Job Creation and Local Economic Development 2016 (eBook)

Oecd (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016 | 1. Auflage
100 Seiten
OECD Publishing (Verlag)
978-92-64-26196-9 (ISBN)

Infos

This second edition of Job Creation and Local Economic Development examines how national and local actors can better work together to support economic development and job creation at the local level. It sheds light on a continuum of issues – from how skills policy can better meet the needs of local communities to how local actors can better engage employers in apprenticeships and improve the implementation of SME and entrepreneurship policy. It includes international comparisons that allow local areas to take stock of how they are performing in the marketplace for skills and jobs. It also includes a set of country profiles featuring, among other things, new data on skills supply and demand at the level of OECD sub-regions (TL3).

Textauszug

Chapter 2. Skills and jobs: Some places are being left behind

The right mix of policies and programmes can help to reduce potential skills mismatches and promote growth. However, determining what this mix should be at the local level requires complementing traditional labour market indicators with information on the local alignment between the skills of the workforce and the jobs available. This chapter looks at sub-regional data on skills and jobs to help local economies better understand how they fare on national and international benchmarks. It also measures the geographic dispersion of skills and jobs within countries to examine whether gaps between places are growing or shrinking.

Skills are a key driver of economic growth, but local economies differ in their ability to develop, attract and retain a skilled workforce. It is not only the supply of skills that matters – local employers also differ significantly in the level of skills that they demand and how they use these skills. Most measures of skills mismatch assess whether an individual is performing a job commensurate with their skills and qualifications. However, it is also important to better understand whether the local economy as a whole is making good use of the skills of the local workforce.

Some local areas have a significant mismatch between the skills of the workforce and the jobs available. In those areas, jobs may remain unfilled or the skills of the workforce may be underutilised. In other communities, a low level of unemployment may be hiding challenges related to low-skilled and poorly productive jobs. Such a situation can undermine future prospects for growth and job creation. Getting local areas over such hurdles requires ambitious and comprehensive strategies for economic and skills development, including altering the use of skills and stimulating innovation (Froy, Giguère and Meghnagi, 2012).

Better understanding the relationship between skills supply and demand in their communities can help local leaders identify the right policy mix to increase competitiveness, reduce unemployment, and tackle social exclusion. To aid in these efforts, this chapter uses local level data across OECD countries to benchmark local performance against national and international peers on measures of both skills supply and demand.

Highlights

• The marketplace for skills and jobs has become increasingly globalised, and some local areas risk being left behind as highly productive workers and the employers who seek them become concentrated in fewer places.

• While there has been an overall increase in the education level of workers across the OECD, education levels in the highest performing local areas generally grew more than education levels in the lowest performing local areas, contributing to increasing geographic divides within countries. However the picture is more mixed and characterised by less pronounced changes over time when looking at the changing geographic dispersion of medium- and high-skilled occupations.

• Using the OECD’s skills diagnostic tool to assess the match between skills and jobs in conjunction with other local labour market indicators can help to provide a richer picture of local labour market health, and identify where policy makers can make targeted investments that have the potential to reap the most benefits.

• In international comparisons, some places perform relatively poorly on both the supply of and demand for skills, resulting in a “low skills trap”. Such places may find themselves stuck in low value-added activities, unable to expand to economic activities that are more productive and use a highly-skilled workforce.

Gaps between local areas in terms of skills and jobs persist, and in some cases are increasing

Over the past decade, much attention has been paid to job polarisation: most employment growth has been concentrated in high and low paid work, with the hollowing out of jobs in the middle of the wage distribution. However, job polarisation trends vary across the OECD (see Autor et al., 2006; Goos and Manning, 2007; Goos et al., 2009; Goos et al., 2014; Autor and Dorn, 2013; Ceda, 2015). While polarisation has been occurring in countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia, trends have been mixed within Europe.

All countries in Europe have seen an increase in the number of highly skilled jobs between 2000 and 2010, but growth in middle- to low-skilled occupations is characterised by different patterns (IPPR, 2014). During this time period, 141 countries have shown increased job polarisation, as measured by the increasing shares of both low- and high-skilled jobs and a fall in the share of medium-skilled jobs. Among them, six (Austria, France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia and Spain) experienced faster growth in low-skilled rather than in higher skilled jobs, while eight (Belgium, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) saw opposite trends, with faster growth in more skilled jobs. Ten other countries did not see increased polarisation but registered either a fall in medium- and low-skilled occupations or an increase in medium-skilled occupations.

While the trends above relate to the concentration of employment growth in certain types of jobs, polarisation may also be occurring geographically. In other words, the geographic distribution of higher-skilled workers and jobs may be changing, with these workers and jobs becoming increasingly concentrated in certain local areas. Previous OECD work has highlighted large variations between regions within OECD countries (i.e. TL2, or the level of geographic aggregation between the local and national level) when looking at the tertiary educational attainment of the labour force. Between 2000 and 2013, such differences have decreased in most countries due to faster improvement in regions with relatively lower shares of tertiary-educated workers (OECD, 2016a).

Overall, gaps in education levels are growing

Some evidence suggests that polarisation may actually be increasing when looking below the regional level to compare local labour markets against each other (i.e. at the sub-regional level which better correspond to travel-to-work or commuting areas). In order to assess the gaps between local labour markets, Figure 2.1 shows the difference between the leading and trailing sub-regions in terms of the shares of the population with post-secondary education. This analysis looks across all sub-regions, (including cities, rural and intermediate areas) over the period of 2000 to 2014,2 but was limited to OECD countries with comparable data available at the Territorial Level 3 (or NUTS3 for European Union countries).

Figure 2.1. Geographical gaps in post-secondary education levels, sub-regions, 2000 and 2014

Percentage point difference between leading and trailing sub-regions

Note: Figure 2.1 shows the difference between the shares of the population with post-secondary education for the leading and trailing sub-regions. Figure 2.2 shows the difference between the shares of the population with medium- and high-skilled occupations for the leading and trailing sub-regions. To minimise the influence of outliers (e.g. big urban centres or very small remote areas), the comparison was done between the sub-regions at the 90th and 10th percentile of the distribution instead of the absolute maximum and minimum. When data were not available for the whole period of 2000-14 at the same geographic level, the earliest and the latest years available were used. Only countries for which data were available for a period longer than six years were included. The years used for the analysis are: 2000 and 2012 for Japan; 2000 and 2013 for Czech Republic, Finland, Korea and Slovak Republic; 2000 and 2014 for the United States; 2001 and 2012 for Italy; 2001 and 2013 for Belgium, Sweden and the United Kingdom; 2002 and 2013 for Slovenia; 2002 and 2014 for Greece; 2003 and 2013 for Hungary; 2003 and 2014 for the Netherlands; 2005 and 2013 for Norway; 2006 and 2012 for France; 2006 and 2013 for New Zealand; 2006 and 2014 for Canada; 2007 and 2013 for Estonia and Latvia.

Source: OECD calculations based on data provided by national statistical offices. This chart is based on the data collected for the country profiles, with the full list of sources included in the overview of the country profiles.

StatLink  http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888933424185

Overall, the rate of post-secondary educational attainment has increased across most local areas, regardless of size and/or level of urbanisation. This is not surprising given that overall levels of education increased in OECD countries generally during this time period. However, the share of the population with post-secondary education tended to increase more quickly in some areas in comparison to others. Namely, those sub-regions that were already doing well enjoyed even greater gains over this time period. For this reason, in most OECD countries, the gaps between local areas at the top and bottom of the distribution have increased.

The gap particularly grew in Canada, Czech Republic, Latvia and Italy, due to the larger improvement in education levels for local areas at the top of the distribution compared to those at the bottom. Only in a few countries, including Greece and Sweden, did the gap remain stable over time; local areas at the top and the bottom of the distribution enjoyed a similar increase in the share of people with...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 28.11.2016
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Makroökonomie
• ISBN-10: 92-64-26196-6 / 9264261966
• ISBN-13: 978-92-64-26196-9 / 9789264261969