The role of public employment services in promoting an inclusive Nordic common labour market

The role of public employment services in promoting an inclusive Nordic common labour market

9789264932906 PDF
9789264848672 HTML

2025

OECD Publishing, Paris

Engelsk

88

Corrigenda to OECD publications may be found at: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/support/corrigenda.html .

This report explores how reforms of Public Employment Services (PES) and active labour market policy (ALMPs) systems in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) contribute to the common Nordic labour market. The report examines recent, ongoing and planned PES reforms and trends in PES modernisation among Nordic countries, the increased deployment of digital and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions and co-operation practices between Nordic PES. The report presents a number of recommendations on how Nordic PES can further strengthen and enhance their work with the aim to promote an inclusive common Nordic labour market. Four out of the five Nordic countries reviewed in this report are undergoing a reform in their system to provide ALMPs. Denmark is designing and Finland has just started to implement major revisions to the organisation of ALMP provision and Sweden has recently re-organised its ALMP delivery system and is currently evaluating and fine-tuning it. Each of these three reforms is changing the high-level institutional set-up of ALMP provision, including organisational set-up, legislative set-up, governance and funding models. Iceland is about to reform its ALMP and other support systems for people with disabilities, aiming to implement the reform in September 2025. The only OECD Nordic country not going through a reform process is Norway which had an overhaul of its ALMP system in 2006, merging employment services, benefits and many other related functions into a single agency. Promoting the common Nordic labour market is not part of the ongoing and planned reforms in the ALMP systems or revisions to ALMP packages. Nevertheless, there will still be some impact on the common labour market, as the reforms are likely to have an impact on the labour market situation and attractiveness more generally in individual countries. The ALMP reforms in the Nordic countries have been inspired by good practices in other Nordic countries and mutual learning from each other has continued throughout the reform processes. Furthermore, the reform designs have been guided by evidence. Denmark went through a thorough evidence-collection phase to guide the reform design, and Finland and Sweden piloted the new models to fine-tune the reform design. All Nordic PES now operate hybrid or blended models of service delivery and have undertaken significant digital advancements in recent years, building on other EU and OECD countries experiences and lessons learnt. All Nordic PES also now have at least one AI solution in place, compared to one-in-two PES in OECD countries. While AI presents many opportunities for Nordic and OECD PES more widely, these technologies also bring with them a number of risks that require proactive mitigation.

Tekstfil PDF

2616-4140