This publication has just been released following the workshop on "Local Employment Development" organised in Tokyo, Japan, on February 9-10, 2005.  This was a joint event of the LEED Programme and the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT), member of the LEED Partners' Club.

Against the widening regional divergences in labor market conditions which have become apparent in the sluggish economy since 1990s, there are calls for promoting policy decentralization and moves to transfer authority on employment policy to regional governments. The JILPT, in its medium-term research, analyses factors that create regional divergences in the unemployment structure, and makes proposals on industrial policy and on measures for improving the labor market conditions. As part of this research, it invited researchers from the EU countries, the U.S., and the OECD to a research workshop with the principal objective of learning from international experience.

This book includes the papers presented at the workshop with report of some successful cases of regional employment development in each country, which was added to the papers based on the discussions at the workshop. You can obtain the publication from the JILPT's Website.

For more information, please contact Sylvain Giguere