May 2024

Pillars

Pathways to Inclusive Labour Markets

Laurels, please
Mission Accomplished
It was a tall order: Illuminate the future of labour markets. And that, of all things, in times of labour facing artificial intelligence, extreme automation, shifting supply chains and the green transformation. The Pillars multidisciplinary, multinational and multitalented team of both young and seasoned researchers made it look like a walk in the park. Over three years, they used cutting-edge technologies to trawl through, combine and analyse a huge corpus of unstructured data to draw a vast array of policy-relevant conclusions. Policymakers, workers, students, employers, educators and John and Jane can feel illuminated.
Read the Key Insights Report

Spreading the Word
Policy Insights
Over the course of the project, Pillars strove to make its findings available to both stakeholders and the generally interested in a timely manner not only on its website, but also through workshops and conferences. Following is a selection of some of the insights that were presented at the various workshops.

Coping with the Digital Onslaught
The most obvious driver of change in labour markets everywhere is digital automation. Jobs, skills demand, and wage levels will all be affected, leading in turn to socioeconomic adjustments. Now is the time to devise appropriate policies to ensure that investment, education, and skills training keep up with emerging technologies and the resulting socioeconomic shifts. The Pillars London workshop provided a sound policy roadmap.

Technology Effects on Regional Labour Markets
Digital automation technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robotics, will have noticeable, but varying, effects on regional labour markets. Clever upskilling and reskilling efforts will be necessary to make the best out of the new technologies while preserving employment and wages, as the Utrecht Pillars workshop showed.

Policy Tools and Guidelines for Inclusive Employment Strategies
True to its focus on policymakers and key stakeholders, the final Pillars workshop, held in Brussels last December, presented and discussed the policy tools developed throughout the Pillars project and shared the lessons learned and insights gained on inclusive labour markets and the future of work.

Digitisation, AI and the Labour Outcomes
A Pillars workshop in Paris explored a number of aspects related to how digital technologies, in particular AI, will play out in the labour market. One particular area of focus was how economies may transition to the dreaded Artificial General Intelligence, i.e. the kind that can most closely compete with humans. Or outcompete them.

Unlikely Trailblazers
With its penchant for defending sunset technologies, such as the internal combustion engine, the German manufacturing industry would seem like an unlikely standard-bearer for the green skills revolution. And yet, there you have it. As it turns out, it is, of all branches, German carmakers that are indeed at the forefront of developing and employing these zeitgeist skills among its workforce. Kudos to them.

How Novel Ways of Leveraging Data Help Reveal Future Skills Needs
Two heavyweights in labour market research—Pillars and the ifo Institute— plus the Chamber of Commerce and Industry for Munich and Upper Bavaria, the foremost organisation with hands-on experience in what skills firms really need, got together to discuss the latest findings with representatives of industry, public administration and politics, regarding how data can be leveraged to ascertain not only the state of skills availability, but also which skills will be needed in the future.

Publications
Horn of Plenty
Pillars turned out to be terrifically prolific in its scientific publication output, with three dozen articles in journals or working paper series or policy reports. A very brief selection follows.

Governance of Artificial Intelligence
A tall order: at the breakneck pace of AI evolution, governing or regulating it is daunting, but essential for society to benefit from the impact of AI. Just how? This special issue provides some pointers.
Research Policy, Volume 53, Issue 3, 2024

The EU and Global Value Chains
How is technology affecting the relationship between EU countries and industries in global value chains and their employment structure? An empirical analysis covering 21 EU countries provides answers.
Research Policy, Volume 53, Issue 3, 2024

Skill Mismatch and the Costs of Job Displacement
The psychological blow and financial stress that usually accompany losing your job are not the only burdens: A further one is the risk that the skills you have no longer match those required on the labour market. A study of individuals’ work histories in Germany over a 35-year period estimates the impact of this mismatch.
Research Policy, Volume 53, Issue 2, 2024

The Dark Side of the Geography of Innovation
Diversifying your economy is a good thing. But, as this study the diversification patterns of 283 regions in 32 European countries over the past 15 years shows, it has a dark side: it can lead to inequality among regions, since only the most economically advanced regions have the opportunity to diversify into highly complex activities.

Gig Economy
Are we headed for a labour market organised around digital platforms and the gig economy? This Pillars report assesses the theory and evidence around this sort of new-fangled occupations.

Reverse Brain Drain
In the digital era, brains flow just as easily from China to the West as from the West to China, as a model developed by Pillars’ Chinese members shows.

New Data Instruments
Tooling Up
Pillars not only produced outstanding policy insights and scientific papers. It also created novel tools to help policymakers, educators, students and HR departments navigate the digitally fuelled change transforming labour markets. They are accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

Brave New World
We have all heard that emerging digital technologies threaten jobs. But what jobs exactly? Where? And to what degree? To shed light on these question, a Pillars team assessed the effects of 40 emerging technologies on a wide range of occupations to create an open-access database that they christened TechXposure.

A Great New Labour Market Tool
A Pillars team fed algorithms they developed to an AI to combine the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills with the European Commission’s ESCO project. The result? An invaluable map of professional skills’ supply and demand across countries. And the best thing? It’s free and available to anyone and everyone.

All Aboard

Our Partner Institutions
From the Americas through Europe to Asia, ten institutions are combining their strengths to plough new ground on what the future brings to, and what it calls for, global and local labour markets.

Keep updated

If you want further alerts from Pillars, subscribe here.
If you do not wish to receive the PILLARS newsletter, please unsubscribe.

© PILLARS – Pathways to Inclusive Labour Markets – ifo Institute – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich 2023.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004703.

Privacy Policy and Data Protection
We place great importance on your privacy and would like to inform you of our updated privacy policy. We treat your information confidentially in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which has been in effect since 25 May 2018.
In order to provide you with more transparent and clear information on how we process your personal information, we have divided our privacy policy into various chapters. In this description you will find the basis on which the data is stored and how we use the data. Here, you can also find out more about your rights, such as how to access your information and how to restrict the use of your information. Our privacy policy can be found on our website.

Published: ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich,
Email: pillars@ifo.de;
Editor: Julio Saavedra.

The reprint of excerpts from this newsletter is permitted only with written permission and provided that the source is acknowledged.

Imprint
Legal Details according to Section 5 of the German Telemediengesetz (TMG):

Organisation and Address:
ifo Institute – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich
Poschingerstr. 5
DE - 81679 Munich
Phone: +49(0)89/9224-0
Fax: +49(0)89/985369
E-Mail: ifo@ifo.de

VAT Reg. No. DE129516729
Munich Society Register 4419
Non-profit status

Executive Board: Prof. Dr. Clemens Fuest, President
Dr. Stephanie Dittmer

CONTACT | IMPRINT