Women, youth and seniors face barriers to economic inclusion in Canada, with considerable scope to improve their labour market outcomes. There has been no progress in shrinking the gender employment gap since 2009, and women, particularly mothers, continue to earn significantly less than men, in...

South Africa has an incomplete social protection system without a mandatory pension savings scheme. Designing a universal insurance pension system would allow to reduce the important government funded pension grant system and ensure that the old-age population has decent income. Only 40% of...

This paper assesses Italy’s 2019 tax and benefit reforms, analyses hypothetical reforms and proposes a reform package that balances goals of reducing poverty, encouraging employment and fiscal sustainability. Using the OECD’s Tax-Benefit and the EUROMOD microsimulation models, it shows that...

The generous Danish welfare state relies on a high degree of labour force participation both for financing and in order to ensure social cohesion. This underlines the need for getting work incentives right and improve the employability of vulnerable groups of workers, in particular migrants....

A rapid decrease in unemployment is a short-term priority to limit social problems and reduce the risk of rising structural unemployment. To this end, strengthening labour market policies to sustain labour demand is key. The public works programme should remain temporary and become more focused...

Owing to past structural reforms, Costa Rica has enjoyed robust GDP growth and productivity levels are gradually converging towards the OECD average. However, large GDP per capita and productivity gaps persist. In addition, not everyone has benefited from this growth. Inequality has increased...

Higher living standards and well-being, as well as convergence with more advanced economies, will depend on achieving higher productivity, which in turn would be boosted by more investment in capital. In particular, investment in knowledge-based capital and greater inward FDI can help Slovenia...

The Dutch labour market has recovered and the unemployment rate has been converging towards pre-crisis levels. Non-standard forms of work have expanded with a strong trend towards self-employment and an increased reliance on temporary contracts. These developments may reflect a preference of...

The crisis revealed the need for a strategic review of the existing social protection system in Estonia. Extreme income fluctuations on one side and low social benefits on the other side exposed fragile groups in the population to a significant poverty risk. The government has recently...