Educational attainment of recent immigrants
Percentage of foreign-born labor force and of the native-born labor force aged 25-34 and 25-64 with a tertiary qualification (2005)
In many emigration countries, emigrants tend to be of higher educational attainment than the general population. This is because emigration involves certain costs, which are more easily borne by persons with higher education and presumably higher incomes, and because highly educated persons are more “tuned in” to opportunities abroad. Whether or not emigrants are more highly educated than the native-born populations of the countries they are moving to, however, depends in part on the history of immigration in these countries, the needs of their labor markets and the returns to different levels of education in destination countries relative to those in the countries of origin.
Recent arrivals to OECD countries who are in the labor force are in some countries more and in others less educated than the native-born labor force. Immigrants to southern Europe, Finland, the Netherlands and the United States in particular tend to show lower levels of tertiary attainment than both the native-born labor force and younger (25-34) native-born recent entrants to the labor force. In France, Belgium and Scandinavia, on the other hand, recent arrivals tend to have relatively more persons with tertiary education in the labor force than the native-born, but less than native-born persons 25-34. Finally, in Austria, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Central Europe and Ireland, the percentage of persons with tertiary education is higher among recent immigrants than among both the native-born labor force and native-born recent entrants to the labor force. Migration to these countries and in particular to Ireland, Luxembourg and Switzerland, is especially highly educated.
Producer Price Indices (PPI)
PPI: manufacturing (average annual growth in percentage)
Compared with consumer prices, producer prices have risen more slowly throughout the period 1993-2006, for OECD in total by 3%. More than half of OECD countries recorded average annual increases of under 2.5% and in two countries, Japan, and Switzerland, producer prices were actually lower at the end of the period than in 1993. All countries recorded unusually sharp rises in 1995, 2000 and 2005-2006 due to sharp movements in world commodity prices. For the Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland and Turkey, very high growth rates in the first 3-year period have been replaced by moderate growth in 2003-2006.
Patents
Triadic patent families (number per million inhabitants, 2005)
Growth during the second half of the 1990s was at a steady 7% a year on average until 2000. The beginning of the 21st century was marked by a slowdown, with patent families increasing by 2% a year on average. The United States, the European Union and Japan show a similar trend, with a stronger deceleration in Japan after 2000. About 53 000 triadic patent families were filed worldwide in 2005, a sharp increase from less than 35 000 in 1995. The United States accounts for 31% of patent families, a loss of around 3 percentage points from its level in 1995 (34.4%); the relative proportion of patent families originating from Europe has also tended to decrease, losing more than 4 percentage points between 1995 and 2005 (to 28.4% in 2005). In contrast, Japan’s share in triadic patent families gained almost 2 percentage points to reach nearly 29% in 2005. When triadic patent families are normalized using total population, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden appear as the five most innovative countries in 2005. Ratios for Finland, Israel, Korea, Luxembourg and the United States are above the OECD average (44). Japan has the highest number of patent families per million population (119), followed by Switzerland (107). One of the largest increases between 1995 and 2005, from 7 to 65 patent families per million inhabitants, occurred in Korea. By size, China has less than 0.4 patent families per million population.
Contribution of key activities to aggregate productivity growth
Contributions of key activities to growth of value added per person employed (in percentage, 2000-2006 or latest available year)
Over the period 2000-2006, “market services” accounted for the bulk of labor productivity growth in many OECD countries. Namely, in Greece, Luxembourg, New-Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, “market services” accounted for over 55% of aggregate labor productivity growth. However, the highest aggregate labor productivity growth performances can still be attributed to the manufacturing sector. This was the case in the Czech Republic, Finland, Korea, the Slovak Republic and Sweden. The contribution of “market services” to labor productivity growth has increased between 1995-2000 and 2000-2006 in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Luxembourg and New Zealand. This growing contribution of market services is sometimes linked to an increasing share in total value added, but in the Czech Republic, Japan and New Zealand, for example, it also reflects faster labor productivity growth in the market service sector. However, in several other countries, labor productivity growth in market services has slowed down in the most recent years.
