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In a rapidly changing world of work, adults in Australia are being challenged to upskill, retrain and consider alternative career paths. Mid-career adults are in a unique position: they have acquired considerable skills and work experience but still have many years left in the labour market before retirement. They thus may need help to build on their existing skills to progress but have time before retirement to recoup their training investments. If well designed, career guidance can facilitate employment transitions for this group and usefully inform their training choices. This report assesses the career guidance services that are currently available to mid-career adults in Australia and puts them into an international perspective. New online survey data shows Australia performs well in OECD comparison with respect to the use of career guidance services, but there is room to strengthen the inclusiveness of these services and to tailor them to the needs of mid-career adults. The report provides concrete recommendations in this regard.

OECD countries deliver publicly-funded employment services through different institutional arrangements. While in most OECD countries the majority of such services are delivered by public employment services, in two in five OECD and EU countries (or regions) they are partly or fully contracted out to external providers, including for-profit and not-for-profit entities. Contracting out employment services to outside providers offers many potential benefits: an increased flexibility to scale capacity in line with changes in unemployment, the possibility of offering services more cost-effectively, the option to better tailor services through the use of specialised service providers and the possibility to offer jobseekers choice of providers. However, achieving these benefits will depend on the actual design and monitoring of the contracting arrangements that are put in place. Focusing on the job brokerage, counselling and case-management employment services typically provided by public agencies, this paper reviews the experiences of OECD countries that have contracted out employment services through outcome-based payment schemes. It highlights the need to carefully consider questions related to the design and implementation of this form of contracting: fostering competition amongst potential providers, setting appropriate minimum service requirements and prices for different client groups, and ensuring the accountability of providers through monitoring and evaluations. These issues are discussed based on country examples, which are also detailed in factsheets contained in the online annex of the paper.

Australia’s financial sector entered the COVID-19 crisis in a strong position, enabling it to play a key role in cushioning the pandemic’s impact. Once the national economy reopens, policymakers will turn their focus to securing a robust, sustainable and inclusive recovery. However, low interest rates are boosting house prices and demand for credit in a banking sector that is already highly exposed to housing and highly indebted households. At the same time, many young and innovative firms – which are the drivers of job creation and productivity growth - struggle to access finance. And financial frictions impede the alignment of financial flows with environmental sustainability. Addressing these obstacles, through regulatory change, developing alternatives to bank finance and facilitating technological transformation, would raise productivity and set the recovery on a more sustainable path. Financial inclusion and financial literacy are comparatively high and financial education is entrenched at schools. Further efforts are still needed to address persistent gaps in outcomes for disadvantaged groups, accompanied by stronger consumer protections to ensure that the recovery is inclusive.

L'apprentissage, le développement et le bien-être des enfants sont directement influencés par leurs interactions quotidiennes avec les autres enfants, les adultes, leur famille et l'environnement. Ce processus interactif est connu sous le nom de « qualité du processus » et conduit à une question clé: quelles politiques établissent les meilleures conditions pour que les enfants vivent des interactions de haute qualité dans les établissements d'éducation et d'accueil de la petite enfance (EAJE) ? Ce rapport examine cinq principaux leviers politiques et leur effet sur la qualité des processus, en se concentrant particulièrement sur les programmes et la pédagogie, et le développement de la main-d'œuvre. Il présente des indicateurs couvrant 26 pays et juridictions, 56 cadres curriculaires différents et plus de 120 types différents d'établissements d'EAJE.

This report offers an initial overview of the available information regarding the circumstances, nature and outcomes of the education of schoolchildren during the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns of March-April 2020. Its purpose is primarily descriptive: it presents information from high quality quantitative studies on the experience of learning during this period in order to ground the examination and discussion of these issues in empirical examples. Information is presented on three interrelated topics: the nature of the educational experience during the period of lockdowns and school closures; the home environment in which education took place for the vast majority of schoolchildren; the effects on the mental health and learning outcomes for children during this period. The data come primarily from 5 countries (France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States) with additional information on some aspects for 6 additional countries (Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Finland, Italy and the Netherlands). This report will be of interest to policy makers, academics, education stakeholders and anyone interested in a first international empirical analysis of the effects of the pandemic on the lives and education of schoolchildren.

COVID-19 is likely to leave long-lasting effects on local labour markets. It is accelerating a pre-existing trend towards automation, as firms look even more to new technologies to pandemic proof their operations. While automation offers the opportunity to boost productivity, it can also lead to job polarisation as vulnerable workers who lose their jobs may not have the skills needed in a changing labour market. This OECD report examines the potential impacts of automation on people and places across Australia. It also sheds light on policies and programmes that can help regions and cities to prepare for the future of work.

The consequences of the pandemic for potential output will partly hinge on its impact on high productivity firms, and more generally the ongoing process of productivity-enhancing reallocation – the rate at which scarce resources are reallocated from less productive to more productive firms. While Schumpeter (1939) originally proposed that recessions can accelerate this process, the more ‘random’ nature of the COVID-19 shock coupled with a policy response that prioritised preservation (over reallocation) raises questions about whether job reallocation remained productivity-enhancing over the course of the pandemic. Despite these headwinds, our analysis based on novel high-frequency employment data for Australia shows that job reallocation (and firm exit) remained solidly connected to firm productivity over 2020. The greater resilience of high productivity firms is significant, given that an indiscriminate shakeout of such firms – and the associated destruction of firm-specific intangible capital – would have imparted significant scarring effects. As it turns out, the temporary nature of Australia’s job retention scheme (JobKeeper) made an important (and surprising) positive contribution to this process, with material consequences for aggregate productivity. But the scheme appears to have become more distortive over time, justifying its timely withdraw – on productivity grounds at least.