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Dieser Bericht erörtert die Frage der Situation der Arbeitskräfte des mittleren Qualifika-tionssegments und ihrer Entwicklung. Unter dem Einfluss von Megatrends wie Automa-tisierung, Bevölkerungsalterung und Outsourcing sinkt der Anteil der Arbeitsplätze, in denen diese Arbeitskräfte in der Vergangenheit beschäftigt waren und durch die sie klar in der Mitte der Lohnverteilung angesiedelt waren. Diese Abnahme des Anteils der Arbeits-plätze mit mittleren Qualifikationsanforderungen ist Teil einer Entwicklung, die als „Polarisierung der Beschäftigung“ bezeichnet wird und von Ökonomen für die Mehrzahl der Arbeitsmärkte im OECD-Raum beobachtet wurde. Wenig untersucht wurde bislang die Frage, was mit den betreffenden Arbeitskräften geschieht. Dieser Bericht befasst sich daher mit der Situation der Arbeitskräfte, die früher im mittleren Qualifikationssegment tätig gewesen wären. Dazu werden zunächst die Merkmale der Arbeitskräfte betrachtet, die in der Vergangenheit Tätigkeiten mit mittleren Qualifikationsanforderungen ausübten, um so das Profil der „typischen“ Arbeitskraft des mittleren Qualifikationssegments zu zeichnen. Ausgehend davon wird dann erörtert, welche Art von Tätigkeiten Arbeitskräfte mit diesem Profil heute aufnehmen und mit welcher Wahrscheinlichkeit sie überhaupt einer Beschäftigung nachgehen. Anschließend werden verschiedene Messgrößen der Beschäf-tigungsstabilität und der Entlohnung analysiert, um daraus abzuleiten, was die Beschäf-tigungsabnahme im mittleren Qualifikationssegment für die Arbeitsmarktaussichten bedeutet.

This report asks what is happening to middle-skill workers. Driven by mega trends such as automation, ageing and offshoring, the share of jobs whose wages placed them firmly in the middle of the wage distribution has been declining. Termed job polarisation, economists have observed the decline in the share of middle-skill jobs in the majority of OECD labour markets. One little explored question is where are these workers going? This report examines what workers are doing who in the past would have been employed in middle-skill jobs. The report first examines the traits of previous middle-skill workers to build a picture of the “typical” middle-skill worker. Using this profile, the report next examines what types of jobs a worker with the typical middle-skill profile is taking, and how likely such a worker is to be working. The study then analyses different metrics of job stability and compensation to put in perspective what shifts out of middle-skill work imply for labour market outcomes.

This paper aims to study the distribution of fiscal power between the legislature and the executive in each of the 70 countries analysed - by comparing Legislative Budget Institutions of 70 countries. This paper also provide practical insights for developing financial strategies that would ensure an appropriate distribution of fiscal authority between the legislature and the executive.

Vocational education and training can play a central role in preparing young people for work and responding to the labour market needs of the economy. While often neglected in the past, an increasing number of countries are recognising that high-quality vocational education and training can make a major contribution to economic competitiveness. In an unpredictable future where jobs will either disappear or transform, vocational education and training, together with work-based learning, can respond to this challenge by offering an excellent opportunity to nurture the skills employers require.

The Sustainable Development Agenda is a universal and ambitious agenda that challenges every single country in the world to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 – and this is why it matters for OECD countries. In this context, Sustainable Development Goal 4 sheds light on education policy issues which were not traditionally included in the international development agenda and which remain highly relevant for OECD member and partner countries. In particular, Sustainable Development Goal 4 stresses the importance of providing equitable access to education and lifelong learning opportunities that lead to effective learning outcomes. It also emphasises the need to adapt the content of education to include relevant topics such as human rights and gender equality. The challenge, however, remains to collect quality and comparable data to monitor the wide range of Sustainable Development Goal 4 indicators. With the 2030 deadline in view, OECD countries can play an important role in pushing strongly for the collection of more and better quality data and developing the methodologies to assess education systems in OECD countries and beyond.

When new PISA data are published, many researchers around the world analyse them with the aim of shedding light on all sorts of questions. One question in search of an answer: why are women under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professions? Using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary examined the nature of the gender gap in STEM fields. The authors analysed data from 67 countries and economies participating in the 2015 cycle of PISA; these data were supplemented by country-level indicators on gender equality (the Global Gender Equality Index) and the proportion of women graduating in a STEM field. Their analysis yielded an interesting result.

The rapid integration of emerging market economies (EMEs) into world trade over the past three decades has raised widespread concerns about the effects this is having on trade-exposed sectors in advanced OECD countries. An analysis of international trade patterns of over 4000 products between 1995 and 2015 shows that the export product overlap between advanced OECD economies and EMEs has been increasing. However, the product overlap between advanced countries is still higher and increasing faster, suggesting that competitive pressures in export product markets on advanced economies is mainly coming from other OECD members. Regression analysis corroborates this finding, supporting the idea that competition from EMEs remains relatively moderate. Regression analysis show that a move to specialise in a product by the United States exerts about twice as much competitive pressure as a similar decision in China. However, competition effects on average are small compared to changes in world demand as drivers of country competitiveness at the individual product level. The negative effect of a one standard deviation decrease in world demand for a product exerts 8 times more pressure than a one standard deviation increase in specialisation of the United States for that product. In short, specialising in what the world wants to buy remains the key for export performance.

Although access to formal education has improved internationally for children with disabilities, concerns remain about education quality for this student population. Using data on 121 173 teachers from 38 countries in the 2013 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), this study examined the qualifications and professional development (PD) needs of teachers who work with children with special needs. The results indicate that teachers responsible for students with special needs had, on average, lower qualifications, worked in itinerant positions more frequently and expressed greater professional development need than colleagues who did not teach students with special needs. The need for professional development among teachers who taught special needs students was lowest in schools with greater instructional leadership. Additionally, only a small percentage of teachers reported that their professional development had a positive impact on their instruction. The paper discusses policy implications for teacher recruitment and designing professional development.

Written communication has been thousands of years in the making, but in recent decades the way we write, the skills we use and the role writing plays in the world have all changed. This has important implications for education and skills.

This paper exploits a new database that is unique in its scale and scope containing detailed information on over two million projects carried out by one million firms that benefited from the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund and the Cohesion Fund in 25 EU member countries during the multi-annual financial framework 2007-2013. This database is used to get a better understanding of the characteristics of the beneficiaries of European funds and to assess the impact of the European funds on the beneficiaries’ performance in terms of employment growth, growth in fixed assets, and total factor productivity.
While the data reveals substantial heterogeneity of beneficiaries and projects across and within countries, in terms of the number of projects, their total values, the average firm size and other aspects, some patterns are identified. The majority of co-funding goes to manufacturing firms as well as public institutions. The Cohesion Fund co-finances larger projects, carried out by larger, more capital-intensive firms that typically conduct large-scale infrastructure projects. In contrast, the European Social Fund co-finances smaller projects related to human capital and initiatives on the labour market. In terms of volume, the European Regional and Development Fund has the largest budget in total and co-finances a large variety of projects.
Using propensity score matching techniques, we find mixed effects of structural and cohesion funds on the performance of a sample of manufacturing firms in six European countries. On average, firms that receive financial assistance hire more workers and increase their capital stock more. However, there is little evidence of additional positive total factor productivity effects for the beneficiaries.

The OECD Better Life Index is an interactive composite index that aggregates average measures of country’s well-being outcomes through weights defined by users. This paper studies these weights by analysing the responses given by close to 130 000 users since 2011 to date. The paper has three goals. First, to investigate the factors shaping users’ preferences over a set of 11 well-being dimensions. Second, to provide insights into users’ preferences for a large group of countries which differ in terms of culture and living conditions. Third, to test for the effects of users’ satisfaction with respect to a given well-being dimension on the weight they attach to it, across different population groups. Various empirical models are used to identify responses’ patterns and see whether they can be accounted for by respondents’ characteristics and their perceived well-being. The paper finds that health status, education and life satisfaction are the aspects that matter the most for BLI users in OECD countries. Men assign more importance to income than women, while women value community and work-life balance more than men. Health, safety, housing and civic engagement become more important with age, while life satisfaction, work-life balance, jobs, income and community are particularly important for youth. There are also clear regional patterns in the choices by BLI users; for instance education, jobs and civic engagement are particularly important in South America while personal safety and work-life balance matter a lot in Asia-Pacific. Analysis carried out on a subset of observations (i.e. BLI-users who completed an extended questionnaire) finds that, for several well-being dimensions (i.e. jobs, housing, community, health, education, civic engagement, personal safety, life satisfaction and work-life balance), there is a positive and linear relationship between individual preferences and self-reported satisfaction in the same dimension, with evidence of distinctly different patterns of association within the population in the case of income and education.

Career and education decisions are amongst the most important young people make. Gender, ethnicity and socio-economic factors all strongly affect these choices. Career guidance is both an individual and a social good: it helps individuals to progress in their learning and work, but it also helps the effective functioning of the labour and learning markets, and contributes to a range of social policy goals, including social mobility and equity. This justifies the public investment in career guidance activities. Empirical evidence point towards career guidance services – in school and outside – having a formative influence on young people’s understanding of themselves and the world of work, and can often improve educational, social and economic outcomes. As young people stay in education and training longer and as the labour market becomes more complex, the case for career guidance grows. But what makes for effective provision? This paper looks at the features of good career guidance practice, including the need for schools to begin early and the essential role of exposure to the world of work.