workforce

This paper reconsiders the cost of business cycles under market incompleteness. Primarily, the authors focus on the heterogeneity in the cost among different skill groups. Unskilled workers are subject to a much larger risk of unemployment during recessions than are skilled workers.

This report, supported by the China Economic Research and Advisory Programme (CERAP), identifies the primary challenges facing China today and presents options for meeting them. The key recommendation of this report is a comprehensive package of policies with three main elements: reform measures to promote growth of consumption in the longer term, a public expenditureprogram to stimulate domestic demand in the short and medium term, and a managedappreciation of the currency.

This study examines the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) and of foreign outsourcing on the demand for skilled workers. Using data for 84 Canadian manufacturing industries over the 1981-1996 period, the authors find that both ICT and foreign outsourcing are important contributors to the demand for skills.

This study contributes to the expanding body of research in the area of information and communication technologies (ICT). Using data on business sector workplaces from the 1999 Workplace and Employee Survey (WES), the authors investigate factors related to the incidence and intensity of training. The study focuses on whether training incidence and training intensity are more closely associated with the technological competencies of specific workplaces than with membership in ICT and science-based industry environments.

The issue whether regional development can be associated with population driving employment changes or employment driving population changes has recently attracted considerable interest, according to the authors. In this paper a preliminary attempt is described in clarifying these matters, by focusing on an articulate literature of 37 so-called ‘Carlino-Mills studies’.

According to the results of the study, the high technology sector and worker flows are strongly concentrated on urban regions in Finland. The individuals with a lot of human capital resources (high education and working experience of knowledge intensive sector) are willing to change their working
region even if they already have a job in the non-urban region, which implies that those regions have difficulties to retain their high technology labour force.

The authors model a corporate firm in a competitive market setting, consisting of a production technology, a hierarchical organization structure, a cost efficiency parameter, and an internal pay-system. Using CES-production technologies, the authors illustrate how firm size depends on labor substitutability, and show that a linear technology yields the deepest organization structure, and complementarity between workers yields the flattest structure.

As urban leaders work to develop new economic strategies for the 21st Century, they will increasingly need to emphasize talent and those aspects of cities that make them attractive to talented workers, the report states.

For a number of OECD countries, the deterioration of labour market outcomes for less-skilled workers since the early 1980’s has coincided with a steady decline in union membership, according to the authors. Findings indicate that globalisation has indeed contributed to deunionisation.

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey is a new data source of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that estimates monthly vacancies, hires, and separations. It has quickly become a useful tool for studying the labor market. This chapter summarizes its aggregate and micro-level evidence, including the relations of vacancies and worker flows to unemployment and other measures of labor market conditions.