Creating new opportunities for employment and encouraging people to find jobs is a major challenge for most governments. Across OECD countries, about one in three people of working age is either unemployed, looking for a job, or not attempting to enter the labour market.

Faced with ageing populations, how can governments best increase employment rates? How can companies and citizens adjust to, and take advantage of, changes brought about by new technologies, globalisation, and labour-rich countries such as China and India? 

A decade ago the OECD Jobs Strategy focused on policies to cut high and persistent unemployment. At the conference Boosting Jobs and Incomes - organised jointly by Human Ressources and Social Development Canada and the OECD -, ministers, business leaders, unions, academics and representatives from civil society discussed the lessons that have emerged from the assessment of the Jobs Strategy, defining policies that work, and those that don't. They discussed how a mix of measures - tax and welfare reform, wage and working-time flexibility, reform of labour and product market regulations, as well as active labour market policies and training - can respond to the new challenges.

On the first day, 15 June, representatives of public authorities, social partners, academics and civil society participated. The second day, 16 June, took the form of a high-level meeting of the OECD's Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Committee and the Economic Policy Committee, at ministerial level.