Reports

As countries seek to draw lessons the COVID-19 crisis and increase their future resilience, evaluations are important tools to understand what worked or not, why and for whom. This report builds on the OECD work on 'government evaluations of COVID-19 responses'. It evaluates Belgium’s responses to the pandemic in terms of risk preparedness, crisis management, as well as public health, education, economic and fiscal, and social and labour market policies. Preserving the country’s resilience in the future will require promoting trust in public institutions and whole-of-government approaches to crisis management, reducing inequalities, and preserving the fiscal balance. The findings and recommendations of this report will provide guidance to public authorities in these efforts.

One in seven working age adults identifies as having a disability in OECD countries. Many of them are excluded from meaningful work and have low levels of income and social engagement. Governments can help create an environment that supports social and labour market integration for people with disability. This report reviews the effectiveness of the social protection system for people with disability in Italy and summarises the results of a pilot carried out in four regions testing an alternative disability assessment. The current assessment process can sometimes deny services to people in need of support while being generous to people with significant health problems but who are not experiencing severe disability. A disability assessment that takes medical and functional aspects into account helps to direct services and resources to those most in need and to harmonise access to disability support across the country. Implementing disability reform has proved to be difficult in Italy in the past decade. This report provides evidence that reform can improve outcomes for people with disability.

People with disability face persisting difficulties in the labour market. There are concerns that AI, if managed poorly, could further exacerbate these challenges. Yet, AI also has the potential to create more inclusive and accommodating environments and might help remove some of the barriers faced by people with disability in the labour market. Building on interviews with more than 70 stakeholders, this report explores the potential of AI to foster employment for people with disability, accounting for both the transformative possibilities of AI-powered solutions and the risks attached to the increased use of AI for people with disability. It also identifies obstacles hindering the use of AI and discusses what governments could do to avoid the risks and seize the opportunities of using AI to support people with disability in the labour market.

Two out of five OECD countries contract out some of the job brokerage and counselling functions of publicly financed employment services using outcome-based payment models. This paper examines several important aspects related to the design and implementation of such outsourcing. First, innovative payment models can improve incentives for external providers to offer training and more effective services for hard-to-place clients. Second, providing forward guidance to providers and accounting for contingencies can mitigate their risks, e.g. of being underpaid relative to expenses incurred, thus lowering service costs. Third, letting individuals choose a provider can result in services that are better tailored and foster ongoing competition between providers. Finally, automating data exchange can, somewhat paradoxically, improve data privacy and data protection while enabling new payment models. These and related findings are discussed with country examples based on desk research and interviews with stakeholders in several OECD countries. The paper builds on work conducted in the project 'Reforming the Swedish Public Employment Service', which was carried out with funding from the European Union via the Technical Support Instrument and was implemented by the OECD in cooperation with the European Commission's Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support.

Long-term unemployment remains a structural challenge for most OECD countries. Despite major efforts to address this issue, the efficiency and effectiveness of many existing active labour market policies are limited for jobseekers who face major vulnerabilities and have no ties to the labour market. Therefore, there is a need for innovative approaches that specifically address the barriers faced by long-term unemployed individuals in their labour market (re)integration. This paper discusses examples of promising practices from across Europe, which can serve as a source of inspiration for policymakers seeking new approaches to assist vulnerable jobseekers in overcoming the challenge of long-term unemployment.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on the Umbrian economy, and despite recovery of labour demand, the region faces challenges related to digitalisation, tight labour markets, and volatile demand for low-skilled jobs. To address these issues, the OECD and the Umbrian regional agency for active labour market policies (ARPAL) have collaborated to investigate the labour and skills demand of the region using big data techniques applied to online job postings. This report provides new insights into the alignment between labour and skills demand and the training options available in the training and education programmes contained in the Umbrian Regional Training Catalogue. This report builds new indicators to measure the alignment of course content with employer demands in Umbria, with results showing that alignment is relatively good for some occupations but that this can be strengthened to provide job seekers with up-to-date training options that match the demand of the labour market.

This paper examines the experiences of self-employed online freelancers working on digital labour platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on interviews with freelancers and platform managers and experts in Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. Their experiences during COVID-19 reveal issues of asymmetric power vis-à-vis platforms. Notably, they reported lack of transparency and certainty in their contracts with platforms, lack of power in negotiating with clients, and limited ability to engage with clients on other platforms. In addition, they often experienced difficulties in accessing government temporary supports for businesses during the pandemic. The paper puts forward policy recommendations to address these issues.

The green transformation of the economy is expected to lead to a sharp reduction in employment in carbon-intensive industries. For designing policies to support displaced workers, it is crucial to better understand the cost of job loss, whether there are specific effects of being displaced from a carbon-intensive sector and which workers are most at risk. By using German administrative labour market data and focusing on mass layoff events, we estimate the cost of involuntary job displacement for workers in high carbon-intensity sectors and compare it with the displacement costs for workers in low carbon-intensity sectors. We find that displaced workers from high carbon-intensity sectors have, on average, higher earnings losses and face stronger difficulties in finding a new job and recovering their earnings. Our results indicate that this is mainly due to human capital specificity, the regional clustering of carbon-intensive activities and higher wage premia in carbon-intensive firms. Workers displaced in high carbon-intensity sectors are older, face higher local labour market concentration and have fewer outside options for finding jobs with similar skill requirements. They have a higher probability to switch occupations and sectors, move to occupations that are more different in terms of skill requirements compared to the pre-displacement job, and are more likely to change workplace districts after displacement. Women, older workers and those with vocational degrees as well as workers in East Germany, experience particularly high costs in case they are displaced from high carbon-intensity sectors.

The OECD AI Principles call for AI actors to be accountable for the proper functioning of their AI systems in accordance with their role, context, and ability to act. Likewise, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises aim to minimise adverse impacts that may be associated with an enterprise’s operations, products and services. To develop ‘trustworthy’ and ‘responsible’ AI systems, there is a need to identify and manage AI risks. As calls for the development of accountability mechanisms and risk management frameworks continue to grow, interoperability would enhance efficiency and reduce enforcement and compliance costs. This report provides an analysis of the commonalities of AI risk management frameworks. It demonstrates that, while some elements may sometimes differ, all the risk management frameworks analysed follow a similar and sometimes functionally equivalent risk management process.

Le déplacement des ukrainiens dans les pays de l’OCDE s’inscrivant dans la durée, une aide supplémentaire à l’intégration est nécessaire pour parvenir à des résultats adéquats, mais la nature et la portée de cette aide peuvent ne pas correspondre aux pratiques d’intégration habituelles car il est probable que de nombreux réfugiés voudront vouloir rentrer chez eux lorsque la situation le permettra. Au vu de ces besoins apparemment contradictoires, adopter une approche de l’intégration visant un double objectif permettrait de prévoir à la fois la possibilité d’un séjour d’une durée indéterminée dans le pays d’accueil et celle d’un retour des réfugiés en Ukraine, tout en s'attachant à minimiser les éventuels obstacles au retour.