Labour Market Models and Their Use in Projecting Vocational Education and Training Requirements.

This report focuses on use of large-scale economy-wide models in Australia for occupational forecasting and their use in the vocational education and training (VET) sector for making decisions about training profiles across occupational areas. Section 2 reviews objectives of VET policy as defined in the legislation and Australian National Training Authority annual reports. Section 3 provides a non-technical overview of international perspectives on the role of occupational forecasting in VET planning and identifies informational requirements of VET planning. Section 4 reports the views and practices of personnel in the VET sector relating to use of labor market projections. Section 5 discusses economic modeling, including the: nature of economic models, constructions of models, different types of economic models, model uses and limitations, and implications of VET requirements for model design and structure. Section 6 describes development of major economic models; reviews research of comparative model evaluation; describes major recent developments in the Monash and Murphy modeling capability; examines the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research model, modern multi-country general equilibrium models, and the latest modeling methodologies used for occupational forecasting overseas; and examines strengths and weaknesses of these approaches; and analyzes how they are used in the VET sector. (Contains 80 references.) (YLB)