With almost 50 per cent of the working age population not working, improving labour market performance represents an essential and daunting challenge for Poland. While some of today’s joblessness is cyclical in nature, most of it appears to be structural. This paper argues that to increase...

Maintaining high participation and employment in the face of the recent recession and a rapidly ageing population are major challenges for policy makers in Finland. The recession of the early 1990s showed that high unemployment can leave long–lasting scars on labour markets, while rapid ageing...

Unemployment in South Africa is extremely high and unevenly distributed, being concentrated among young less-skilled blacks. The legacies of apartheid can explain part of the increase in labour supply and inability of the economy to absorb it which produced the extreme levels of unemployment,...

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of patterns and trends of worker transitions across European countries and the United States, with an emphasis on differences across socio-economic groups. Understanding labour market transitions is important to gauge the scope of labour market...

New variants of the virus are spreading which, together with seasonal effects, are estimated to be able to raise effective reproduction numbers by up to 90%. Meanwhile, many countries are rolling out vaccination programmes, but at varying speeds. Hence the race is on to beat the variants with...

immigration for natives' labour market outcomes, as well as issues linked to immigrants' integration in the host country labour market. Changes in the share of immigrants in the labour force may have a distributive impact on natives' wages, and a temporary impact on unemployment. However, labour...

Subsidisation of industrial activities distorts the allocation of scarce resources, is a burden on government finances and generates friction in international trade. This paper draws on a wide range of data sources to examine industrial subsidisation in OECD countries. The sectoral distribution...

This paper deals with trends and cycles of unemployment and labour-force participation. Empirical evidence on both trends and cyclical movements in unemployment and participation is presented. Some of the mechanisms behind the observed developments are also analysed, examining how well they fit...

This paper highlights some key policy issues regarding the performance of public expenditure and proposes an analytical framework for its assessment. The framework distinguishes three economic objectives of policies in the pursuit of better performance of public expenditure: macroeconomic...

This paper assesses the impact on economic growth of increased efficiency of public spending in primary and lower-secondary education. Higher efficiency in public spending in schools can bolster growth through two main channels. On the one hand, it can allow a transfer of labour from the public...