The New Zealand Government has asked the Commission to examine how New Zealand can maximise the opportunities and manage the risks of disruptive technological change and its impact on the future of work and the workforce. The Commission will provide an independent assessment of the scale and potential impacts of rapid technological change and its disruptive impact on the future of work and the workforce in New Zealand. The overriding aim is to harness changes to maximise the wellbeing of New Zealanders. The assessment is to provide material for future government policy development and other initiatives to prepare the country for a productive, sustainable, and socially-inclusive future, despite uncertainties around the impact of technology. Two broad questions are to guide the assessment: What are the current and likely future impacts of technological change and disruption on the future of work, the workforce, labour markets, productivity and wellbeing? How can the Government better position New Zealand and New Zealanders to take advantage of innovation and technological change in terms of productivity, labour-market participation and the nature of work? The Commission has released this issues paper outlining the context and scope of the inquiry, key issues to be investigated and a list of questions to be addressed and evidence sought. The paper aims to assist individuals and organisations to participate in the inquiry.

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs are a key contributor to economic growth and national competitiveness. Yet STEM workers are perceived to be in short supply. This paper shows that the 'STEM shortage' phenomenon is explained by technological change, which introduces new job skills and makes old ones obsolete. We find that the initially high economic return to applied STEM degrees declines by more than 50 per cent in the first decade of working life. This coincides with a rapid exit of college graduates from STEM occupations. Using detailed job vacancy data, we show that STEM jobs change especially quickly over time, leading to flatter age-earnings profiles as the skills of older cohorts became obsolete. Our findings highlight the importance of technology-specific skills in explaining life-cycle returns to education, and show that STEM jobs are the leading edge of technology diffusion in the labor market.

The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for the project began in 2003. First, it presents a brief recap of PIAAC and its two predecessor international skills surveys. Second, it outlines the main themes which have been investigated to date using data from PIAAC. Third, the main findings and policy lessons drawn from PIAAC are highlighted. Finally, looking forward to the second cycle of PIAAC, for which planning is now underway, the paper suggests some priority areas for improvement to the survey design in order to add to its analytical usefulness and enhance its utility to policy makers.

This study aims at disentangling the returns to formal, non-formal and informal training and fills key knowledge gaps. Informal learning is found to be by far the most common form of job-related learning at work. Learning informally at work is found to be associated with 3.5% higher wages, on top of the wage returns of non-formal training which amount to about 11%. Work environments which apply high performance work organisation practices – i.e. where workers have more autonomy and work in teams – are found to nurture a training culture that yields high returns. Workers in these contexts are 12% more likely to experience informal learning. In addition, they also reap higher returns from the training they attend, both non-formal and informal. This suggests that HPWP may amplify the benefits of learning at work, possibly giving workers more opportunities to turn what they learn into immediate use because of the increased flexibility in organising once work.

The impact of robots on employment and trade is a highly discussed topic in the academic and public debates. Particularly, there are concerns that automation may threat jobs in emerging countries given the erosion of the labour cost advantage. We provide evidence on the effects of robots on worldwide employment, including emerging economies. To instrument the use of robots, we introduce an index of technical progress, defined as the ability of robots to carry out different tasks. Robots turn out to have a statistically significant negative impact on worldwide employment. While it is small in developed countries, for emerging economies it amounts to -14 per cent between 2005 and 2014. Furthermore, we assess cross-country effects, finding that robots in developed countries decrease off-shoring just as employment in emerging economies.

Lifelong learning research focuses on formal training, documenting a positive correlation between initial education and continuing training. This 'training gap' research disregards two important distinctions: (a) between formal and informal training, and (b) between employee skill supply and job demand. A complete account of work-life human capital formation requires simultaneous analysis of formal and informal activities, and of workers current qualifications and the skill requirements of their current jobs. Less-educated workers may hold jobs with low skill requirements providing little training since the use of high skills is irrelevant. Examining workplace training in Sweden, on the basis of indicators from the Swedish Level of Living Surveys (LNU), we find that informal training quantitatively dominates formal and that both are unequally distributed across skill categories. Job requirements essentially determine the incidence of training, while the net impact of individual education is very small. Employer decisions regarding how to structure jobs and whom to hire appear to be the primary factors behind the training gap in lifelong learning.

Occupations are bundles of inseparable skill requirements and tasks. We propose a novel approach for studying the relationship between wages and bundles of occupational skills and tasks. We predict occupational wages using a regression tree approach which also provides an empirically powerful aggregation scheme where detailed occupations with similar wages and job requirements are combined into 15 large occupation groups. Our empirical analysis is carried out on a dataset obtained by combining O*Net information on job attributes with the occupational wage and employment information from Occupational Employment Statistics. Not having a priori information on which O*Net variables belong in a wage equation, the first step in our analysis is to perform factor analysis on a number of O*NET categories that represent basic job skill requirements and job attributes. The second step is to use a regression tree to group the detailed SOC occupations into broader aggregates. These occupational aggregates are then used to non-parametrically analyze the well-known hollowing out phenomenon and the increase in log wage variance from 2005 to 2017.

The objective of this paper is to study the evolution of the incidence and profile of nonstandard workers in selected countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe and Central Asia in the past two decades. The analysis of the profile of this group of workers focuses on three key characteristics that could approximate their productivity: education level, labor income, and task content (manual/cognitive or routine/nonroutine) performed by the workers in their occupations. While in Latin America most of the countries show a stable prevalence in recent decades, in Europe and Central Asia there is not any common pattern across countries. In contrast, from the point of view of the profile of nonstable employment, there are several common characteristics among these types of workers across countries, such as improved level of education, performance of more intensive nonroutine cognitive tasks, and higher variance of labor income. The findings suggest that nonstandard workers are a heterogeneous group. The increase in the incidence of nonstandard employment and its heterogeneity generates concern about the lower level of insurance against certain risks that workers face. Therefore, a greater understanding of the trends in the prevalence and characteristics of nonstandard workers is needed to design regulation and policies oriented to these types of workers.

We assess the relationship between numeracy skills and numeracy practices among adults in everyday life and at work from the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), an international survey of about 250 000 adults aged 16-65 years old conducted by the OECD in 33 countries/economies. The level of proficiency and the intensity of engagement in numeracy practices are two embedded aspects of numeracy. Proficient adults use numeracy frequently and adults who regularly engage in numeracy practices improve their performance. Individual and contextual factors influence, in different ways across countries, the strength of these links. The intensity of the use of numeracy in everyday life decreases as the lapse of time since a person's studies increases. Moreover, employed people engage in mathematical activities less in the private setting if they do not do so intensively in the workplace.