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While the structural changes that have taken place in the labour markets of the industrialised world over the past decades are well documented, less is known about how individuals respond to this changing environment. This includes the extent of intersectoral mobility during the work career, skill differentials in mobility, the impact of the type of training on mobility and changes in mobility patterns over a long period of time. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this paper is to examine intersectoral labour mobility during the first 15 years of working careers in Sweden and West Germany. The analyses show that individuals in both countries tend to move away from industry into other sectors during their careers, but that this tendency is rather weak. While there are some mobility differences among educational categories, the differences between transition probabilities of German apprentices and Swedish vocational school students are insignificant. In the face of the massive transformation of employment structures, the importance of variation in the curricula is probably minuscule.

This special issue of the International Journal of Manpower aims to make a contribution to broadening our limited understanding of the role and impact of employer‐provided training for low‐skilled service sector workers. It brings together seven of the papers that were presented at the international conference “Adapting Education and Training for the Enhancement of Low‐Skilled Jobs” held at Helsinki in May 2002. The papers are situated at the crossroads where three different strands of research and policymaking meet: the training of the low skilled, the system of vocational training and the role of training for the service sector. The contributions cover an interesting variety of European countries: Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Spain and the UK, with diverging levels of low‐skilled (un)employment, vocational training and service‐sector employment.

Starts out by documenting the massive scale of early, and disability, retirement in Hungary and Poland, during the first seven years of the post‐communist transition. Sums up that the Hungarian and Polish governments had urgent reasons to design social policies to try to halt the danger of large‐scale protests in the 1990s.

The aim of the research is to examine in depth the relationship between financial support, entrepreneurship and economic growth in emerging African economies.

The study adopts the system-generalized methods of moments (sys-GMM) technique for data analysis and hypothesis testing on a sample of 34 African emerging economies (340 observations) from 2010 to 2019.

The results show that there is significant positive correlation between financial support, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Moreover, entrepreneurship served as a partial mediator between financial support and economic growth in African emerging economies.

This research suggests that African governments should focus on entrepreneurial systems, which are essentially networks driven by the pursuit of individual opportunities and the promotion of new business creation; and introduce other forms of financial assistance, such as loans, loan guarantees, interest subsidies, technical assistance, insurance, etc.

The main novelty of the paper is that the authors empirically investigate the mediating role of entrepreneurship in the association between financial support and economic growth in 34 African emerging economies.

This study examines whether institutional quality affects the relationship between income inequality and entrepreneurial activity. The authors specifically examine whether the greasing or sanding effect holds for the relationship between income inequality and entrepreneurship, while moderating for institutional quality. The greasing effects suggest that income inequality can promote entrepreneurial activity, while the sanding effects disincentivise it.

The authors examine this relationship using a sample of 100 advanced and developing countries from 2006 to 2018 using a dynamic panel estimator to control endogeneity and simultaneity. Additionally, the authors include an interaction term to estimate the marginal effects of income inequality, while moderating for institutional quality. Furthermore, the authors differentiate between six measures of institutional quality.

Overall, the authors find that institutional quality and income inequality have a positive and significant impact on entrepreneurial activity. However, when moderating for institutional quality, the findings show that the marginal impact of income inequality is negative for countries with low levels of institutional quality. The authors show that the rule of law and government effectiveness are effective moderators in terms of magnitude. Furthermore, the authors find that the sanding effect of income inequality is observed in developing economies, even when moderating for institutional quality.

The major limitation lies in the estimation of entrepreneurial activity, which is measured using new business formation. While this is commonly used, it focuses on formal entrepreneurial activities and overlooks the informal economy.

This study provides new empirical evidence on whether institutional quality can moderate and explain the puzzling link between entrepreneurial activity and income inequality.