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The term “university” has a longstanding history, yet its definition remains highly contentious at the turn of the century. According to conventional scholarship, the first university initially appeared as far back as the 12th century with the formation of the University of Paris and the University of Bologna (circa 1150 AD). Other scholars, however, contend that the university may have begun many centuries earlier, depending on the definition employed (Neave, 1999; Welch and Denman, 1997; Patterson, 1997). The intent of this article is to suggest a classification of universities for the 21st Century, with emphasis placed on the university's role in disseminating and advancing knowledge through scholarship and research. Drawing upon major historic events that have shaped universities in their various forms, this article discusses whether universities are designed to cater to market forces or are catalysts for change in an increasingly “knowledge-based” society.

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 article examines recent micro-evidence on the productivity of Indian firms, helping to explain why India’s manufacturing sector has not performed as well as many observers expected. A series of structural distortions are documented, all of which may depress the performance of manufacturing, and thus the economy as a whole.

These distortions exist at multiple levels, and reflect long-standing problems with the reallocation of labour across sectors, the excessively small scale of firms, low firm turnover, poor product market integration, high industry concentration and persistent state ownership. Combined, these phenomena represent severe restraints on the level and growth of productivity in manufacturing, and suggest that much remains to be done to improve the strength and sustainability of India’s development path.

International migration in Latin America today presents several features that will remain constant up to 2030, and new issues will emerge such as the growing feminisation of migration, the special case of indigenous people or human rights aspects. A concentrated migration pattern to the United States and Spain dominate the region. Although this will continue during the next decades, there will also be an incipient pattern of diversification of destinations (other European countries, Canada and Japan). Little progress has been made regarding the productive use of remittances, and the agreements and programmes targeted for temporary labour migration have not become widespread and also continue to include meagre migrant worker quotas. Today, the main destinations for intraregional migrants are Argentina, Costa Rica and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, but there are some modest signs of change in the future.

Both the experience from previous economic crises and first indications on labour market and social outcomes during the current pandemic suggest that the COVID‑19 crisis is likely to have a disproportionate impact on immigrants and their children. This policy brief provides first evidence on how the pandemic has affected immigrants and their children in terms of health, jobs, education, language training and other integration measures, and public opinion, and describes host countries’ policy responses. It complements a previous brief on the impact of the pandemic on migration management.

This article provides estimates of the private Internal Rates of Return to tertiary education for women and men in 21 OECD countries, for the years between 1991 and 2005. IRR are computed by estimating labour market premia on cross-country comparable individual-level data. Labour market premia are then adjusted for fiscal factors and costs of education. We find that returns to an additional year of tertiary education are on average above 8% and vary in a range from 4 to 15% in the countries and in the period under study. IRR are relatively homogenous across genders. Overall, a slightly increasing trend is observed over time. The article discusses various policy levers for shaping individual incentives to invest in tertiary education and provides some illustrative quantification of the impact of policy changes on those incentives.

Government Venture Capital (GovVC) has emerged as a policy tool to complement private venture capital (Private VC) by funding innovation-driven firms that might not attract traditional VC investment. This study analyses GovVC's role in OECD Member countries using comprehensive data on entrepreneurial firms, investors, and patents, with GovVC entities identified through surveys of ministry experts. The analysis shows that GovVC-funded firms are typically riskier than Private VC funded ones and generally demonstrate lower performance in securing follow-on funding and innovation output. However, when GovVCs partner with Private VC investors, these performance gaps diminish significantly. In co-investment scenarios, firms show comparable innovation and exit performance to those funded solely by Private VC. The findings indicate that GovVC can effectively direct capital to overlooked firms, particularly when working in partnership with private investors.

This paper estimates the data intensity of occupations/sectors (i.e. the share of job postings per occupation/sector related to the production of data) using natural language processing (NLP) on job advertisements in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Online job advertisement data collected by Lightcast provide timely and disaggregated insights into labour demand and skill requirements of different professions. The paper makes three major contributions. First, indicators created from the Lightcast data add to the understanding of digital skills in the labour market. Second, the results may advance the measurement of data assets in national account statistics. Third, the NLP methodology can handle up to 66 languages and can be adapted to measure concepts beyond digital skills. Results provide a ranking of data intensity across occupations, with data analytics activities contributing most to aggregate data intensity shares in all three countries. At the sectoral level, the emerging picture is more heterogeneous across countries. Differences in labour demand primarily explain those variations, with low data-intensive professions contributing most to aggregate data intensity in the United Kingdom. Estimates of investment in data, using a sum of costs approach and sectoral intensity shares, point to lower levels in the United Kingdom and Canada than in the United States.

Produced as part of the OECD Global Action on Promoting Social and Solidarity Economy Ecosystems, funded by the European Union’s Foreign Partnership Instrument, this paper provides a framework to clarify the core notions of the social and solidarity economy, along with social economy, social enterprise, social innovation and other related notions. The objective is to explain what they are and understand how these notions have evolved in recent decades. It also aims to capture and document the great diversity within social and solidarity economy organisations in terms of purposes, legal entities, business models and practices to help better characterise the “population” of social and solidarity economy entities.

On average across OECD countries, almost one in four students – whether boy or girl – expects to work
in an occupation that requires further science training beyond compulsory education. This brief highlights the kinds of science careers 15-year-olds anticipate for themselves in the future.

This paper defends the idea that universities manufacture knowledge as a public good through the “creative destruction” of social capital. The idea is presented as contemporary restatement of the Humboldtian ideal of the unity of research and teaching: Research “creates” (i.e. concentrates) social capital, which is then “destroyed” (i.e. distributed) through teaching. The defense is made against recent attacks to the integrity of the university as an institution associated with postmodernism and the so-called “new production of knowledge”, which would evaluate universities by client-led performance indicators. The emergence of such indicators is considered and critiqued, followed by some constructive suggestions for indicators specifically designed to measure qualities at which universities uniquely excel.