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Policy makers – like navigators on a long voyage – should periodically check their bearings to verify that they are on course. Nearly a decade has now passed since the OECD proposed a comprehensive blueprint for labour market reform, the so-called Jobs Strategy. Since then, the OECD has worked closely with Member countries to identify the best ways to implement the Jobs Strategy, in each specific national context, and monitored the results. A reassessment of the policy priorities is therefore timely. As part of this process, OECD Employment and Labour Ministers will meet in 2003. This forum will allow ministers to compare labour market conditions and policy experiences in their countries, and assess the policy agenda in the coming decade. In anticipation of that event, this editorial offers a first survey of the jobs horizon.
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The special section of this chapter describes trends in youth labour market outcomes and policies. Youth population shares in OECD countries reached a peak in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s, and have everywhere fallen since then. In a slight majority of countries, young adult unemployment rates have fallen relative to prime-age adult rates since 1983, but trends are varied. Youths are staying longer in education, but in some countries study is often combined with participation in the labour market, and the conventionally-measured unemployment rate will often not be the most relevant indicator of labour market distress. One alternative indicator, the proportion of youths who are neither in education nor in employment, generally shows some trend improvement.
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This chapter analyses the diverse labour market experiences of women in OECD countries using comparable and detailed data on the structure of employment and earnings by gender. It begins by documenting the evolution of the gender gap in employment rates, taking account of differences in working time and how women’s participation in paid employment varies with age, education and family situation. Gender differences in occupation and sector of employment, as well as in pay, are then analysed for wage and salary workers.
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Temporary employment has grown in a number of OECD countries during the past two decades and this growth has raised concerns that temporary jobs may be crowding out more stable forms of employment, becoming an additional source of insecurity for workers and increasing labour market dualism between workers finding stable career jobs and those failing to do so. This chapter sheds light on these issues by assembling harmonised data on temporary employment in OECD countries.
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Efforts to reduce the duration of unemployment spells should be a key element in strategies to reduce overall unemployment. There is some evidence that the long-term unemployed are relatively more likely to become very-long-term unemployed in some countries, while they are more likely to exit the labour force in others. In European countries, the shares of prime-aged males in long-term unemployment and in potentially-avoidable disability and early retirement appear to be similar.
A special analysis of longitudinal data for European countries is used here to examine the role of recurrent unemployment and explore alternative measures of long-term unemployment.
A second section examines issues of timing in the design of active labour market policies.
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Best-practice policies in the labour and product markets are much researched topics, but relatively little attention has been paid to the cross-market effects of these policies, that is, to the influence of product market policies on outcomes in the labour market and vice versa. This chapter analyses cross-market policy effects and assesses their relevance for improving labour market policies and outcomes.
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