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Australia has committed to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and more recently outlined a more ambitious intermediate target for emission reductions by 2030. However, achieving these targets will be challenging given a historical reliance on coal generation and the presence of significant mining and agriculture sectors. It will require a rapid transformation of the electricity grid, significant emissions reductions in highly-polluting sectors such as industry and agriculture, and sufficient offsets generated by 'negative emissions' technologies and practices to counterbalance any emissions that cannot be fully eliminated. At the same time, Australia is particularly vulnerable to the physical impacts of climate change, as the driest inhabited continent on the planet with the majority of the population living on the coasts. Further significant reforms are required to meet the emission reduction goals, support the reallocation of workers and adapt to climate change.

This paper develops a novel classification of high-polluting occupations for a large sample of European countries. Unlike previous efforts in the literature, the classification exploits country-level data on air polluting emission intensity by industry. The country-level data allows to capture important cross-country differences, due to differences in technology and in production focus. Applying the new classification to European Labour Force Survey data shows that, on average across the countries covered, about 4% of workers are employed in high-polluting jobs, ranging from 9% in Czechia and the Slovak Republic to around 2% in Austria. These shares do not exhibit any clear decreasing trend over the past decade. High-polluting jobs are unequally distributed, being over-represented among men, workers with lower and medium educational attainment and those living in rural areas.

Japan faces serious demographic headwinds. Under current fertility, employment and immigration rates, the population would fall by 45% by 2100 and employment by 52%. Given the challenges of a shrinking and ageing population, the government has pledged to 'create a children-first economic society and reverse the birth rate decline'. One priority is to strengthen the weak financial position of youth, which leads many to delay or forgo marriage and children. Making it easier to combine paid work and family is also critical so that women are not forced to choose between a career and children. Policies should also cut the cost of raising children, the key obstacle to couples achieving their desired number of children. Given the challenge of reversing fertility trends, Japan needs to prepare for a low-fertility future by raising productivity and employment, particularly among women and older people. Breaking down labour market dualism, which disproportionately affects youth, women and older people, is a priority. Abolishing the right of firms to set a mandatory retirement age (usually at 60) and raising the pension eligibility age would also promote employment. Foreign workers are helping ease labour shortages, but more needs to be done to attract foreign talent. A comprehensive approach is needed to raise fertility, the employment rates of women and older persons and inflows of foreign workers.

Gender inequalities in Australia have steadily declined, but remain particularly visible in the labour market. Women in Australia have lower employment rates, hourly wages and hours worked than their male counterparts. Childbirth is particularly disruptive for their labour market experience. Reforms to the tax and benefits system, childcare and parental leave arrangements are all needed to reduce the barriers to female labour participation of mothers. At the same time, ensuring the adequacy of unemployment benefits will support the living standards of many low-income women given that they have become an increasing share of recipients. Single mothers face particularly high poverty risk and would also benefit from more robust arrangements around child support payments from non-custodial parents.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented global economic downturn, affecting productivity, business dynamics, and digital technology adoption. Using a comprehensive commercial database from Spiceworks Ziff Davis, this study analyses the firm-level drivers of digitalisation during the pandemic across 20 European countries. The findings show that a considerable share of firms introduced new digital technologies during the COVID-19 crisis. Notably, firms that were larger, more digitalised, and more productive before the pandemic were more likely to introduce new digital technologies in 2020 and 2021. Additionally, firms with pre-existing complementary technologies had a higher likelihood of adopting digital applications that gained momentum during the pandemic (such as digital commerce, collaborative software, cloud, and analytics). These patterns may increase polarisation among the best-performing firms and the rest of the business population. Public policy can play a key role in fostering an inclusive digital transformation in the post-pandemic era.

Greening the economy entails jobs contracting in 'high-polluting' economic activities and expanding in environment-friendly activities. Minimizing the corresponding transition costs is crucial to accelerate decarbonisation and reduce displacement costs for affected workers. Using individual-level labour force data for a large sample of European countries, this paper finds that the shares of green and high-polluting jobs remained approximately stable between 2009 and 2019, hinting at a slow or yet-to-come green transition in labour markets. Green and high-polluting jobs are unequally distributed across socioeconomic groups: women are under-represented in both green and high-polluting jobs, while green jobs are associated with higher educational attainment, and high-polluting jobs with lower educational attainment. Equally important from a policy perspective, the results show that high-polluting jobs are concentrated in rural areas. These results are confirmed by analyzing labour market transitions: for instance, while women are more likely to transition from study to job, they are significantly less likely to get a green job. Overall, the results suggest that well designed and targeted policies are needed to support efficient and inclusive labour market transitions in the greening economy: to minimize scarring effects for displaced workers, help individuals’ upskilling and reskilling, and support the matching between workers and jobs in higher demand.

In today's knowledge-driven societies, universities play a crucial role in fostering innovation and sustainable growth within their ecosystems. Improving knowledge exchange and collaboration (KEC) activities within the Italian university system is essential for societal progress, well-being, and enhancing the productivity of firms of different sizes and stages of development and generate value for society. This document offers a reform roadmap proposal for policies to enhance the knowledge exchange and collaboration system between universities and society in Italy.

Rising uncertainties and geo-political tensions, together with increasingly complex trade relations have increased the demand for monitoring global trade in a timely manner. Although it was primarily designed to ensure vessel safety, information from the Automatic Information System, which allows for the tracking of vessels across the globe, is particularly well suited for providing insights on port activity and maritime trade developments, which accounts for a large share of global trade. Data are available in quasi real time but need to be pre-processed and validated. This paper contributes to existing research in this field in two major ways. First, it proposes a new methodology to identify ports, at a higher level of granularity than in past research. Second, it builds indicators to monitor port congestion and trends in maritime trade flows and provides more granular information to better understand those flows. Those indicators will still need to be refined, by complementing the AIS database with additional data sources, but already provide a useful source of information to monitor trade, at the country and global levels.