The paper discusses the implications of recent advances in artificial intelligence for knowledge workers, focusing on possible complementarities and substitution between machine translation tools and language professionals. The emergence of machine translation tools could enhance social welfare through enhanced opportunities for inter-language communication but also create new threats because of persisting low levels of accuracy and quality in the translation output. The paper uses data on online job vacancies to map the evolution of the demand for language professionals between 2015 and 2019 in 10 countries and illustrates the set of skills that are considered important by employers seeking to hire language professionals through job vacancies posted on line.
Being able to swim empowers individuals to make choices, have agency, and be free to choose core aspects of their life, such as working safely on or near water. It is also associated with lifelong health benefits and reduces the risk of drowning. Using data from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll 2019, this paper provides the first global estimates of adults’ ability to swim without assistance. Individuals in high-income countries are considerably more likely to report being able to swim without assistance than individuals in low-income countries. Disparities also exist within countries. In particular, women are less likely to be able to swim without assistance than men in virtually all countries, birth cohorts, and levels of education. Investing in reducing inequalities in life skills, such as swimming, can foster economic development and empowerment, especially in light of threats, such as climate change.
The report presents an in-depth analysis of various policies that aim to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of urban transport. Decarbonising transport lies at the core of efforts to mitigate climate change and has close links to urban sustainability and housing affordability. The report identifies the drivers of rising emissions in the urban transport sector and offers pathways to reduce them through a combination of transport and land use policies. The analysis yields a holistic welfare evaluation of these policies, assessing them according to their environmental effectiveness, their economic efficiency and their impact on fiscal balance and housing affordability. The report concludes that significant reductions in emissions from urban transport can be achieved through a careful alignment of transport policies designed to promote the use of public transit and electric vehicles, and land use policies, which foster a more compact urban form. The study is based on the case of Auckland, New Zealand but the lessons drawn are relevant for institutions and governments working on issues relating to urban sustainability, transport, housing and climate change mitigation.
Tackling mental health problems of the working-age population is a key issue for labour market and social policies in OECD countries, not just for health systems. Governments increasingly recognise that policy has a major role to play in keeping people with mental health conditions in employment or bringing those outside of the labour market into it, and in preventing mental illness. This report on New Zealand is the tenth in a series of reports looking at how broader education, health, welfare and labour market policy challenges are being tackled in a number of countries. The report is also the first one published after the endorsement of the OECD Recommendation of the Council on 'Integrated Mental Health, Skills and Work Policy' and assesses New Zealand's performance against the strategic policy framework agreed by all OECD countries. The report concludes that awareness and policy thinking is well developed in New Zealand but that structural and institutional weaknesses limit the provision of timely, integrated health and employment services, with particularly disappointing outcomes for the indigenous population. Against the background of the OECD Council Recommendation, the report proposes improvements in policy development and policy implementation to make youth, workplace, health and welfare policies ready for the challenge.