Based on research commissioned by the Gatsby Foundation, this report examines the impact of the new systems of vocational qualifications and provoked a lively debate in the letters pages of the Financial Times.

An edited version of a major one day conference hosted by the Centre for Economic Performance ahead of the Birmingham G8 Summit in May. Contributors include:Rt Hon. David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education and Employment; Jacques Delors, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School; and...

Robinson raises a series of questions about the Government's priorities, challenging the key policies of target-setting and raising average achievement. (The Times). This report, which attracted much media coverage, examines many of the commonly held assumptions about educational standards in...

The paper uses Department of Employment data, the New Earnings, General Household and Labour Force Surveys and the Census of Population to look at changes in the structure of employment and unemployment in Britain over the post-war period. Trends such as rising female labour force participation...

The paper argues that the 1990-93 recession in Sweden offered a natural experiment to test hypotheses about Sweden's success in maintaining low unemployment in the 1980s. The paper identifies a fundamental shift in the macroeconomic policy regime in 1991 as the main cause of the subsequent...

There is no parity of esteem between academic and vocational qualifications in the labour market. Data from the Labour Force Survey show that on average men and women working full-time with academic qualifications at one level in the national qualifications framework earn about the same as men...

Evidence is presented for the UK, the US and France that the pace of change in the structure of employment by occupation has not been accelerating. Changes in the occupational structure of employment are taken to proxy changes in the net demand for labour by skill level. Efforts are made to make...

The National Education and Training Targets appear to dominate the public policy debate, though outside of policy making and influencing circles they are in fact little known. This paper argues that the definition of and measurement of progress towards those Targets are based on equivalence...

The paper sets out two things. Firstly, average living standards in Britain are not that far out of line with other Western European countries. One source of data shows that by 193 the gap in manufacturing productivity between Britain and Germany, France and the Netherlands had been more or less...

This paper uses the Census, the General Household and New Earnings Surveys, and OECD data, to look at trends in the dispersion of pay and the returns to education, the supply of and demand for different types of labour and the supply of qualifications. It casts doubt on the ability of a simple...