National Institute Economic Review

This paper argues that successive governments since the 1980s have struggled to establish the necessary foundations to enable the majority of young people to make effective and supported transitions from education to the labour market and, further, to create labour market conditions that protect and…

Men are a small minority of childcare workers, and this has contributed to skills shortages which have affected the sector’s ability to meet rising demand. The paper looks at current initiatives aimed at recruiting men, particularly through the Government’s National Recruitment Campaign, and the ben…

British apprenticeship, now dependent on the Modern Apprenticeship programme, is compared in this paper to both German apprenticeship and its national predecessor, Youth Training. Modern Apprenticeship shares many of the attributes of Youth Training, and shows some improvement in terms of skills pro…

Government has promised that Britain will build a vocational route based on apprenticeship to match that found in the rest of Europe. However, judged on the first five years of Modern Apprenticeship, every important aspect of apprenticeship in Britain will need to be strengthened and improved if the…

The German economy is recovering hesitantly from the sharp post-unification boom and recession. Two features of recent West German performance are novel: there has been an unprecedented loss of jobs in industry, and manufacturing profitability has been pushed to its lowest level ever and is now low …

This article reports on a detailed comparison of productivity, machinery and skills in matched samples of food manufacturing (biscuit) plants in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and France. In comparing labour productivity levels, explicit account was taken of inter-country differences in the mix o…

The contribution of differences in the Dutch and British education and training systems to the significant Dutch advantage in manufacturing productivity levels is examined in this article. The Dutch schooling system is characterised by high standards in mathematics, the provision of vocational educa…

The emphasis placed in Germany on vocational training and education was explored in previous studies by the Institute. These drew attention to: the greater numbers with vocational qualifications there than in Britain; the generally broader scope of German training, leading to greater adaptability in…

Government policy to increase substantially the amount of vocational training and education available to school-leavers in this country raises the issue of how much and what kind of training is provided elsewhere. This article describes the training given in Britain and Germany in five of the more p…