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This paper discusses the importance of effective training and workforce development programs as part of a broader strategy to increase the competitiveness of American workers. Although rapid technological change and increasing global competition have delivered great economic benefits to the US economy overall, the development of new and more productive industries has caused some Americans to experience significant declines in their earnings and job prospects; the Great Recession exacerbated these longer-term trends. Workers with less education and those who have been displaced from long-tenured jobs face particular challenges, and effective job training programs are an important component of policies to help these workers. The Hamilton Project proposes two general principles that can guide policy-makers in improving training programs to aid American workers: (1) training funds should be directed to programs with a track record of success in improving earnings for the specific target population and to those workers who can benefit the most from those programs; and (2) training programs should directly engage employer and industry partners, or actively guide students to career-specific training.

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This report is concerned with the impact of future changes in employment structures and pay patterns on income inequality and poverty. Using the latest Working Futures projections of employment, together with data from the Family Resources Survey, this report considers the implications for poverty and inequality of a range of possible changes to the structure of employment and pay. The effects of these changes on the distribution of personal and household income are simulated and there is a detailed exploration of the links between the changes in the labour market and their implications for inequality and poverty. The report findings suggest that: relative poverty and inequality are set to rise by 2020 as a result of changes to the structure of employment and future changes in the tax and benefit system; absolute poverty is likely to be affected very little by those changes; and to mitigate increases in poverty and inequality, a very precise and targeted approach to policy, focusing on households in poverty, will be required.

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The Ministerial Taskforce, Education Workforce Initiatives, was developed in response to the progressive decline in the number of teachers available to work in certain areas of the Western Australian education workforce over recent years. This trend is compounded by a corresponding reduction in the numbers of people entering education degree courses and subsequently entering the teaching workforce. These are part of an Australia-wide trend and, while most acute in Western Australia, where employment has reached record highs, they are progressively becoming more evident across Australia. Similarly, vocational education and training is under extreme pressure as the demand for skilled, experienced individuals caused by massive resources growth has made it difficult to retain current staff and attract new lecturers. The Taskforce engaged in a broad and inclusive consultative process which included: careful consideration of appropriate Australian and international literature in the education workforce domain; meeting with expert individuals; commissioning independent market research; calling widely for written submissions from the Western Australian public; and conducting 15 interactive forums across the State. Careful consideration of the data and information produced recommendations in 15 main areas aimed at improving the number and quality of those entering school teaching and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) lecturing, and determining the requirements necessary to keep them in the system and more content with their employment. Chapters include: 1. Remuneration; 2. Career progression; 3. Workplace and housing conditions; 4. Leadership and mentoring; 5. Status of the profession; 6. Attraction and transition into teaching; 7. Workload issues; 8. Practicums; 9. Vocational education and training; 10. Flexible learning; 11. Operational management of education; 12. Workforce planning; 13. Legislation; 14. Equity; 15. The Federal government.

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Job loss during the Great Recession is upending retirement savings plans for many older workers. Fewer than a quarter of workers age 50 and older who lost their jobs between mid-2008 and the end of 2009 found work within 12 months, much lower than the reemployment rate for younger workers. Older displaced workers who find jobs must often accept deep pay cuts. These challenges highlight the need for more training and employment services for those 50 and older.

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The ten chapters presented in this monograph were originally presented at the conference of the Applied Econometrics Association, Maastricht in May, 1997. This publication seeks to contribute to the scientific knowledge base regarding the economic impact of education and training. The emphasis in the contributions is on the returns of education and training. Problems regarding the functioning of the labour market and unemployment are also addressed. This book is organised into three broad parts. The first part, 'Education', contains the following chapters: On returns to education: wandering along the hills of ORU Land / Joop Hartog; A stochastic dynamic programming model of education choices in Sweden / Christian Belzil and Jorgen Hansen; The choice of a discipline at university: risk versus returns / Denis Rochat and Jean-Luc Demeulemeester; The effects of school quality on pupil outcomes: an overview / Peter Dolton and Anna Vignoles; On trickling chimneys and other unemployment misery / Adriaan van Zon, Huub Meijers and Joan Muysken. The second part, 'Training', contains these chapters: Mismatch between occupation and education and the costs and benefits of job-related training / Patrick van Eijs and Hans Heijke; Over/undereducation and specific training in Spain: complementary or substitute components of human capital? / Pilar Beneito, Javier Ferri, Maria Luisa Molto and Ezequiel Uriel; Vocational training and the poaching externality: evidence for France / Laetitia Hocquet; Technological change and skill obsolescence: the case of German apprenticeship training / Doris Blechinger and Friedhelm Pfeiffer. The third part, 'Perspectives', contains one chapter: Technology, globalisation and employment: analytical and policy challenges / Luc Soete.

Selected chapters are indexed from TD/TNC 66.302 to TD/TNC 66.306. Show less

Educational attainment increased markedly in New Zealand between 1986 and 2001, while the income premia for higher qualifications first increased and then stabilised or decreased over the 1990s. We first document the growth in qualification-based skills and then examine its contribution to average income growth and the relationship with relative demand changes. Of the 15 per cent increase in real average incomes between 1986 and 2001, upskilling accounted for 25 per cent, while 70 per cent was due to income growth across all qualifications. The pattern of qualification employment share and relative income changes provides evidence of changing demand for skills within detailed industry-occupation cells.

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In this paper we re-evaluate the returns to education based on the increase in the compulsory schooling age from 14 to 15 in the UK in 1947. We provide a Bayesian fuzzy regression discontinuity approach to infer the effect on earnings for a subset of subjects who turned 14 in a narrow window around the policy change and whose schooling was affected by the policy change. Our approach and our results are quite different from previous work that has focused on large sets of cohorts and [two-stage least squares] 2SLS based approaches and has reported positive earnings and wage effects of five per cent and above. Our empirical analysis, using data from the UK General Household Surveys, yields considerably lower earnings and wage effects for the additional year of compulsory schooling than previous work. These findings are consistent with the implementation of the policy change that affected students at the lower end of the schooling distribution and did not lead students to acquire additional qualifications. The results add further evidence to a number of recent studies that have found no effect from this policy change on socio-economic outcomes correlated with earnings.

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In this paper, I focus on occupation-specific human capital and analyze to what extent firms value and utilize such human capital that is formed through the experience within occupation, using publicly available data. The results can be summarized as follows. First, since the 1990s, the percentage of job changers who stay in the same occupation has increased for those who were formerly specialist and technical workers, or clerical workers, but it has remained almost at the same level for those who were formerly in the other occupations. Second, in the analysis of factors that determine the percentage of job changers who stay in the same occupation, it turns out that job changers formerly in occupations that require a larger accumulation of human capital are more likely to stay in the same occupation, for both male and female workers. Third, a worker's experience within an occupation has a larger effect on wages than his or her age, both for male and female workers, and in the case of females, this occupational experience effect for specialist and technical workers relative to that for other occupational groups has risen in recent years.

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In this paper, the author provides an account of the responses of the ILO journal, International Labour Review, to the economic Depression of the 1930s. The period covered ranges from 1931 to 1938. The author has selected articles that either make explicit reference to the Depression, or deal directly with national and international policies to manage the Depression. The article begins with the general effects of the Depression, so as to provide an idea of the scale and movements of the collapse in demand that debilitated economic activity so thoroughly. The social dimensions of economic crisis are highlighted in a number of articles, and cover topics from migration to housing to nutrition. Finding ways to restore, and secure, prosperity became the ultimate aim of the journal. The main policy proposals were: managing working hours; providing unemployment insurance; managing wages; the provision of public works; and the development of international cooperation, for establishing a coherent monetary policy, as well as for broader purposes. The 1932 International Labour Conference passed a special Resolution on the crisis prioritising the implementation of national public works schemes. This policy is the most extensively covered. Analyses of concurrent governmental efforts to manage the crisis form the empirical basis of the Review's work, and national remedies are reviewed in series: wage management measures, for instance, being considered in turn in New Zealand, Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom, allowing both for comparative studies and a fuller understanding of particular national conditions. Finally, having traced the debates surrounding policy proposals, the author looks at the causal explanations of the Depression.

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Over the last three decades, full-time jobs and permanent jobs have generally become scarcer for youth. In addition, median real hourly wages of young men employed in full-time jobs grew little, if at all, from the early 1980s to the mid-2010s. Along with other pieces of evidence from media reports, these facts have raised concerns that recent youth cohorts now experience less favourable earnings trajectories as they age than previous cohorts did 40 years ago. This study compares the earnings trajectories of several recent cohorts of young workers with those of cohorts who entered the labour market in the late 1970s. The study combines three versions of Statistics Canada's Longitudinal Worker file (LWF) and covers the 1978-to-2015 period.

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