Saudi Arabia is in the middle of a major economic transformation, one whose scope and intensity may merit the label “unprecedented.”...

Progress towards greater gender equality has been hesitant and halting over the past five years and the Covid-19 pandemic now risks sending it into reverse. Our analysis shows that women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to this crisis than men’s jobs: Women make up 39% of global employment but account for 54% of overall job losses as of May 2020. At the same time, the burden of unpaid care, which has risen in the pandemic, falls disproportionately on women....

Considering how Germany anchors a European continent plagued by high unemployment and slow growth, its labor market is on fire. The number of unemployed has been halved over the past decade. With just 2.6 million people out of work, the German unemployment rate has declined to 5.9%. The country’s exports reached nearly $1.3 trillion in 2016. That’s roughly, and remarkably, half of Germany’s GDP, amounting to about 9% of world exports that year....

As demand grows for new and emergent skills, including UX design, cybersecurity, and data science, workers around the world — and labor markets — are struggling to keep up. According to a recent survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, nearly eight in 10 global CEOs say they’re concerned about the availability of people with the right skills. So far, organizations have responded by engaging in a war for talent — that is, buying or stealing it, rather than growing it from within. As they compete to fill roles, many have been willing to spend billions on recruiting (or poaching), while reluctant to invest in training their existing workers or unskilled ones, perhaps out of fear their competitors will hire those newly attractive employees away. Spending per employee (around $1,000 per year on average) remains just a fraction of cost-to-hire (which most estimates place around $4,000). However, while overall spending on training by employers increased over the past five years, large companies actually spent less on training per employee in 2018 than they did the previous year. And, according to a recent survey that we conducted, 70% of employers either have terminated workers due to the implementation of new technology or anticipate doing so. Meanwhile, companies like Netflix have gone so far as to offer new hires double their previous pay to lure them away from their current employers....