New project about labour market in Poland

The main aim is the development of a novel methodology and a model for forecasting labour demand and supply up to the year 2050. The tool will build upon and extend the level of disaggregation of forecasts prepared by the University of Lodz created in the early 2010s.

The project’s target group are primarily employees of Public Employment Services and other labour market institutions, whose aim is among others reducing unemployment, increasing the mobility of the workforce, and fostering the development of human capital and the creation of high quality jobs. A prerequisite to achieving these goals is access to reliable data and forecasts regarding both the demand and supply side of the labour market. This project fits perfectly into these requirements, since it will broaden the scope of the forecasts and provide increased functionality of the modelling system, helping employees of the Public Employment Services make better decisions.

The project is carried out in a consortium composed of three institutions: University of Łódź, Institute of Labour and Social Studies (IPiSS) and IBS as the leader. The project is carried out for the Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Policy within the PO WER programme. The planned completion time is November 2020.

Project steps

1. Evaluation and update of existing forecasts – the starting point of the work is an evaluation of the existing labour market forecasting framework created in the early 2010s (available in Polish: www.prognozowaniezatrudnienia.pl). The assessment will cover the assumed methodology and the accuracy of the forecasts. It will also be updated with the latest data, so that labour market institutions will have access to up-to-date forecasts until the new model is developed.

2. Creating the new labour market forecasting system – in comparison to the existing forecasts, the new one will be expanded along several dimensions:

• Separate forecasts of labour demand, labour supply and the resulting gap between the two – the forecasts will be conducted for a finer disaggregation: for types of counties, Polish classification of economic activities (based on Nace Rev. 2), level and field of education of the workforce.
• Macroeconomic module – the module will allow simulating custom macroeconomic scenarios through the use of a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model. It will be thus possible for the user to generate forecasts for different assumptions about the future trends of selected economic indicators.
• The integration with existing tools and databases – the model will also be integrated with other existing tools and databases used by the Ministry such as the CeSAR platform and the wortal of the Public Employment Services (pl. PSZ).
• Internet job offers webcrawler – it will automatically browse, analyse and classify job offers advertised online.

Forecasts dissemination

The forecasts will be available on a new website. The end users will run forecasts and simulations through a graphical user interface. The website will contain an exhaustive documentation regarding the forecasting framework, the programming implementation, scenario descriptions and a user manual. Training courses for end users are also planned.

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