Youth Unemployment: Déjà Vu? - Index of - IZA

to sustain that claim either. 48 There is some evidence to suggest that the influx of
workers, who were generally working in less skilled jobs, from the ten Accession
countries did have some negative impact in the period since 2004 on the employment of
the least skilled young people. 49 But these effects are usually insignificant or when
significant, quite small.
b) How is industrial change impacting young people's labour market prospects?
The changing structure of labour demand may also be adversely affect young people’s
labour market prospects. Autor, Levy and Murnane argue that industrial change in the
USA has led to a significant change in the demand for skills. 50 Rather than additions to
labour demand being entirely focused on high-skilled jobs, there has been some increase
in demand for low-skilled workers. Many such jobs involve non-routine or interactive
tasks that cannot be easily automated. In contrast, the demand for skilled workers has
fallen, mainly as a result of automation. Such workers might typically have expected to
earn wages close to the central deciles of the earnings distribution. Goos and Manning
(2003) produce evidence supporting this hypothesis for the UK. 51 They use information
from the LFS for the period 1979-1999 and define “lousy” jobs as those
occupation/industry combinations where median earnings are relatively low and “lovely”
jobs as those where median earnings are relatively high. They argue that both these types
of jobs typically involve tasks that are not routine and therefore cannot be easily
substituted by technology. Examples of “lousy” jobs might be care workers or gardeners,
while lawyers or cell biologists could be said to work in “lovely” jobs. They then show
that such non-routine jobs have exhibited the most rapid employment growth from 1979-
1999, with the most rapidly growing occupations being care workers, software engineers
and management consultants.
48 Metcalf, D. (2008), 'Why has the British National Minimum Wage had little or no impact on
employment?', Journal of Industrial Relations, 50 (3), June. R. Dickens and M. Draca (2005), 'The
employment effects of the October 2003 increase in the National Minimum Wage', CEP, February.
Dickens, R., and Manning, A. (2003) ‘Minimum Wage – Minimum Impact’, in Dickens, R., Gregg, P. and
Wadsworth, J. (eds.), The State of Working Britain, Palgrave McMillan, Basingstoke, pp 17-31 Report
prepared for Low Pay Commission. M. Stewart (2002a) ‘Estimating the impact of the minimum wage
using geographical wage variation’, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 64, pp. 583-605. M.
Stewart (2002a) ‘The employment effects of the National Minimum Wage’, Economic Journal, 114,
March, pp. C110)-C116. M. Stewart (2004), ‘The impact of the introduction of the UK minimum wage on
the employment probabilities of low wage workers’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 2, pp.
67-97.
49 Blanchflower, D.G. and C. Shadforth (2009) ibid. S. Nickell and J. Saleheen (2008), 'The impact of
immigration on occupational wages: evidence from Britain', Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Working
Paper # 08-6.
50 Autor, D. H, Levy, F. and R.J. Murnane (2003), 'The skill content of recent technological change: an
empirical exploration,' Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXVIII, 1279-1333
51 Goos, M. and Manning, A. (2007), 'Lousy and lovely jobs: the rising polarization of work in Britain',
Review of Economics and Statistics, February, 89, pp. 118-133.
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