Publication: Educated Workers and Managers in the EU-27
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2025-01-23
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This Brief highlights issues related to the education and skill level of workers and top managers in firms in 27 European Union countries (the EU-27), using the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES). The exercise is an important step toward understanding the use of skilled and adequately educated workers and top managers by a firm and its likely effects. The Brief identifies several factors at the NUTS2 region level and firm level that are correlated with the difficulty firms face in obtaining adequately educated workers as well as the skill level and education level of the workers and top managers. Somewhat surprisingly, income per inhabitant in the NUTS2 regions is not a strong predictor of the use of skilled and educated workers and top managers or firms’ reported difficulty in finding adequately educated workers. Several firm performance measures, such as labor productivity, employment growth, exporting, research and development (R&D), and management quality, are found to be correlated with the use of skilled and educated workers and top managers. Some of these correlations differ sharply between low and high levels of the outcome variables. There is evidence that training provided to workers by the firms is associated with less dispersion of labor productivity between firms, and greater use of skilled workers is associated with less dispersion of wage rates across firms. Overall, the Brief finds that starting at low-income levels in EU regions, policy focus needs to shift more toward ensuring the availability of adequately educated workers than on reducing other obstacles as the economy develops. This shifting of policy focus can stabilize after the economy is sufficiently developed.
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“Amin, Mohammad. 2025. Educated Workers and Managers in the EU-27. Enterprise Note; No. 43. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42895 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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