This publication gathers the papers presented at the “OECD-EU dialogue on mobility and international migration: matching economic migration with labour market needs” (Brussels, 24-25 February 2014), a conference jointly organised by the European Commission and the OECD.

We develop a framework where mismatch between vacancies and job seekers across sectors translates into higher unemployment by lowering the aggregate job-finding rate. We use this framework to measure the contribution of mismatch to the recent rise in U.S. unemployment by exploiting two sources of cross-sectional data on vacancies, JOLTS and HWOL, a new database covering the universe of online U.S. job advertisements. Mismatch across industries and occupations explains at most 1/3 of the total observed increase in the unemployment rate, whereas geographical mismatch plays no apparent role. The share of the rise in unemployment explained by occupational mismatch is increasing in the education level.

This book studies the interaction between labour and social policies, showing the crucial role labour plays in both the scope and the speed of transition. By including the influence of education systems, institution-building, and policy-enforcement mechanisms, this book goes beyond previous studies of the transition experience to provide a detailed analysis of the many contributing factors to the success or failure of the transition process.

"Overeducation is one of the most important mechanisms for labor market adjustment when there is an excess supply of high-skilled workers. However, there is much debate about the consequences of this phenomena and the short and long term effects for both the overeducated worker and the economy as a whole. This book contributes to our understanding of recent developments in the research on overeducation by providing a detailed overview of the pertinent theoretical and policy issues."

Using panel data for 15 industrial countries, active labor market policies (ALMPs) are shown to have raised employment rates in the business sector in the 1990s, after controlling for many institutions, country-specific effects, and economic variables. Among such policies, direct subsidies to job creation were the most effective. ALMPs also affected employment rates by reducing real wages below levels allowed by technological growth, changes in the unemployment rate, and institutional and other economic factors. However, part of this wage moderation may be linked to a composition effect because policies were targeted to low-paid individuals. Whether ALMPs are cost-effective from a budgetary perspective remains to be determined, but they are certainly not substitutes for comprehensive institutional reforms.

The transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, among all emerging- and developing-economy regions, have been hardest hit by the global economic crisis of 2008-09. This is partly due to the region s deep integration into the global economy across many dimensions trade, financial, and labor flows. Attempts by countries that came later to the transition to catch up rapidly to Western European living standards at a time when global liquidity was unusually abundant, together with some policy weaknesses, made them vulnerable to reversals in market sentiment. Written on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 'Turmoil at Twenty' analyzes the run-up to the current crisis and addresses a number of key questions related to vulnerability to the recession, expected recovery, and necessary reforms in the region: Did the transition from command to market economies, and the period during which this took place, plant the seeds of vulnerability that made transition countries more prone to crisis than other developing countries? Did the choices made on the road from plan to market shape the ability of crisis-hit countries to recover? What combination of domestic policy reform and international collective action is needed to bring about a recovery and minimize the humanitarian cost of the crisis? What structural reforms are needed today to address the most binding constraints on growth in a world where capital fl ows to transition and developing countries are expected to be considerably lower than before the crisis? 'Turmoil at Twenty' will be of interest to policy makers and their advisers, researchers, and students of economics who seek lessons from the current economic crisis, as well as scholars of the transition.