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This address to a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) event discusses spare capacity in the labour market from four perspectives: (1) the rates of unemployment and underemployment; (2) the flexibility of labour supply; (3) the effectiveness with which people are matched with job vacancies; and (4) trends in wages growth. The speech finishes with some comments on monetary policy.

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'Key indicators of the labour market' (KILM) provides 20 labour market indicators: Labour force participation rate; Employment-to-population ratio; Status in employment; Employment by sector; Part-time employment; Hours or work; Employment in the informal economy; Unemployment; Youth unemployment; Long-term unemployment; Unemployment by educational attainment; Time-related underemployment; Inactivity rate; Educational attainment and illiteracy; Manufacturing wages indices; Occupational wage and earning indices; Hourly compensation costs; Labour productivity and unit labour costs; Employment elasticities; Poverty. Show less

The Australian Fair Pay Commission (Commission) is an independent body responsible for adjusting federal minimum and classification wages to promote the economic prosperity of the people of Australia. The Commission undertakes ongoing research and consultation programs to ensure its wage-setting decisions take into account economic and social circumstances of low-paid Australians and their employers. The information gathered through stakeholder meetings and site visits has been supplemented by a program of targeted focus group consultations and a series of interactive online discussion forums. The Commission engaged TNS Social Research to conduct the focus groups and online discussion forums. The purpose of the consultations is to explore the views of a broad cross-section of the Australian community in relation to minimum wages. This knowledge is used by the Commission during its minimum wage review. It also assists the Commission to monitor the impacts of its wage-setting decisions on the general population. The timing of the consultations, being prior to the July 2008 Minimum Wage Decision, allows this report to inform the 2008 Minimum Wage Review. This report presents the findings from the focus groups and online discussion forums.

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This analysis presents the public costs of high school dropouts in Oregon. It examines how dropouts in the state dramatically impact state finances through reduced tax revenues, increased Medicaid costs, and high incarceration rates. This study describes how much high school dropouts cost Oregon's taxpayers each year, and how much could be saved by increasing the state's graduation rate. The educational attainment gap in Oregon, though seemingly small relative to other states, is still troubling. While 89 per cent of white students earn high school diplomas, only 79 per cent of African American students graduate. More concretely, African American students are twice as likely to drop out as white students. A single cohort (e.g. class year) of dropouts costs Oregon hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Key findings include: over five per cent of high school seniors did not complete high school during the 2007-08 school year. On average, working-age dropouts in Oregon earn USD10,000 less each year than those who graduate from high school, reducing the overall earnings of the state significantly each year. At 9.2 per cent, the unemployment rate (prior to the recent economic downturn) of high school dropouts in Oregon is more than twice the rate of those who have graduated from high school. Approximately USD173 million in tax revenues is lost each year due to the decreased earnings of high school dropouts.

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This study investigates the impact of [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 on the labour market disparities between Pasifika and New Zealand European (NZ European). To analyse these disparities, we assess labour market outcomes for the pre-pandemic period (January 2017-December 2019, inclusive) and quantify how they changed during the COVID-19 period (March 2020-June 2021, inclusive). We are interested in understanding whether COVID-19 amplified ethnic disparities in job accession and benefit dependence; job and wage mobility; and job separation. The empirical research utilises the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), a population-wide research database by Stats NZ. Our population of interest is from the 2018 Census and linked with wage data from Inland Revenue. Supplementary information from various databases, including Benefit Dynamics data from the Ministry of Social Development, was added.

Large ethnic disparities across multiple dimensions (e.g., qualification, benefit dependency) already existed before the pandemic. To determine the impact of the pandemic that is not caused by structural differences between the two ethnicities, we use econometric models to filter out differences in observable characteristics. For this reason, we apply gender-specific regressions and control for individual-level and employment-related characteristics to estimate ethnic differences in labour market dynamics.

The key findings are as follows: (1) there are significant pre-pandemic ethnic disparities between NZ European and Pasifika in the labour market, and these are primarily observable in job-entry wages following a period of non-employment (commonly known and thereby referred to as wage scarring for the remainder of the report) and wage progression of the employed; (2) the pandemic amplified ethnic disparities for some sub-populations - of note was the impact on the following Pasifika sub-populations: women; those below age 30; and Auckland residents; and we also find greater estimated ethnic labour market disparities in 2021 relative to 2020; (3) the COVID-19 period substantially impacted young Pasifika living in Auckland for 2021 by exacerbating the wage scarring effect and increasing benefit dependency; (4) the industries hit the hardest during COVID-19 (in terms of lower wage growth) positively correlate with where Pasifika are more prevalent in the workforce, and this is manufacturing and construction for Pasifika men, and manufacturing and healthcare and social assistance for Pasifika women; and (5) there was a sizable impact on both wage scarring and wage progression across all workers at firms that received a COVID wage subsidy versus not.

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This paper explores the short- and long-term effects on wages of absence from work for young highly attached skilled male and female workers in West Germany. The analysis distinguishes different types of career absence: unemployment, maternity leave for female workers, compulsory service for male workers and other non-work spells. We find negative effects for all types of work absence, except for compulsory service for men. Compulsory service has a positive short-term wage effect. Unemployment decreases wages in the short term only, and for women more strongly than for men. Maternity leave leads to substantial losses for women. An important finding of this study is that maternity leave leads to substantially higher wage losses than other types of work absence, especially in the long term.

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This paper studies the role of training vouchers and caseworkers in public training programs. Using a rich administrative data set, we apply matching and regression methods to measure the effect of the Hartz reform in Germany, which introduced training vouchers and imposed more selective criteria on participants. Besides estimating the overall reform effect, we isolate the effect induced by changes in the composition of program participants due to stricter selection by the caseworkers (selection effect) from the effect based on the introduction of vouchers (voucher effect). Analyzing the most important type of training in Germany, we find a slightly positive impact of the reform. Our decomposition results suggest that the selection effect is - if at all - slightly negative, and that the voucher effect increased both the employment probability and earnings of the participants.

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In this paper, the potential earnings losses experienced by this year's class of high school and postsecondary graduates as a result of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) are simulated. These graduates may face very challenging conditions as they enter the labour market, which could have long-term ramifications for their earnings prospects. Consequently, earnings losses are simulated up to five years after graduation, based on various scenarios of this year's youth unemployment rate.

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Employment generating public works (EGPW) are an important part of [Government of Timor Leste's] GoTL's strategy to reduce unemployment, underemployment and poverty and contribute to social stability. The term EGPW is used in this report as a generic term to encompass labour intensive (LI) and labour based (LB) approaches. The distinction between these approaches is made below. [Secretaria de Estado ba Formasaun Profisional no Empregu = Secretariat of State for Vocational Training and Employment] SEFOPE is being supported by a number of international agencies to develop and implement EGPW programmes. Other government ministries and agencies and [non-governmental organisations] NGOs offering different wage rates are also engaged in such programmes and projects.

In setting wage rates for such programmes, it is necessary to take account of: (a) the nature of benefits they offer (e.g. the balance between employment creation and effective use of labour); (b) the beneficiaries to be targeted; and (c) any adverse impacts on other economic activities. The purposes of this assignment are: (a) to make recommendations on appropriate wage rates for unskilled casual employment on public works programmes; and (b) make a broad assessment of the labour supply response to the employment opportunities created by employment intensive programmes. The latter would help in gauging the scale of such activities required.

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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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