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This paper looks at the importance of mechanisms that give formal recognition to vocational skills acquired through work-based learning and how such mechanisms might be developed. It describes how skill recognition can benefit individuals, employers and society as a whole, and identifies in which contexts skill recognition has the highest potential to bring benefits. The focus is on three tools that are commonly used to shorten the path to a formal qualification: admission into a programme, reduced programme duration and qualification without a mandatory programme. For each of these tools, this paper sets out country approaches, discusses common challenges that arise in their implementation and advances policy messages to support policy design and implementation.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the link between age and proficiency in information-processing skills, based on information drawn from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The data reveal significant age-related differences in proficiencies, strongly suggesting that proficiency tends to "naturally" decline with age. Age differences in proficiency are, at first sight, substantial. On average across the OECD countries participating in PIAAC, adults aged 55 to 65 score some 30 points less than adults aged 25 to 34 on the PIAAC literacy scale, which is only slightly smaller than the score point difference between tertiary educated and less-than-upper-secondary educated individuals. However, despite their lower levels of proficiency, older individuals do not seem to suffer in terms of labour market outcomes. In particular, they generally earn higher wages, and much of the available empirical evidence suggests that they are not less productive than younger workers. Older and more experienced individuals seem therefore able to compensate the decline in information processing skills with the development of other skills, generally much more difficult to measure. On the other hand, proficiency in information-processing skills remain a strong determinant of important outcomes at all ages: this makes it important to better understand which factors are the most effective in preventing such age-related decline in proficiency, which does not occur to the same extent in all countries and for all individuals. Two broad interventions seem to be particularly promising in this respect. First, it is important to ensure that there is adequate and effective investment in skills development early in the life-cycle: as skills beget skills, starting off with a higher stock of human capital seems also to ensure smaller rates of proficiency decline. Second, it is equally important that policies are in place that provide incentives to individuals (and firms) to invest in skills across the entire working life. In this respect, changes in retirement policies can not only have the short-term effect of providing some reliefs to public finance, but have the potential to radically reshape incentives to stay active, to practice their skills and to invest more in training, thus helping to maintain high levels of proficiency. One table, Age Differences and Age Effects, is appended.

Using the 2012 PIAAC data, our analysis confirms that there are significantly higher earnings and employment returns to "both" increasing levels of formally recognised education, and to increasing levels of numeracy, literacy and information and communication technologies (ICT) skills proficiencies controlling for the level of education. Unsurprisingly, the labour market returns to changes in formally recognised levels of education in general exceed the labour market returns associated with increasing levels of skills proficiency. In the case of literacy and numeracy proficiencies, improved literacy and numeracy skills narrow the labour market outcomes gap between individuals with different levels of formally recognised education, but do not close it completely. The analysis demonstrates more substantial returns to ICT skills. Furthermore, possession of higher levels of ICT skills and lower levels of formally recognised qualification are often associated with higher returns compared to individuals with higher levels of formally recognised education but lower ICT proficiency levels. In other words, ICT skills proficiencies often entirely compensate for lower formally recognised qualifications in the labour market. Contains the following annexes: (1) Country Literacy and Numeracy Profiles; and (2) Demographic Control Variables.

This paper explores the impact of policies and institutions on employment and unemployment of OECD countries in the past decades. Reduced-form unemployment equations, consistent with standard wage setting/price-setting models, are estimated using cross-country/time-series data from 21 OECD countries over the period 1982-2003. In the "average" OECD country, high and long-lasting unemployment benefits, high tax wedges and stringent anticompetitive product market regulation are found to increase aggregate unemployment. By contrast, highly centralised and/or coordinated wage bargaining systems are estimated to reduce unemployment. These findings are robust across specifications, datasets and econometric methods. As policies and institutions affect employment not only via their impact on aggregate unemployment but also through their effects on labour market participation -- particularly for those groups "at the margin" of the labour market, group-specific employment rate equations are also estimated. In the "average" OECD country, high unemployment benefits and high tax wedges are found to be associated with lower employment prospects for all groups studied, namely prime-age males, females, older workers and youths. There is also evidence that group-specific policy determinants matter, such as targeted fiscal incentives. The paper also finds significant evidence of interactions across policies and institutions, as well as between institutions and macroeconomic conditions. Consistent with theory, structural reforms appear to have mutually reinforcing effects: the impact of a given policy reform is greater the more employment-friendly the overall policy and institutional framework. Certain more specific interactions across policies and institutions are found to be particularly robust, notably between unemployment benefits and public spending on active labour market programmes as well as between statutory minimum wages and the tax wedge. Finally, it is shown that macroeconomic conditions also matter for unemployment patterns, with their impact being shaped by policies. (A bibliography is included. Contains 144 footnotes, 9 figures, 3 boxes and 27 tables.)

This working paper assesses the ease of immigrants' integration in OECD labour markets by estimating how an immigration background influences the probability of being active or employed and the expected hourly earnings, for given individual characteristics. Applying the same methodology to comparable data across twelve OECD countries, immigrants are shown to significantly lag behind natives in terms of employment and/or wages. The differences narrow as years since settlement elapse, especially as regards wages, reflecting progressive assimilation. Strong differences in immigrant-to-native gaps are also observed across countries, and the paper shows that they may, to a significant extent, be explained by differences in labour market policies, in particular unemployment benefits, the tax wedge and the minimum wage. In addition, immigrants are shown to be overrepresented among outsiders in the labour market and, as such, highly sensitive to the difference in employment protection legislation between temporary and permanent contracts. (Contains 36 footnotes, 1 figure and 10 tables.)

This paper examines policies regarding access to social benefits and the labor market in nine representative liberal industrialized democracies. Five are self-consciously nations of immigration: the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and France. Four are de-facto immigration nations within the European Union (EU): Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Britain. The countries reflect substantial variation in size and character of immigration flows, as well as differing regimes of access to both the social welfare state and labor market and approaches to granting citizenship. This analysis focuses on legal or tolerated immigrants. After section 1, "Introduction," section 2, "Access to Public Benefits: General Policy Trends," discusses the path to permanent status; rationing benefits by citizenship in the United States, Austria, and Britain; indirect bars to benefits; restrictions to contributory benefit programs; and whether rationing by citizenship makes good policy. Section 3, "Rationing Access to the Labor Market on the Basis of Citizenship," discusses public sector employment, private sector employment, and self-employment. Section 4 focuses on "Is Citizenship Enough? Antidiscrimination Policies." Section 5, "Policy Recommendations," offers five recommendations. An appendix presents summary tables (benefit eligibility by country). (Contains 63 references.) (SM)

This bulletin examines the labor market experience of youth in the United States and eight other industrial countries from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. The analysis focuses upon unemployment, the most visible and measurable form of labor underutilization. The report highlights the size of the youth unemployment problem and discusses some of the underlying reasons for the large international differences in youth unemployment. To facilitate international comparisons, the data have been adjusted to United States concepts. Subjects covered include trends in labor supply, demand factors, the student labor force, apprenticeship and format training, guidance and counseling, youth minimum wage, and minority group unemployment. Countries studied in the report, in addition to the United States, are Canada, Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Sweden. Presented in a brief conclusion are comparative differences among the countries and reasons accounting for them. (KC)

This monograph takes the perspective that increased awareness of how active labor market programs operate in other nations can substantially improve the way in which the United States deals with worker displacement. Chapter 1 considers the costs of worker displacement and how government programs designed to reduce these costs are evaluated. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the labor market policies in place in the seven countries examined: Sweden, Germany, Japan, Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States. It investigates a possible linkage between these countries' labor market policies and differences in their unemployment rates. Chapter 3 reviews the evaluation evidence available for demonstration projects and experiments implementing active labor market programs in the United States as well as evaluation reports examining the effectiveness of training and basic education programs in demonstration projects targeted to economically disadvantaged workers. Chapter 4 considers adult retraining programs. It investigates the government training model in Sweden, Britain's employer-led/school-based model, and firm-based training systems in Germany and Japan. Chapter 5 focuses on employment services. It examines carefully the job matching system provided by the Swedish public employment service and job development services supplied by the Canadian Industrial Adjustment Service. Chapter 6 presents findings and outlines an agenda for assisting displaced workers. Appendixes include 148 references and an index. (YLB)