By Gabriela Ramos. Mounting fears of another slowdown in the global economy call for bolder policy responses. Trade and investment are a case in point.
The latest WTO forecasts suggest 2015 will be the fourth year running that global trade volumes grow less than 3%, barely at—or below—the rate of GDP growth. Before the crisis, trade was growing faster than GDP. More...

By OECD Statistics Directorate. Women entrepreneurship is increasingly recognised as a key source of employment creation and innovation, and for addressing inequalities. McKinsey for example have just published a study estimating that “$12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality.” Women entrepreneurs could be a major part of this, but the latest figures presented in the OECD’s Entrepreneurship at a Glance 2015 show that in OECD countries there are two and a half times more men than women that are self-employed with paid employees. More...

By Roel Nieuwenkamp. The UN has now agreed to the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 goals which will define the post-2015 development agenda. It is recognised that the private sector has an important role to play in economic and social development. More...

By Christian Kroll. When world leaders from all UN member countries meet today in New York for the largest ever gathering of heads of state, it will be about so much more than a unique photo opportunity. Beyond the grand gestures and speeches, we are going to have to ask our leaders if they have done their homework. More...

By Guillermo Montt. Last month, chatbot Rose won the 2015 Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence (AI) – an annual contest in which machines try to fool judges into believing that they are human. While Rose ranked the most human-like bot by three of four judges, it failed to fool any of them into thinking it was a real person. More...

By Guillermo Montt. Skills are key determinants of prosperity and well-being. However, developing skills is costly and so these investments need to be made wisely. This requires good information about where skill development is most needed, how well the skills of individuals match those required in the labour market, and the returns to investments in skills in terms of economic and social outcomes. More...

By Guillermo Montt. In a previous post, we showed how across countries that took part in the Survey of Adult Skills, 39% of workers are mismatched by field of study. These are workers who graduated from a particular field but work in another, unrelated occupation. We also showed that many field-mismatched workers are also over-qualified, leading to a large wage penalty and non-ignorable costs for economies. More...

By Glenda Quintini. Apprenticeships provide opportunities to build up new skills and knowledge both on and off the job. When they are of high quality, apprenticeships promote a smoother transition from school to work for young people, giving them a good start to their working careers. They do so by providing a good mix of basic competences and job-specific skills as well as valuable work experience. In addition, apprentices are usually able to earn a wage, even if small, while studying. More...

By Glenda Quintini. Recent empirical literature warns about the negative impact that skills mismatch can have on individuals and economies as a whole. At the individual level, over-qualification and over-skilling entail lower earnings, lower job satisfaction and a higher risk of unemployment relative to well-matched workers (OECD, 2015 (forthcoming); Quintini, 2011). At the aggregate level, skill and qualifications mismatch are associated with lower labour productivity within industries (Adalet McGowan and Andrews, 2015). More...

By Glenda Quintini. The combination of work and study has been hailed as crucial to ensure that youth develop the skills required on the labour market so that transitions from school to work are shorter and smoother. As a result, in the current context of record high unemployment rates, many governments have set out to encourage learning on the job, particularly when it comes as part of certified programmes such as vocational education and training pathways (VET) or apprenticeships. Despite this central role in current policy thinking, comparative statistics on work and study are hard to come by and information is patchy at best when it comes to the context in which most students work – crucially, whether there is a (formal or informal) link between their schooling and their job. More...