Recent international research has highlighted how the effects of changes in technology and markets vary among different parts of a country. Understanding this regional dimension of economic performance can help explain New Zealand’s aggregate productivity performance and how this performance could be improved. This working paper New jobs, old jobs: the evolution of work in New Zealand's cities and towns uses Census data from 1976 to illustrate the changing economic geography of New Zealand’s cities and regions. This research distinguishes the employment dynamics of New Zealand’s large urban areas from those of smaller ones and shows how the transition paths out of manufacturing and into professional services sectors have varied among urban areas. It also shows how the economies of most cities and towns in New Zealand have become less reliant on specialist industries and more like each other, which has implications for regional labour mobility and government policy. While the material is largely descriptive, its aim is to unravel the effects of several different forces on the evolution of jobs, towns and cities. This paper is not designed to make predictions about either the future of work or the future of regions. Rather, by documenting the evolution of regional employment patterns in New Zealand over the last 40 years, it aims to help understand how New Zealand has got to its current situation. A Cut to the chase summarises the paper, explaining what it reveals and means for policymakers.

This paper uses measures of cognitive and noncognitive skills in an expanded definition of human capital to examine how schooling and skills differ between men and women and how those differences relate to gender gaps in earnings across nine middle-income countries. The analysis finds that post-secondary schooling and cognitive skills are more important for women's earnings at the lower end and middle of the earnings distribution, and that men and women have positive returns to openness to new experiences and risk-taking behavior and negative returns to hostile attribution bias. Especially at the lower end of the earnings distribution, women are disadvantaged not so much by having lower human capital than men, but by institutional factors such as wage structures that reward women's human capital systematically less than men's.

With an estimated 724 million extreme poor people living in developing countries, and the world’s demographics bifurcating into an older north and a younger south, there are substantial economic incentives and benefits for people to migrate. There are also important market and regulatory failures that constrain mobility and reduce the net benefits of migration. This paper reviews the recent literature and proposes a conceptual framework to better integrate and coordinate policies for addressing the different market and regulatory failures. The paper advances five types of interventions in need of particular attention in terms of design, implementation and evaluation; namely, 1) active labor market programs that serve local, regional and foreign markets; 2) remittances and investment subsidies to promote job creation and labor productivity growth; 3) social insurance programs that cover all jobs and facilitate labor mobility; 4) labor taxes to internalize the social costs of migration in receiving regions; and 5) more flexible, private sector driven schemes to regulate the flow of migrants and minimize irregular migration.

This paper looks at the importance of mechanisms that give formal recognition to vocational skills acquired through work-based learning and how such mechanisms might be developed. It describes how skill recognition can benefit individuals, employers and society as a whole, and identifies in which contexts skill recognition has the highest potential to bring benefits. The focus is on three tools that are commonly used to shorten the path to a formal qualification: admission into a programme, reduced programme duration and qualification without a mandatory programme. For each of these tools, this paper sets out country approaches, discusses common challenges that arise in their implementation and advances policy messages to support policy design and implementation.

Labour markets across the OECD have polarised in recent decades, as the share of middle-skill occupations has declined relative to that of both high- and low-skill occupations. This paper shows that, contrary to what is often assumed in the public debate, job polarisation has not resulted in a decline in the share of households with middle-income across 18 OECD countries. Most of the changes in the share of middle-income households result instead from changes in the propensity of workers in different occupations to be in it. In fact the results point to a change in the relationship between occupational skill levels and household income as both middle and high skill jobs increasingly fail to deliver on the promise of the relative income status traditionally associated with their skill level. These changes might help explain some of the social frustration that has been at the centre of the political debate in recent years.

Using individual level data on task composition at work for 30 advanced and emerging economies, we find that women, on average, perform more routine tasks than men?tasks that are more prone to automation. To quantify the impact on jobs, we relate data on task composition at work to occupation level estimates of probability of automation, controlling for a rich set of individual characteristics (e.g., education, age, literacy and numeracy skills). Our results indicate that female workers are at a significantly higher risk for displacement by automation than male workers, with 11 percent of the female workforce at high risk of being automated given the current state of technology, albeit with significant cross-country heterogeneity. The probability of automation is lower for younger cohorts of women, and for those in managerial positions.

The rapid emergence of gig economy platforms that use digital technologies to intermediate labour on a per-task basis has triggered an intense policy debate about the economic and social implications. This paper takes stock of the emerging evidence. The results suggest that gig economy platforms' size remains modest (1-3 per cent of overall employment). Their growth has been most pronounced in a small number of services industries with high shares of own-account workers, suggesting that thus far they have been a substitute for traditional self-employment rather than dependent employment. New evidence provided in this paper is consistent with positive effects of platform growth on overall employment and small negative or insignificant effects on dependent employment and wages. While most empirical studies suggest that platforms are more efficient in matching workers to clients, reductions in barriers to work could offset such productivity-enhancing effects by creating employment opportunities for low-productivity workers. Fully reaping the potential benefits from gig economy platforms while protecting workers and consumers requires adapting existing policy settings in product and labour markets and applying them to traditional businesses and platforms on an equal footing.

This paper investigates changes in the task content, methods and tools of European jobs from 1995 to 2015. Drawing on the taxonomy of tasks proposed by Bisello and Fernández-Macías (2016), this work tries to better understand whether changes in the average intensity of tasks performance are the result of changes in the shares of employment across jobs, or changes in the task content within-jobs, or both. The main findings from a combined analysis of the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) and European Jobs monitor data (EJM) suggest that jobs with more social task content expanded relative to the rest, but this is in contrast with a decline in the amount of social tasks people actually do in those (and other) jobs over the same period. A similar contradictory trend can be observed in terms of routine tasks, with compositional and intrinsic changes going in opposite directions: an actual increase in the total levels of routine at work is recorded, notwithstanding marginal compositional declines. The implications of these findings in the context of the current debate on the impact of technological change on employment are discussed.

The gig economy – in which digital platforms link workers with the purchasers of their services – is growing globally. Yet there has been little research to date on its impacts in low- and middle-income countries or on gendered experiences of gig work. This lack of knowledge critically limits the ability of policy-makers to understand women’s experiences of the gig economy and, therefore, to develop evidence-based policy responses to ensure the gig economy works for all involved. This paper presents a wide-ranging review of evidence on workers’ experiences of the ‘on-demand’ gig economy, which typically provides less-skilled and lower-remunerated jobs than other forms of gig work, and situates the gig economy within wider technological, economic and labour market trends. It highlights the impact of the gig economy on women, who face disadvantages related to poverty and intersecting inequalities, and lays out next steps to fill knowledge gaps to ensure apt policy and regulation in the gig economy era.