Reports

With the rising economic importance of human resources and skills, employment and training agencies are now often expected to play a more important role in local strategies to support new job creation, facilitate restructuring and increase productivity. The OECD Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED) Programme has developed a series of reviews on Local Job Creation to examine the contribution of local labour market policy to boosting quality employment and enhancing productivity. In Slovenia, the review has looked at the range of institutions and bodies involved in employment and skills policies, focusing on local strategies in the the Drava and South-east Slovenia regions.
 

This review assesses the performance of Slovenia, including looking at how Slovenia might increase the impact of its aid through a tighter thematic focus and geographic footprint, a stronger focus on results and better mainstreaming of gender and environment across its development co-operation.

Giving people better opportunities to participate actively in the labour market improves well-being. It also helps countries to cope with rapid population ageing by mobilising more fully each country’s potential labour resources. However, weak labour market attachment of some groups in society reflects a range of barriers to working or moving up the jobs ladder. This report on Slovenia is the second country study published in a series of reports looking into how activation policies can encourage greater labour market participation of all groups in society with a special focus on the most disadvantaged. Labour market and activation policies are well developed in Slovenia. However, the global financial crisis hit Slovenia hard and revealed some structural weaknesses in the system, which have contributed to a high level of long-term unemployment and low employment rates for some groups. This report on Slovenia therefore focuses on activation policies to improve labour market outcomes for four groups: long-term unemployed people; low-skilled workers; older workers; and workers who were made or are at risk of becoming displaced. There is room to improve policies through promoting longer working lives and through enabling the Employment Service and related institutions to help more harder-to-place jobseekers back into employment.