The Politics and Policies of Skills Shortage

In an age where policy makers draw on instruments with different policy backgrounds to counter skills shortage, it is imperative to understand their interrelationships both concerning their design and their effects. States rely both on education, skill formation, and social policies to close the gap between the demand and supply of (skilled) labour. While the origins of these policies are different, they are converging in the quest to increase people’s skills. Convergence does not imply synergies alone since the responsible designers and implementing institutions of skill-shortage related measures come from different traditions of equipping people with the right skills and of guaranteeing both social inclusion and economic efficiency. The issue of skills shortage is of multi-disciplinary nature and existing research has started to engage with the crossroads of social, education and skill formation policies. Next to the growing attention towards social inclusion in skill formation (e.g., Carstensen and Emmenegger 2023), there is research on complementarities between education and labour market policies in promoting employment (Plavgo 2023) and on youth targeted active labour market policies (Geyer 2022). There is already excellent research on increasing labour participation through policies for better reconciling work and family. Instead, this workshop intends to close the gap on training-related labor market policy for young, low-skilled, and unemployed people. The questions addressed by the workshop do not only speak to political economists and social and education policy scholars, but to the wider discipline of political science where different debates tackle complexities in governing public goods.

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1: How is skills shortage defined, for whom is it a problem and who ought to solve it?
2: To what extent is there coordination between social, education, and skill formation policies?
3: How have labour market policy measures that provide training developed over time?
4: How are efficiency/inclusion concerns reflected in policies to address skills shortage?
5: How have policies to respond to the skill shortage developed and what are the underlying politics?

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