The UK labour market has become more challenging for all jobseekers, with unemployment particularly high among young people and those with limited education and skills. Research published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation describes the difficulty of job searching for young people seeking low-skilled work, examining three contrasting local labour market areas in England and Wales.

The report was co-authored by Professor Becky Tunstall (University of York) and Professor Anne Green (IER), Ruth Lupton, Simon Watmough and Katie Bates (LSE).

The Nominet Trust has published a state of the art review undertaken by IER on Employment and the Internet. The report provides a baseline of data around employment and digital technology, mapping emerging employment patterns that may provide opportunities to rethink how we address current levels of unemployment and underemployment.

The report is available to download from the Nominet website.

Today sees the publication of a report of findings from research undertaken by a team at the Warwick Institute for Employment Research and the Institute of Fiscal Studies. The project considered the impact of changes in the structure of employment and pay on income inequality and poverty. It combined employment projections with a tax and benefit model to simulate the distribution of household income, poverty and inequality.

The research found that changes in the labour market, combined with changes to the tax and benefit system, over the next decade are likely to increase relative poverty rates across the UK. It also found that changes that might be expected to lead to lower poverty, such as reducing the gender pay gap or rebalancing regional growth, are (by themselves) unlikely to do so.

The full report is available on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation website.

In the fourth of a series of podcasts about our work at the Institute for Employment Research, Professor Anne Green speaks about her recent work on spatial inequalities in the UK and the importance of sub-national perspectives on employment and skills.

IER's Bernard Casey gave a presentation at the conference "The Cyprus Economy at a Time of European Uncertainty: Managing Reform and Sustainability", organised by the Hellenic Observatory of the London School of Economics and held at LSE on 10-2-12. His talk on "The Fiscal Implications of Demographic Change" gave an overview of the challenges of addressing pension and care provision for Cyprus's ageing population. Other presenters at the event included the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism of the Republic of Cyprus, Prof. Chris Pissarides, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Economics, the head of sovereign debt rating for Europe, Middle East and Africa from Standard & Poor's, experts from the World Bank and the European Commission and academics from the University of Cyprus.