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The Arctic is a vital region that helps preserve the balance of the global climate. The Arctic environment is particularly sensitive to short-lived climate pollutants, including black carbon, due to their strong warming effect. With ambitious policy action to reduce air pollutants, Arctic Council countries would obtain a positive effect on health and the environment throughout their territory, while also helping to slow down climate change by reducing emissions of black carbon. This report calls for ambitious policy action to reduce air pollution in Arctic Council countries, highlighting the environmental, health, and economic benefits from policy action.

Vocational education and training (VET) plays a central role in preparing young people for work, developing the skills of adults and responding to the labour-market needs of the economy. Teachers and leaders in VET can have an immediate and positive influence on learners’ skills, employability and career development. However, when compared to general academic programmes, there is limited evidence on the characteristics of teachers and institutional leaders in VET and the policies and practices of attracting and preparing them. VET teachers require a mix of pedagogical skills and occupational knowledge and experience, and need to keep these up to date to reflect changing skill needs in the labour market and evolving teaching and learning environments. This report fills the knowledge gap on teachers and leaders in VET, and produces new insights into what strategies and policies can help develop and maintain a well-prepared workforce. It zooms in on VET teacher shortages; strategies for attracting and retaining teachers; initial training and professional development opportunities for teachers; the use of innovative technologies and pedagogical strategies; and the important role of institutional leaders and strategies for better preparing and supporting them.

Skills are central to the capacity of countries and people to thrive in a rapidly changing world. Recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic will require countries to co-ordinate interventions to help recent graduates find jobs, reactivate the skills of displaced workers and use skills effectively in workplaces. Megatrends such as globalisation, climate change, technological progress and demographic change will continue to reshape work and society. Countries should take action now to develop and use more effectively the skills required for the world of the future and at the same time make their skills systems more resilient and adaptable in the context of change and uncertainty. The OECD Skills Strategy provides countries with a strategic approach to assess their skills challenges and opportunities. The foundation of this approach is the OECD Skills Strategy framework allowing countries to explore how they can improve i) developing relevant skills, ii) using skills effectively, and iii) strengthening the governance of the skills system. This report applies the OECD Skills Strategy framework to Southeast Asia, providing an overview of the region’s skills challenges and opportunities in the context of COVID-19 and megatrends, and identifying good practices for improving skills outcomes. This report lays the foundation for a more fully elaborated Skills Strategy for Southeast Asia.

This paper presents a stocktaking of standalone chapters in trade agreements dedicated to good regulatory practices and international regulatory co-operation. While standalone regulatory policy chapters in trade agreements remain a new development, they signal countries’ increasing interest in elevating the visibility and ambition of regulatory policy, in line with their commitments in the 2012 OECD Recommendation of the Council on Regulatory Policy and Governance and the 2005 APEC-OECD Integrated Checklist on Regulatory Reform. Still, the level of ambition of these chapters varies widely depending on the state of play of regulatory policy in trading partners. By comparing the main substantive and structural features of these chapters, this stocktaking aims to inform the development of similar chapters in future trade agreements.

The U.S. population has become increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas. However, there are striking differences in between the performances of big cities: some of them have been very successful and have been able to pull away from the rest, while others have stagnated or even declined. The main objective of this paper is to characterize U.S. metropolitan areas according to their labor-market performance: which metropolitan areas are struggling and falling behind? Which ones are flourishing? Which ones are staying resilient by adapting to shocks? We rely on an unsupervised machine learning technique called Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) to conduct this empirical investigation. The data comes from a number of sources including the new Job-to-Job (J2J) flows dataset from the Census Bureau, which reports the near universe of job movements in and out of employment at the metropolitan level. We characterize the fate of metropolitan areas by tracking their job mobility rate, unemployment rate, income growth, population increase, net change in job-to-job mobility and GDP growth. Our results indicate that the 372 metropolitan areas under examination can be categorized into four statistically distinct groups: booming areas (67), prosperous mega metropolitan areas (99), resilient areas (149) and distressed metropolitan areas (57). The results show that areas that are doing well are predominantly located in the south and the west. The main features of their success have revolved around embracing digital technologies, adopting local regulations friendly to job mobility and business creation, avoiding strict rules on land-use and housing market, and improving the wellbeing of the city’s population. These results highlight that cities adopting well-targeted policies can accelerate the return to growth after a shock.

Job mobility is essential for a well-functioning market economy and for individual workers to boost their wages. This paper provides a re-assessment of job mobility in the United States during 2000-2018, based on a novel administrative data source covering almost all workers and job flows. First, aggregate job hire and job separation rates have declined over time, especially in the 2000s. This is mainly driven by flows into and out of nonemployment, while job-to-job hires during 2016-2018 had recovered to their peak levels prior to the global financial crisis. Examination of job mobility across different individual and firm-level characteristics shows comparatively higher job-to-job flows for youth, the less educated, non-whites and individuals working in young firms. In addition, observed job movers in these groups experience the largest earnings gain on average from job-to-job changes. Second, a spatial look at job mobility shows net job-to-job flows towards Western and Southern States. The aggregate rate of interstate job-to-job hires has been stable since 2000 and the observed job-to-job movers on average get a substantial boost to earnings by moving farther away and switching industries. Third, the paper briefly considers the influence of demographic changes on job mobility, one important driver identified in previous work. While ageing may explain around half of the downward trend in job hire and separation rates, other factors matter too.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on SME access to finance. In particular, the sudden drop in revenues created acute liquidity shortages, threatening the survival of many viable businesses. The report documents an increase in demand for bank lending in the first half of 2020, and a steady supply of credit thanks to government interventions. On the other hand, other sources of finance declined, in particular early-stage equity. This paper, a special edition of Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs, focuses on the impacts of COVID-19 on SME access to finance, along with government policy responses. It reveals that the pre-crisis financing environment was broadly favourable for SMEs and entrepreneurs, who benefited from low interest rates, loose credit standards and an increasingly diverse offer of financing instruments. It documents the unprecedented scope and scale of the policy responses undertaken by governments world-wide, and details their key characteristics, and outlines the principal issues and policy challenges for the next phases of the pandemic, such as the over-indebtedness of SMEs and the need to continue to foster a diverse range of financing instruments for SMEs.

The U.S. population is becoming increasingly urban and has gradually shifted to the south and west. Policy restrictions have played a role in preventing dynamic areas expanding, and when they do expand it can be through low-density housing sprawl. Land use restrictions and a sluggish housing supply as well as difficulties in making timely and co-ordinated supply of infrastructure have hindered workers benefiting from new opportunities including through moving. Policies can address these issues by targeting housing affordability, help families move and invest in infrastructure to improve accessibility and connectivity.

Occupational licensing and non-competition agreements are two important types of labour market regulation in the United States, both covering around one fifth of all workers. While some regulation is needed to protect safety and ensure quality of services, it also creates entry barriers and reduces competition with important costs for job mobility, earnings and productivity growth. Employment opportunities for low-skilled workers and disadvantaged groups tend to be particularly affected by these barriers. The States are mainly responsible for labour market regulation and the variation across States is similar to the variation in the European Union. Harmonising requirements and scaling back occupational licensing as well as restricting the use of non-competition covenants could help to circumvent the secular decline in dynamism. However, attempts to reform often face stiff opposition from associations of professionals. The federal government has limited influence, but can in some cases help by shifting the burden from workers to meet regulatory requirements onto States and employers to show that high and differing regulatory standards are needed.