Integrating Employment, Skills and Economic Development: New Zealand

OECD-LEED study on ‘Integrating Employment, Skills and Economic Development’

Published 13 September 2007

Description

The Integrating Employment, Skills and Economic Development (IESED) report to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) follows a study to identify existing co-ordination between labour market policy, skills and vocational training policy and economic development strategies at both regional and national levels. It includes a case study on the Bay of Plenty.

The key outputs of this OECD Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED) project are a New Zealand preliminary country report and a final cross-country comparative study report, including 11 countries, to be published by the OECD in 2008.  The other countries in the study are Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania and the United States.

Link to full report

Integrating Employment, Skills and Economic Development HTML | PDF [52 pages, 778KB]

Key findings and recommendations:

Considerable progress has been made since 1999 to promote the integration of employment, skills and economic development policies at the national and regional level. Significant policy reforms in regional economic development policy and tertiary education were announced during the study period.

Labour market conditions are important in determining policy integration approaches.  In particular, emerging skill shortages in the last seven years significantly boosted national and regional efforts to integrate skills and vocational training policies with labour market policies. However, the study recommends that regional economic development should be better integrated with vocational training policies.

A large number of regional initiatives were created within a short period of time, resulting in a numerous agencies seeking to create, support, or host a regional partnership without necessarily coordinating and aligning these efforts.

During the study period, the government announced its refreshed approach to regional economic development policy. As part of this, some work is being led out of the Ministry of Economic Development which will consider the coordination of government’s regional economic development activity, and will stocktake the provision of government’s economic development services at the regional level. This project will provide a useful vehicle to progress key IESED recommendations on ways to better co-ordinate government activity to support policy alignment.

The OECD study recommends:

• Work plans and Statements of Intent produced by central government agencies could be better aligned.
• Closer collaboration between local, regional and national stakeholders on setting targets to achieve similar policy outcomes at the regional level. These sorts of collaborations could also help to clarify roles and responsibilities of different parties in meeting such targets.
• There is widespread acknowledgement of the need for quality regional labour market analyses. Numerous agencies were producing labour market analyses at the regional level for their own purposes and these efforts could be consolidated to produce a more integrated product.