The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for...

Despite the fact that today’s young cohorts are smaller in number and better educated than their older counterparts, high youth unemployment remains a serious problem in many OECD countries. This reflects a variety of factors, including the relatively high proportion of young people leaving...

The purpose of this paper is to distill the lessons for labour market reforms from the ?successes? and ?failures?. It begins by discussing the structural unemployment indicator which the OECD has used to identify the successful countries. This is followed by a review of the cross-country...

This paper first reviews trends since 1985 in public spending on labour market programmes, both active and passive. It then reviews the main findings from recent evaluations of labour market programmes. At first sight evaluation findings are not very encouraging, but there are some success...