In this report, we present our latest long-term economic growth projections, providing an update to our 2015 results. We project GDP to 2050 for 32 of the largest economies in the world, which together currently account for around 85% of global GDP. We hope this analysis will be of interest to policymakers around the world, businesses making long-term investments, academics, students and economic commentators. These long-term growth projections will also feed into other PwC projects and reports.

The gig economy, as reflected by nonemployer firms, is significant and growing fast. Overall, there has been a clear surge in nonemployer firms’ — a measure of contractor and freelance individuals — business activity in the last decade, which almost certainly reflects, at least in part, the rise of online platforms. Platform-based freelancing is not yet substantially displacing payroll employment—but that could change. Despite the uptick in nonemployer contractors, payroll employment in “rides and rooms” industries has not declined during the last five years. Instead, payroll employment has increased in these industries, particularly in the passenger ground transit sectors. Online gigging in the rides and rooms industries is so far concentrated in large metropolitan areas. Gig economy activity is unevenly distributed in the rides and rooms industries. The spread of nonemployer firms between 2010 and 2014 occurred mostly in the largest metro areas. No less than 81 percent of the four-year net growth in nonemployer firms in the rides sector took place in the 25 largest metros, while 92 percent occurred in the largest 50 metros.

Business dynamism is the process by which firms continually are born, fail, expand, and contract, as some jobs are created, others are destroyed, and others still are turned over. Research has firmly established that this dynamic process is vital to productivity and sustained economic growth. Entrepreneurs play a critical role in this process, and in net job creation. But recent research shows that dynamism is slowing down. Business churning and new firm formations have been on a persistent decline during the last few decades, and the pace of net job creation has been subdued. This decline has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech. Here, the geographic aspects of business dynamism are analyzed. In particular, we look at how these trends have applied to the states and metropolitan areas throughout the United States. In short, we confirm that the previously documented declines in business dynamism in the U.S. overall are a pervasive force throughout the country geographically. In fact, we show that dynamism has declined in all fifty states and in all but a handful of the more than three hundred and sixty U.S. metropolitan areas during the last three decades. Moreover, the performance of business dynamism across the states and metros has become increasingly similar over time. In other words, the national decline in business dynamism has been a widely shared experience. While the reasons explaining this decline are still unknown, if it persists, it implies a continuation of slow growth for the indefinite future, unless for equally unknown reasons or by virtue of entrepreneurship enhancing policies (such as liberalized entry of high-skilled immigrants), these trends are reversed.

Faced with a labor market change, countries are facing the same reality: a workforce who have difficulty finding employment while employers report having recruitment difficulties. Faced with this imbalance between supply and demand for skills, countries are driven by the same desire: to ensure a better match between training and employment. For this, they use evaluation exercises and anticipation of skill needs.  All OECD countries and EU conduct such exercises since the 60s of 20esiècle (ILO, 2018). In a recent book, the OECD provides an overview of these exercises in the light of an analysis of practices in 29 countries, including Canada. The elements that have retained our attention. [googletranslate_en]

TECHNOCompétences the Sectoral Committee of labor (CASM) in information technology and communications (ICT), recently released a sector study that presents the major trends of industry and labor in the field . We learn in particular that the number of ICT professionals experienced strong growth over the past fifteen years, reaching a workforce of over 210,000 people in 2016. Interestingly, of those, just over half the work in the 'non-ICT' industries. This echoes the findings of a previous study of the Committee stressed that the majority of industries are sustainably processed today by the use of ICT professionals in the field now are strategically placed in all organizations (TECHNOCompétences, 2016, 50).  If we add to this that these professionals are themselves affected by the digitization of the economy, we have a situation which greatly increases the difficulty of the exercise information on the skills of the workforce that must ensure sectoral and government agencies. This situation is not unique to Quebec, she is experienced in many other countries, including France. Therefore, what and how?  We present two initiatives that provide the foundation for a new proactive approach to identify changes in jobs and skills constantly changing. The first TECHNOCompétences in Quebec and the second in France Strategy and Céreq in France. These initiatives are particularly relevant as they are within the guidelines of major international organizations such as OECD (2016) and the International Labor Organization (2016). [googletranslate_en]

The nowcasting which in French translates as nowcasting is an approach developed in meteorology now used in economics and in the field of evaluation and anticipation skills. The nowcasting resorts to mathematical, statistical and econometric and massive data to identify trends in this time that will shape the near future. [googletranslate_en]

We entered the fourth industrial revolution. This revolution is characterized by a fusion of the physical universe, digital and biological. Innovations - artificial intelligence and robotics, Internet of Things, augmented reality and virtual, additive manufacturing technology, nanotechnology, quantum computing, etc. - evolve at an exponential rate profoundly transforming the world we live in and with it the labor market.  Faced with these changes, we are witnessing the last twenty years with the emergence of new repositories of skills and new assessment tools and training. Skills bases to the future skills, we present here a few. [googletranslate_en]

In the last century, there was a clear distinction between white collar and blue collar workers. Today, the line between these two categories is fading in favor of the "new-collar workers."  This neologism, introduced in 2016 by Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, will first apply to employees occupying new jobs in the digital industry analysts such as cyber security, application designers, specialists cloud computing, etc. (New-collar worker, wiki)  Originally the concept, there is strong demand for skilled labor that the education system does not respond. In 2016, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (Bureau of Labor Statistics) attests to the phenomenon by showing, with supporting figures, that the demand for graduates in information and communications technology is already two times greater than supply. (TechForce Foundation, 2018)  Therefore, players in the digital industry will reflect the skills required by these jobs to find that they require a combination of specific skills - that is acquired in a vocational or technical training - with a solution knowledge base of higher education, but not necessarily an undergraduate degree. (Ohm, 2018) Hence the intermediate positioning of the new collar workers. On this basis, they will invite companies to overcome the undergraduate degree as a condition of employment. (Eichler, 2018) [googletranslate_en]

In a world of automation, digitization and automation extends to all sectors of activity, here are five strategies to ensure their employability. From a book of Davenport and Kirby (2015) these strategies are based on a perspective that states that the relationship between man and machine must be complementary. [googletranslate_en]