Browse by: "2018"

Written communication has been thousands of years in the making, but in recent decades the way we write, the skills we use and the role writing plays in the world have all changed. This has important implications for education and skills.

Career and education decisions are amongst the most important young people make. Gender, ethnicity and socio-economic factors all strongly affect these choices. Career guidance is both an individual and a social good: it helps individuals to progress in their learning and work, but it also helps the effective functioning of the labour and learning markets, and contributes to a range of social policy goals, including social mobility and equity. This justifies the public investment in career guidance activities. Empirical evidence point towards career guidance services – in school and outside – having a formative influence on young people’s understanding of themselves and the world of work, and can often improve educational, social and economic outcomes. As young people stay in education and training longer and as the labour market becomes more complex, the case for career guidance grows. But what makes for effective provision? This paper looks at the features of good career guidance practice, including the need for schools to begin early and the essential role of exposure to the world of work.

The rapid integration of emerging market economies (EMEs) into world trade over the past three decades has raised widespread concerns about the effects this is having on trade-exposed sectors in advanced OECD countries. An analysis of international trade patterns of over 4000 products between 1995 and 2015 shows that the export product overlap between advanced OECD economies and EMEs has been increasing. However, the product overlap between advanced countries is still higher and increasing faster, suggesting that competitive pressures in export product markets on advanced economies is mainly coming from other OECD members. Regression analysis corroborates this finding, supporting the idea that competition from EMEs remains relatively moderate. Regression analysis show that a move to specialise in a product by the United States exerts about twice as much competitive pressure as a similar decision in China. However, competition effects on average are small compared to changes in world demand as drivers of country competitiveness at the individual product level. The negative effect of a one standard deviation decrease in world demand for a product exerts 8 times more pressure than a one standard deviation increase in specialisation of the United States for that product. In short, specialising in what the world wants to buy remains the key for export performance.

On average across OECD countries, 4.2% of 15-year-old students expect to work as teachers – a greater proportion than the share of teachers in the adult population. In many countries, 15-year-old students who expect to work as teachers have lower mathematics and reading scores than students who expect to work in other professions that, like teaching, require at least a university degree. However, data from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills show that the numeracy skills of teachers tend to be similar to the numeracy skills of other degree holders. The skills gap between students who expect a career in teaching and those who expect a career as another type of professional is often larger in low-performing versus top-performing countries. Countries with higher teacher salaries (relative to GDP) and higher perceptions of the social value of the teaching profession have, on average, larger shares of students who expect to work as teachers.

This paper exploits a new database that is unique in its scale and scope containing detailed information on over two million projects carried out by one million firms that benefited from the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund and the Cohesion Fund in 25 EU member countries during the multi-annual financial framework 2007-2013. This database is used to get a better understanding of the characteristics of the beneficiaries of European funds and to assess the impact of the European funds on the beneficiaries’ performance in terms of employment growth, growth in fixed assets, and total factor productivity.
While the data reveals substantial heterogeneity of beneficiaries and projects across and within countries, in terms of the number of projects, their total values, the average firm size and other aspects, some patterns are identified. The majority of co-funding goes to manufacturing firms as well as public institutions. The Cohesion Fund co-finances larger projects, carried out by larger, more capital-intensive firms that typically conduct large-scale infrastructure projects. In contrast, the European Social Fund co-finances smaller projects related to human capital and initiatives on the labour market. In terms of volume, the European Regional and Development Fund has the largest budget in total and co-finances a large variety of projects.
Using propensity score matching techniques, we find mixed effects of structural and cohesion funds on the performance of a sample of manufacturing firms in six European countries. On average, firms that receive financial assistance hire more workers and increase their capital stock more. However, there is little evidence of additional positive total factor productivity effects for the beneficiaries.

Although access to formal education has improved internationally for children with disabilities, concerns remain about education quality for this student population. Using data on 121 173 teachers from 38 countries in the 2013 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), this study examined the qualifications and professional development (PD) needs of teachers who work with children with special needs. The results indicate that teachers responsible for students with special needs had, on average, lower qualifications, worked in itinerant positions more frequently and expressed greater professional development need than colleagues who did not teach students with special needs. The need for professional development among teachers who taught special needs students was lowest in schools with greater instructional leadership. Additionally, only a small percentage of teachers reported that their professional development had a positive impact on their instruction. The paper discusses policy implications for teacher recruitment and designing professional development.

This paper sheds light on the extent to which different types of skills are rewarded as industries go digital. It relies on information from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills on labour market participation and workers’ skills for 31 countries as well as on a novel OECD index on the digital penetration of industries. It investigates how cognitive and non-cognitive skills are rewarded in digital vs. less digital intensive industries and assesses the extent to which skills bundles matter. The results indicate that digital intensive industries especially reward workers having relatively higher levels of self-organisation and advanced numeracy skills. Moreover, for workers in digital intensive industries, bundles of skills are particularly important: workers endowed with a high level of numeracy skills receive an additional wage premium, if they also show high levels of self-organisation or managing and communication skills.

The OECD Better Life Index is an interactive composite index that aggregates average measures of country’s well-being outcomes through weights defined by users. This paper studies these weights by analysing the responses given by close to 130 000 users since 2011 to date. The paper has three goals. First, to investigate the factors shaping users’ preferences over a set of 11 well-being dimensions. Second, to provide insights into users’ preferences for a large group of countries which differ in terms of culture and living conditions. Third, to test for the effects of users’ satisfaction with respect to a given well-being dimension on the weight they attach to it, across different population groups. Various empirical models are used to identify responses’ patterns and see whether they can be accounted for by respondents’ characteristics and their perceived well-being. The paper finds that health status, education and life satisfaction are the aspects that matter the most for BLI users in OECD countries. Men assign more importance to income than women, while women value community and work-life balance more than men. Health, safety, housing and civic engagement become more important with age, while life satisfaction, work-life balance, jobs, income and community are particularly important for youth. There are also clear regional patterns in the choices by BLI users; for instance education, jobs and civic engagement are particularly important in South America while personal safety and work-life balance matter a lot in Asia-Pacific. Analysis carried out on a subset of observations (i.e. BLI-users who completed an extended questionnaire) finds that, for several well-being dimensions (i.e. jobs, housing, community, health, education, civic engagement, personal safety, life satisfaction and work-life balance), there is a positive and linear relationship between individual preferences and self-reported satisfaction in the same dimension, with evidence of distinctly different patterns of association within the population in the case of income and education.