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Young people have been among those most affected by the recent financial crisis. Vocational education and training (VET) is often viewed as the silver bullet for the youth joblessness problem. In this article, the authors provide a better understanding of VET in industrialized countries, proposing a typology with three types of vocational systems: 1) vocational and technical schools, 2) formal apprenticeships, and 3) dual apprenticeship systems that combine school training with a firm-based approach. They first describe the strengths and challenges of each system. They subsequently review the evidence of the effectiveness of VET versus general education and the relative effectiveness of the different VET systems. Results indicate that VET is a valued alternative beyond the core of general education and that the use of apprenticeships combined with institutional learning tends to be more effective than school-based VET.

The expected year-on-year intrinsic mortality variations/changes are largely overlooked in the existing research when estimating the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality patterns. To fill this gap, this study provides a new assessment of the loss of life expectancy caused by COVID-19 in 27 countries considering both the actual and the expected changes in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020. Life expectancy in 2020 and the expected life expectancy in the absence of COVID-19 are estimated using the Lee-Carter model and data primarily from the Human Mortality Database. The results show that life expectancy in 21 of the 27 countries was expected to increase in 2020 had COVID-19 not occurred. By considering the expected mortality changes between 2019 and 2020, the study shows that, on average, the loss of life expectancy among the 27 countries in 2020 amounted to 1.33 year (95% CI 1.29–1.37) at age 15 and 0.91 years (95% CI 0.88–0.94) at age 65. Our results suggest that if the year-on-year intrinsic variations/changes in mortality were considered, the effects of COVID-19 on mortality are more profound than previously understood. This is particularly prominent for countries experiencing greater life expectancy increase in recent years.

Germany’s recovery from an unemployment disease and its resilience to the Great Recession is remarkable. Its success story makes it a showcase for labor policy and labor market reforms. This paper assesses the potential of the German experience as a model for effective, evidence-based policymaking. Flexible management of working time (through overtime and short-time work, time accounts, and labor hoarding), social cohesion and controlled unit labor costs, combined with a rigid, incentive-oriented labor policy supported by effective program evaluation, define the characteristics of a strong reference model. Austerity, sometimes seen as core to the German model, is not viewed as a key element.

This article advocates for a new measure of the ethnic identity of migrants, models its determinants, and explores its explanatory power for economic performance. The ethnosizer, a measure of the intensity of a person's ethnic identity, is constructed from information on the following elements: language, media, ethnic self-identification, ethnic networks, and residency plans. The two- dimensional concept of the ethnosizer classifies migrants into four states: assimilation, integration, marginalization, and separation. The ethnosizer is found to mainly depend on pre-migration characteristics, and to be exogenous to economic activity. Ethnic identity significantly affects economic outcomes.

Background Since vaccination is the decisive factor for controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to understand the process of vaccination success which is not well understood on a global level. The study is the first to judge the now completed \"first wave\" of the vaccination efforts. The analysis is very relevant for the understanding why and where the vaccination process observed got stuck by the end of 2021. Methods Using data from 118 countries globally and weighted least squared and survival analysis, we identify a variety of factors playing crucial roles, including the availability of vaccines, pandemic pressures, economic strength measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), educational development, and political regimes. Results Examining the speed of vaccinations across countries until the Fall of 2021 when the global process got stuck, we find that initially authoritarian countries are slow in the vaccination process, while education is most relevant for scaling up the campaign, and the economic strength of the economies drives them to higher vaccination rates. In comparison to North and Middle America, European and Asian countries vaccinated initially fast for 5% and 10% vaccination rate thresholds, but became rather slow reaching the 30% vaccination level and above. The findings are robust to various applied estimation methods and model specifications. Conclusions Democratic countries are much faster than authoritarian countries in their vaccination campaigns when controlling for other factors. This finding suggests that the quality of government and the political environment play a key role in popular support for government policies and programs. However, despite the early success of their vaccination campaigns, the democratic country group has been confronted with strong concerns of vaccine reluctance among their vast populations, indicating the two most potent variables explaining the speed of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign are education and economic conditions.

The importance of repeat and circular migration starts receiving rising recognition. The paper studies this behavior by analyzing the number of exits and the total number of years away from the host country using count data models and panel data from the German guestworker experience. Beyond the myth, more than 60% of migrants in the sample from the guestworker countries living in Germany are indeed repeat or circular migrants. Migrants from European Union member countries, those not owning a dwelling in Germany, the younger and the older (excluding the middle-aged), are significantly more likely to engage in repeat migration and to stay out for longer. Males and those migrants with German passports exit more frequently, while those with higher education exit less; there are no differences with time spent out. Migrants with family in the home country remain out longer, and those closely attached to the labor market remain less; they are not leaving the country more frequently.

This paper uses the concept of ethnic self-identification of immigrants in a two-dimensional framework. It acknowledges that attachments to both the country of origin and the host country are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There are three possible paths of adjustment from separation at entry, namely the transitions to assimilation, integration, and marginalization. We analyze the determinants of ethnic self-identification in this process using samples of first-generation male and female immigrants, and controlling for pre- and post-immigration characteristics. While we find strong gender differences, a wide range of pre-immigration characteristics like education in the country of origin are not important.

The reasons behind the slow pace of corruption suppression within democratic systems are not well understood. We suggest that it relates to a societal inequity, precisely an insufficient parliamentary representation of the interests of private-sector workers. Our analysis of data from European Economic Area countries reveals a positive correlation between the proportion of Members of Parliament who have exclusively worked in the public sector and the level of corruption in their respective countries. Further, we find a negative correlation between a country’s level of corruption representing a form of in-group cooperation and the percentage of its population in cooperatives, which serves as an indicator of universal cooperation. Finally, the emergence of breakpoints in the analysis of corruption data motivates us to propose a network model where the economy is an evolving complex system characterized by a tipping point. We argue that, particularly in more corrupt European countries, private-sector workers should be better represented by parliamentarians with private-sector work experience to successfully combat corruption and thus promote equity and good governance.

This paper takes a global, long-run perspective on the recent debate about secular stagnation, which has so far mainly focused on the short term. The analysis is motivated by observing the interplay between the economic and demographic transition that has occurred in the developed world over the past 150 years. To the extent that high growth rates in the past have partly been the consequence of singular changes during the economic and demographic transition, growth is likely to become more moderate once the transition is completed. At the same time, a similar transition is on its way in most developing countries, with profound consequences for the development prospects in these countries, but also for global comparative development. The evidence presented here suggests that long-run demographic dynamics have potentially important implications for the prospects of human and physical capital accumulation, the evolution of productivity, and the question of secular stagnation.

Understanding school-to-work transitions The challenge There is increasing interest in understanding the role of specific institutional features of different school-to-work transition (SWT) regimes in affecting the youth labor market performance. In Italy, the Buona Scuola reform has changed the mission of the education system which still remains sequential, but providing high secondary school students with compulsory work-related learning, based on the Scandinavian model. [...]in many EU countries and also outside of the EU, several reforms of the apprenticeship system have been implemented to spread the use of on-the-job training already at the school level. For those who cannot gain work-related competences at school, which remains the main weakness of sequential education systems (work experience after education, rather than together with education like in dual education systems), the European Union is popularizing the Youth Guarantee (YG since now), an active labor market policy initiated in the Scandinavian regime and exported to all of Europe with ups and downs. Recent reforms have, in fact, incorporated also public and private employment services, foreseeing the introduction also in South and East European countries of a better management of the public employment services (European Commission, 2017).