believe that they are adequately preparing youth for the labor market while at the same time employers lament the students' lack of skills. A possible source of the mismatch in perceptions is that employers and educators have different understandings of the types of skills valued in the labor market. Using economics and psychology literature to define four skills sets - socio-emotional, higher-order cognitive, basic cognitive, and technical - this paper reviews the literature that quantitatively measures employer skill demand, as reported in a preference survey. A sample of 27 studies reveals remarkable consistency across the world in the skills demanded by employers. While employers value all skill sets, there is a greater demand for socio-emotional skills and higher-order cognitive skills than for basic cognitive or technical skills. These results are robust across region, industry, occupation, and education level. Employers perceive that the greatest skills gaps are in socio-emotional and higher-order cognitive skills.

These findings suggest the need to re-conceptualize the public sector's role in preparing children for a future labor market. Namely, technical training is not equivalent to job training; instead, a broad range of skills, many of which are best taught long before labor market entry, should be included in school curricula from the earliest ages. The skills most demanded by employers - higher-order cognitive skills and socio-emotional skills - are largely learned or refined in adolescence, arguing for a general education well into secondary school until these skills are formed. Finally, the public sector can provide programming and incentives to non-school actors, namely parents and employers, to encourage them to invest in the skills development process.

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Jobs are the number one policy concern of policy makers in many countries. The global financial crisis, rising demographic pressures, high unemployment rates, and concerns over automation all make it seem imperative that policy makers employ increasingly more active labor market policies. This paper critically examines recent evaluations of labor market policies that have provided vocational training, wage subsidies, job search assistance, and assistance moving to argue that many active labor market policies are much less effective than policymakers typically assume.

Many of these evaluations find no significant impacts on either employment or earnings. One reason is that urban labor markets appear to work reasonably well in many cases, with fewer market failures than is often thought. As a result, there is less of a role for many traditional active labor market policies than is common practice. The review then discusses examples of job creation policies that do seem to offer promise, and concludes with lessons for impact evaluation and policy is this area.

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