Towards a Global Framework for a Public Good to Reduce Information and Labour Market Gaps

Published in August 2023

The acceleration of technological change is reconfiguring employment, labour relations, and required skills. A recent example is AI like ChatGPT. All countries are facing acute challenges to respond to the new workforce’s skills requirements, especially in developing countries, limiting economic productivity enabled by technological development.

Lack of updated labour market statistics and information on new skills demanded is a key obstacle in addressing the skills gap. Therefore, well-designed framework policies can boost labour productivity by reducing skills mismatch

The solution involves among other things:

  • Collecting and measuring detailed and current data to make informed decisions about education, continuous learning, training, and workforce support.
  • Developing a common language with a skills taxonomy is crucial, similar to standardized occupational or educational classifications.
  • Utilizing non-traditional data sources and technologies like AI to generate high-frequency data at low cost, such as analyzing big data from online job vacancies.
  • Combining information from different sectors, including public, private, job search, and education, can benefit students, workers, companies, and governments.

In conclusion, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the acceleration of technological change are redefining employment occupations, labour relations, and skills demanded, leading to a mismatch between the workforce’s available skill-set and the qualifications demanded by employers. This paper argues that better data collection and measurement to make informed decisions about education, lifelong learning, training strategies, and support for workers during times of transition can help address the labour mismatch. The G20’s role is essential to follow up on the roadmap towards a Common Framework for Measuring the Digital Economy, developed in previous G20 presidencies, and to promote inclusive people-centred growth through digitalisation and automation.

(Un)Paving the Way for Heat Resilience in Cities

María Victoria Boix & Alejandro Saez Reale

Published in may 2023

Cities are experiencing a relentless temperature rise due to climate change and a sustained urban sprawl. This, in turn, is leading to more severe and long-lasting heat waves and higher urban heat island effect. Both heat sources behave synergistically, affecting severely our cities. The impacts are wide-ranging and profound, especially in terms of public health. Nowadays heat causes more deaths than any other extreme weather event in many developing and developed countries.  

However, these impacts are not felt equally by the entire population, but rather by the most vulnerable groups, such as the elderly, children, people with a prevalence of heart or mental illnesses, and people with economic, housing or social deficits, who are most exposed. Not surprisingly, the consequences are not limited to health, rising temperatures also cause wide economic burdens, and urban infrastructure disruptions. 

It is imperative to move towards risk-informed urban development. To promote urban heat resilience, we need to encourage urban planning that focuses on improving heat equity as well. By ensuring that heat mitigation and management strategies are distributed equitably across communities, and by posing a particular focus on the communities most vulnerable to high temperatures, local governments can protect themselves from heat impacts and associated losses and damages. Cities should invest in heat-resilient, low-carbon action plans at the earliest.  

These efforts should focus on investing in more resilient housing and health systems, providing improved thermal comfort and generating cooler public spaces, buildings and housing, promoting energy efficiency, using renewable energy sources, improving green infrastructure, and developing complementary innovative solutions to address the heat island effect.  

Cities must prioritize raising awareness among the population and train personnel and public officials on this new-but-dangerous phenomena. This requires a thorough assessment of the risks and vulnerabilities unique to each city to develop appropriate plans. By doing so, cities can effectively address the fundamental importance of combating climate change.  

“The only way to succeed in finding real, on-scale solutions and strategies to address extreme urban heat and its consequences is substantially improving awareness. We need to talk about it, invest in it, and work together: academia, civil society, private and public sector, both on the national and subnational levels, to create real resilient cities. No one can solve this challenge on their own; we need to work together to tackle climate change and thrive as humankind in a new, hotter environment, and we need to start now.” 

Demographic Odyssey. Demographic trends in Argentina: key inputs for the design of social welfare

This document analyzes recent demographic changes in Argentina to emphasize the role of demography in the country’s economic and social prospects, answering four questions: Where do we come from? Why did the fertility trend change in the last five years and what does this mean for poverty reduction? Where are we today? and Where are we headed? 

Reframing the narrative on the future of work. The Global South perspective.

Published in February 2022

There is a fundamental error in trying to predict the future: it does not exist yet. There is nothing to reveal and everything to create. In this sense, assuming the transformational ability of the Global South is the first step not to predict, but to build a better labor future. Not only for the Global South, but for the world economy: developing countries will account for 90% of the world’s working-age population by 2050. 

In this document, prepared within the scope of the FOWiGS (Future of Work in the Global South) initiative, we have tried to provide a first set of elements to adapt the standard narrative on the future of work to the context of these different regions. 

About FOWIGS 

The Future of Work in the Global South (FOWiGS) is an initiative supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and coordinated by CIPPEC. Its goal is understanding the effect of technological change on jobs from a Global South perspective by providing data, knowledge and policy frameworks to build evidence-based narratives on the future of work in developing countries. 

How to reduce global asymmetries in open government data in the Global South: a Latin American perspective

Published on may 2022

The coronavirus pandemic highlighted economic and social inequalities around the world and, as it spread across regions and countries, it also exposed the vulnerability and fragility of states. The lack of planning, weak governance, as well as poor information management and the absence of an evidence-based decision making process triggered insufficient responses – if any – in the Global South, ultimately magnifying disappointment in institutions and political leadership. 

Having quality open data, properly collected and processed within short time frames, is essential for making decisions that benefit citizens. In the context of a pandemic such as the one we have been experiencing for over two years, not only epidemiological information is useful for public administration, but also all those records that allow us to think about social, health, educational and economic policies when dealing with complex problems and, to this end, it is essential to have comprehensive information systems. 

This document is based on the assumption that, when there is quality open government data and the political will to analyze it, the results that can be obtained encourage the implementation of evidence-based public policies. When talking about Open Government Data (OGD), the document considers a concept that not only calls for quantity (the actual publication of information), but also quality. In order to assess the latter, we analyze the level of compliance of open data with the principles of accessibility, disaggregation, updating and reuse. 

This document compares three federal countries in Latin America to better understand the existing asymmetries in open government data and propose actions needed for future improvement. The results presented are based on COVID-19 data collection and analysis conducted in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico during 2021. Canada was used as a benchmark, as it is a developed federal state in the Global North with extensive involvement in Open Government Partnership (OGP) initiatives. 

Based on the data collected, we can focus on three problematic dimensions that need to be addressed by governments in the Global South: i) asymmetries in OGD between national and subnational governments in each federal country; ii) the fragmentation in the data offered in public information portals and; iii) the lack of completeness of the information offered through open data. A fourth dimension could be added to these three: how to build evidence from open data policies. 

To contribute to this debate, we propose i) strengthening the openness of government data at national and subnational levels to meet the specific challenges posed by the pandemic at the sanitary, social and economic levels, and expanding it to other areas of importance; ii) improving regional, federal and subnational collaboration frameworks in terms of data standardization, exchange and publication; iii) developing national frameworks for monitoring and assessing open government data in order to evaluate its effectiveness, efficiency and alignment with regulatory frameworks in terms of personal data, cybersecurity and openness and; iv) implementing and/or adapting to international open government data standards, such as the one proposed by the Open Data Charter under the name Disease surveillance (CAF, ODC & CDS, 2021). 

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