Growing labour market mismatches will be a major problem

The structural changes to the nature of jobs in the wake of the COVID crisis (working from home, digitalisation, online consumption) and the acceleration of the energy transition will create growing mismatches in labour markets between the skills required by companies and those of the labour force, with a major change in the structure of jobs. We may therefore increasingly see a low employment rate combined with major hiring difficulties. This will create economic efficiency and growth problems, bottlenecks for goods and services and a social problem. Obvious solutions include: Higher w age s for less attractive jobs; but this would not resolve the skills problem; Stronger incentives to return to work; A significant training and upskilling drive.