Economy

This paper estimates the data intensity of occupations/sectors (i.e. the share of job postings per occupation/sector related to the production of data) using natural language processing (NLP) on job advertisements in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Online job advertisement data collected by Lightcast provide timely and disaggregated insights into labour demand and skill requirements of different professions. The paper makes three major contributions. First, indicators created from the Lightcast data add to the understanding of digital skills in the labour market. Second, the results may advance the measurement of data assets in national account statistics. Third, the NLP methodology can handle up to 66 languages and can be adapted to measure concepts beyond digital skills. Results provide a ranking of data intensity across occupations, with data analytics activities contributing most to aggregate data intensity shares in all three countries. At the sectoral level, the emerging picture is more heterogeneous across countries. Differences in labour demand primarily explain those variations, with low data-intensive professions contributing most to aggregate data intensity in the United Kingdom. Estimates of investment in data, using a sum of costs approach and sectoral intensity shares, point to lower levels in the United Kingdom and Canada than in the United States.

This paper analyses persistence and change in the regional league table of entrepreneurship performance in the United States in comparison with England and Wales and West Germany. It examines whether regional rankings in start-up and self-employment rates in the United States are as sticky over time as in these European countries over approximately century, half-century and 30-year periods, or whether the United States is different. It identifies the types of regions that improve markedly ('leapfroggers') or decline sharply ('plungers') in their league table positions and the reasons for these changes and compares the countries on these issues. The paper draws out policy implications on regional levelling-up of entrepreneurship activity. It also sets out an agenda for further research.

The American middle class has shrunk in size since 1970 according to most definitions. This 'hollowing' out of the United States income distribution could result in disillusionment, diminished political engagement, and declining trust in institutions. The American middle class faces two major challenges, among others. First, child care costs in the United States are high and availability is low. Improving enrolment in child care has the potential to reverse the fall in female labour market participation since the financial crisis and result in improved well-being and economic growth. Public funding for child care programmes should be raised, and programme eligibility should be widened to benefit middle-income parents. Second, the climate transition will entail major changes to middle-class lifestyles. Reductions in US household emissions from housing and transportation will be key to achieving the overall emission reduction targets, and may prove costly. Workers in carbon-intensive sectors of the economy and households living in regions that rely on carbon-intensive activities will be affected as resources shift to greener sectors. A national climate strategy should be developed that explicitly takes into account emissions inequalities and the redistributive effects of climate policies. Active labour market policies will be key to achieving a just transition, and existing home weatherisation programmes should be expanded to cover the middle-class.

Blockchain is mainstreaming, but the number of blockchain for development use-cases with proven success beyond the pilot stage remain relatively few. This paper outlines key blockchain concepts and implications in order to help policymakers reach realistic conclusions when considering its use. The paper surveys the broad landscape of blockchain for development to identify where the technology can optimise development impact and minimise harm. It subsequently critically examines four successful applications, including the World Food Programme’s Building Blocks, Oxfam’s UnBlocked Cash project, KfW’s TruBudget and Seso Global. As part of the on-going work co-ordinated by the OECD’s Blockchain Policy Centre, this paper asserts that post-COVID-19, Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors and their development partners have a unique opportunity to shape blockchain’s implementation.

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 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.

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.