This report provides a qualitative understanding of the benefits of training levies and their impacts in order to better understand how levies affect employer behaviour. To achieve this, the research sets out the following objectives at a high level: • What does an effective training levy system look like? • What is the impact of the current levy systems? • What lessons can be learned in order to encourage employers to participate in levy type systems more widely? What features are most attractive/persuasive to employers? These objectives have been pursued through a combination of desk research and a small number of interviews with levy operators, employers and stakeholders. The research provides indicative findings to further develop our understanding about employer attitudes and opinions on these issues.

This report seeks to identify today's innovations that could lead to new kinds of job opportunities for youth under four alternative scenarios. The goal is to identify key leverage points to work with organizations, corporations, and other large employers in building future jobs for the young people, starting today. The report uses the alternative scenarios methodology developed at the University of Hawaii to envision four archetypal futures: (1) growth - the flexing economy, where increasing competition and automation force workers to continuously upgrade skills or risk losing out on opportunities; (2) collapse - the growing gap, where increasing automation reducing the number of both low- and high-skill jobs is grossly mishandled and results in a deep social and economic divide; (3) constraint - oDesk inside, where highly networked and internally coordinated firms become efficient economic forces and major employers of coordinated workforces; and (4) transformation - the amplified individual, where technologies only available to large organizations now empower employees to splinter off and create single-person companies and ventures.

This paper raises basic questions about the process of economic growth. It questions the assumption, nearly universal since Solow's seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. The paper is only about the United States and views the future from 2007 while pretending that the financial crisis did not happen. Its point of departure is growth in per-capita real GDP in the frontier country since 1300, the U.K. until 1906 and the U.S. afterwards. Growth in this frontier gradually accelerated after 1750, reached a peak in the middle of the 20th century, and has been slowing down since. The paper is about "how much further could the frontier growth rate decline?"

This paper shows that high-tech employment – broadly defined as all workers in high-tech sectors but also workers with STEM degrees in low-tech sectors – has increased in Europe over the past decade. Moreover, we estimate that every high-tech job in a region creates five additional low-tech jobs in that region because of the existence of a local high-tech job multiplier. The paper also shows how the presence of a local high-tech job multiplier results in convergence is happening at a glacial pace, and some suggestive evidence is presented that lifting several institutional barriers to innovation in Europe’s lagging regions would speed up convergence leading to faster high-tech as well as overall employment while also addressing Europe’s regional inequalities.

This paper presents an overview of some of the recent literature about the long-run changes in labour market outcomes in advanced economies. It shows that the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, with inventions in the second half of the 19th century that had a lasting impact up to 1980, resulted in skill upgrading and decreasing overall wage inequality. To the contrary, the Computer Revolution that started in the 1980s is no longer unambiguously skill-upgrading but characterized by an underlying process of job polarization and an increase in upper-tail and overall wage inequality. However, the paper concludes by providing arguments in favour of optimism about future computerization as long as our labour markets are able to provide the necessary worker skills to support such changes.

In April 2010, the UK Commission took over strategic ownership of the Investors in People (IIP) Standard. This evidence review draws on a wide range of research from the last 10 years to develop a deeper understanding of how IIP is perceived and to provide evidence of the impact of the Standard on the businesses which are accredited. The review provides the UK Commission with a consistent narrative on IIP to date. Over the past twenty years Investors in People has become an enduring feature of the UK skills policy landscape, as a training tool and as a business development tool for organisations. There is evidence of a continuing concentration of accreditations among larger organisations and employers in the public sector. The review identifies many reasons why employers engage with IIP. These differences in motivation are likely to influence the impact of IIP on organisations, which are commonly measured in the literature as relating to training levels, operational performance and business outcomes. There is a mixed understanding among employers and stakeholders as to whether IIP is a training tool, a business development tool, or both. The report raises interesting questions about the future objectives of IIP in encouraging more employers to invest in workforce capability.

Between the 1980s and the 2000s, the largest ever positive labour supply shock occurred, resulting from demographic trends and from the inclusion of China and eastern Europe into the World Trade Organization. This led to a shift in manufacturing to Asia, especially China; a stagnation in real wages; a collapse in the power of private sector trade unions; increasing inequality within countries, but less inequality between countries; deflationary pressures; and falling interest rates. This shock is now reversing. As the world ages, real interest rates will rise, inflation and wage growth will pick up and inequality will fall. What is the biggest challenge to our thesis? The hardest prior trend to reverse will be that of low interest rates, which have resulted in a huge and persistent debt overhang, apart from some deleveraging in advanced economy banks. Future problems may now intensify as the demographic structure worsens, growth slows, and there is little stomach for major inflation. Are we in a trap where the debt overhang enforces continuing low interest rates, and those low interest rates encourage yet more debt finance? There is no silver bullet, but we recommend policy measures to switch from debt to equity finance.

Key findings include: IIP was more likely to be seen as a business improvement tool among Human Resources (HR) staff, whereas senior managers tended to view the Standard as a more narrowly focussed framework for HR colleagues. The HR function tended to recommend, own and lead IIP accreditation, but senior managers, directors or the chief executive tended to make the final decision about whether to (re)accredit. Long-term accredited organisations understood the purpose of IIP and used the Standard to manage change, reflective of a continuous improvement philosophy. These employers adapted how IIP is applied to their organisation, and in doing so continued to make it relevant and ensure the longevity of its value. Previously accredited IIP employers felt IIP provided the firm with an initial one-off benefit, but had run its useful course within an organisation. For previously accredited employers, consideration needs to be given to how employers can continue to derive value from the assessment process. De-committed employers reported that the amount of work required implementing processes for a successful IIP accreditation were substantial. Some businesses may need additional support in enabling them to recognise and make use of IIP in tough business conditions, in a variety of circumstances.

This essay series re-examines the history of technological advancement, the impact on jobs and industry, and the likely outcomes for Canada in the future. Western societies have exhibited a continuing worry that automation, particularly automation associated with artificial intelligence, will lead to massive unemployment and the impoverishment of large segments of society. In different epochs, technological change has triggered concerns and social protests. Those concerns date back to the early stages of the industrial revolution and the use of coal-fired weaving machines to automate textile manufacturing, and they continue through to the present-day and adoption of computerized algorithms that “learn” how to automate tasks through the use of data-driven “machine learning.” In fact, the history of automation affirms that concerns about technological change causing widespread unemployment are misguided