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Investigates changes in skilled and unskilled employment over the 1980s using UK data skills from the Labour Force Survey and the New Earnings Survey Panel Data set, matched with industrial data from the Census of Production. The major findings are: that there was a rise in non‐manual wage and employment shares over the 1980s but only a slight rise in that of the skilled; and that in industries where foreign competition intensified the manual wage share fell, but there was no significant effect on the unskilled.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the impact of trade openness and technology import on the change in demand structure of employment toward skilled workers. Because of the limited number of empirical papers done in the case of Tunisia, this research investigates whether these factors had similar effects on relative labor demand in Tunisia to those observed in the international literature.

For this purpose, the paper uses a manufacturing industries database provided by the Tunisian National Institute, the Quantitative Economic Institute and Comtrade of United Nations for six manufacturing industries. The methodology used here is a panel data technique, and consists of estimating a dynamic relative employment equation.

Empirical results show that trade liberalization and technology change positively affect relative employment of Tunisian manufacturing industries which confirms the existence of skill biased technological change that contributes to increase the relative demand for skilled workers.

The paper adds to existing literature by studying for the first time the case of Tunisian manufacturing industries by using dynamic model. The paper deals also with an econometrics issues related to the use of suitable estimation methodology in the case of dynamic panel data at macroeconomics level.

This paper presents a model with flexible wages in which unemployment of low‐skilled labor is possible in equilibrium, whereas high‐skilled workers are fully employed. Thus, the model can explain why even in countries with flexible labor markets and full employment of skilled labor an employment problem exists at the bottom of the skill spectrum. The model is used to evaluate the impact of technological change and increased skill supply on the employment of low‐skilled workers. It is shown that a switch to technologies with higher skill requirements unambiguously leads to a rise in unemployment of low‐skilled workers. An increase in the supply of high‐skilled labor has a positive effect on the employment level of low‐skilled labor.

The aim of this article is to explore the current European debate over labour market flexibility. First, it considers lessons from economic theory. The classical consensus considering unemployment to be purely voluntary, the Keynesian consensus introducing the concept of demand deficient involuntary unemployment and finally the neo‐classical consensus returning us to the classical viewpoint of the dominance of real conditions in the labour market. In order to proceed without confusion the article provides a clear working definition of the natural rate of unemployment and its three main components, voluntary unemployment, structural unemployment and involuntary unemployment. It then proceed to analyse each of these main components in detail, illustrating the difference between a free market approach and a European Commission approach to reducing each component of unemployment. The article concludes that the future is dependent on all EU citizens as electors of governments and holders of wages to moderate.

The change in the share of skilled occupations in total employment is broken down into changes in the skill intensities of industries weighted by their shares in employment, changes in the shares of industries in employment weighted by their skill intensities, and an interaction term. Claims about the three terms – associated with the product life cycle and degradation of labour hypotheses – are assessed theoretically and empirically. A two‐sector general equilibrium model is used to show from what assumptions the claims might be deduced. The claims are compared with US data for the 1970s and projections for the 1990s.

This paper analyses the link between educational qualification structure and information technology (IT) in the service production process. The analysis is based on 1996 cross‐sectional data for approximately 1,000 West German firms. The empirical evidence indicates that IT capital and high‐skilled labor are complements in the production process: firms with higher IT investment output ratios employ a larger fraction of high‐skilled workers at the expense of unskilled workers. To a lesser extent, the positive IT effect carries through for workers with vocational degrees including masters and technicians. Furthermore, we find that firms’ expectations of the future size of their high‐skilled workforce are positively related to their initial IT investment output ratio. To account for censoring in the employment variables, the empirical analysis uses Powell’s Censored Least Absolute Deviations estimators as well as standard Tobit estimators.

The finding that immigrants are more likely to self-employ than natives has been consistently shown by different researchers. At the same time, many call for the prioritization of high-skilled immigration as they believe low-skilled entrepreneurs are not particularly innovative or high-growth-oriented. The purpose of this study is to critically review and synthesize the current literature on immigrant self-employment, paying particular attention to low-skilled immigrant entrepreneurship and the popular policy recommendation that high-skilled immigrants should be prioritized.

The authors survey the existing literature on immigrant self-employment and discuss recurring data issues, how those issues have or have not been addressed, as well as how these data issues impact the validity of policy recommendations that favor high-skilled immigrants and disfavor low-skilled immigrants. In particular, the authors examine how length of stay in the host country and host country institutions impact immigrant self-employment, especially low-skilled immigrant self-employment. The authors also point out unintended consequences of low-skilled immigration.

The authors find data issues significantly impact the potential justifications behind calls to favor high-skilled immigrants. In particular, many researchers underestimate the positive impacts of low-skilled immigrant self-employment by not accounting for institutions and length of stay in the host country. The authors conclude with policy recommendations that prioritize high-skilled immigration should be re-examined in light of recurring omitted variable biases within previous studies and evidence of a number of positive unintended consequences associated with low-skilled migration.

The authors review current literature and discuss how important confounding variables, like the number of years an immigrant entrepreneur has lived in a host country and the institutions of a host country, make common policy recommendations suggesting prioritization of high-skilled immigration problematic. The authors also discuss potential solutions to these data issues, ways these issues have been solved already, and possible ways forward. Finally, after considering the literature, the authors offer our own set of policy recommendations.

The polarisation of employment is a specific structural change in the labour market when the share of high and low-skilled workers increases and, simultaneously, the share of middle-skilled workers decreases. The chapter analyses the effect of polarisation in Czechia and other Central European countries and describes how employment has changed from the perspective of skills regarding gender. The analysis is based on observing the changes in the share of high, middle and low-skilled workers evaluated on the basis of occupational classification over time. Results imply (with a few exceptions) polarisation of employment across all countries during the period between 1998 and 2021, even if we consider the distinction between males and females. Results confirm that employment polarisation has also become a prevalent phenomenon in Central European countries during the last two decades. Finally, this chapter also summarises the economic motivation for studying polarisation phenomenon.