China has made impressive strides in education in recent decades, even though the accumulation of human capital has lagged behind that of physical capital. Going forward, access to and quality of education will be key to sustain economic convergence with the most advanced economies and to offset...

South Africa has achieved remarkable progress in educational attainment relative to other emerging countries, but the quality of basic education for a large fraction of the Black African population is still very low. This study identifies several hurdles to the upgrading of basic education...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

The NZ labour market is among the most flexible in the OECD, and outcomes for its young people have been among the best. However, labour-market opportunities are heavily determined by initial education, where New Zealand’s system is also successful and innovative in many ways. Average PISA...

This paper uses a new measure of human capital that works much better in explaining productivity in OECD countries compared to earlier measures of human capital to investigate the educational policy drivers of human capital. A novel methodology is utilised by interacting educational policies,...

This paper reviews recent empirical literature on policy drivers of two educational outcomes - years of schooling and rates of return - that form the OECD’s aggregate measure of human capital. The paper sets the literature findings into the context of current educational polices in place in...

Despite significant progress made, improving skills remains one of Portugal’s key challenges for raising growth, living standards and well-being. Upskilling the adult population remains a priority and lifelong learning activities should focus more on the low skilled. While active labour market...

Digitalisation, automation and future technological changes are changing the world of work, affecting the skills needed to perform them. The future of jobs will not look like the present situation: increasingly, workers will have to adapt to fast technological change, accept more mobility during...

Technological change is increasing the productivity of highly skilled workers but creating more challenging labour-market conditions for their low-skilled counterparts. These pressures are likely to grow, especially in light of progress being made in Artificial Intelligence. The NZ labour force...

Switzerland makes more use of its human resources than most other OECD countries. Labour force participation is high and the unemployment rate low for most segments of society. This ensures a high standard of living for most Swiss people. Nevertheless, productivity growth is relatively slow....