Creating more and better quality jobs is key to boosting growth, reducing poverty and increasing social cohesion. At the national level, job creation requires a stable macroeconomic framework coupled with structural policies that encourage innovation, skills and business development. But how can national and local policies be better aligned and tailored to specific local opportunities and challenges?

There are a number of barriers to getting the local conditions for job creation right. Policy makers often work in silos, due to institutional barriers and rigidities in performance management structures, and many policies are not flexible enough to be tailored to local conditions. Additionally, the search for efficiency in delivering national policies and programmes can sometimes lead to a lack of attention to the negative effects that a "one size fits all" approach can have in certain regions.

Read Job Creation and Local Economic Development 2014

This report provides guidance on how policy makers can bolster local job creation and achieve sustainable inclusive growth, while meeting challenges such as youth unemployment, population ageing and climate change.

Key messages

Boost skills supply and demand to create quality local jobs

• Co-ordinate employment, skills, and economic development policy
• Support the lifelong development of relevant skills
• Help areas move out of the low skills trap
• Tackle labour market exclusion

Support enterprise development and growth to create jobs

• Create conditions conducive to high growth firms
• Promote entrepreneurship skills
• Support social entrepreneurship as a source of job creation

Build adaptable local economic strategies and systems

• Adopt new approaches to economic development local areas are changing their growth and investment strategies, exploiting new markets and alternative sources of finance
• Respond to demographic changes
• Smooth the transition to a green economy

Use local data to inform local policy

• Use locally disaggregated data

Table of Contents

Executive summary
Reader's guide
     Chapter 1: Setting the framework for local job creation
Part 1: How labour market policies and training can help
     Chapter 2: Aligning local employment, skills and economic development policies
     Chapter 3: Building a flexible and responsive skills system
     Chapter 4: Escaping the low skills equilibrium trap
     Chapter 5: Overcoming barriers to employment
Part 2: Building jobs through entrepreneurship and enterprise creation
     Chapter 6: Building entrepreneurship skills
     Chapter 7: Stimulating high-growth firms and local entrepreneurial ecosystems
     Chapter 8: Job creation in the social economy and social entrepreneurship
Part 3: Local economic strategies and systems
     Chapter 9: New growth and investment strategies – creating jobs and opportunity
     Chapter 10: Managing demographic transitions in local labour markets
     Chapter 11: Seizing opportunities from green growth
Part 4: Country profiles
Tables
Figures