On finding a new OECD paper on "Skill Mismatch and Public Policy in OECD Countries", I eagerly scrolled down to the section on "Policy-related variables" which may affect the alleged scourge of skill mismatch, thinking there might be some attention given to:

• The game of credential roulette young people must play for the two or three (or four, or…) years prior to entering the labour market,
• Punitive social welfare policies that require the unemployed to take the first job available, rather than the one to which they may be best suited, or
• The possibility that businesses could, instead of demanding off-the-shelf perfect-fits for their immediate needs, hire generally capable and well-educated people and foot the bill for training them for the particular requirements of the job.

Instead, they highlighted "structural differences in supply and demand", including,:

• "frictions that afffect the efficiency of labour reallocation, arising from policy-induced frictions", for instance "stringent regulations on the firing of permanent employees [which] make it more difficult for firms to adapt the labour force structure", including "employment protection legislation (EPL) [which] might increase mismatch by making it harder for workers to get their first job and more difficult to fire because of firing restrictions" (what part of the definition of "permanent" is confusing you?),
• "structural factors that prevent geographical mobility across regions" (because in the age of "border security" hysteria, everybody loves a gypsy),
• "vocational education and training and the matching of available university programmes to labour market demand needs" and "policies to increase human capital accumulation" (sigh),
• "flexible product and labour market regulations and bankruptcy legislation that does not excessively penalise business failure" (but penalising your workers for "skill mismatch" is perfectly fine), indeed by "raising exit costs and thus preventing the winding down of low productivity firms, strict bankruptcy legislation can result in labour, particularly high-skilled workers, being trapped in inefficient firms and jobs that are not sufficiently challenging. This would in turn restrict the ability of high productivity firms to innovate and grow given a fixed pool of high-skilled workers" (Damn this abundance of high-skilled workers! If only I could declare bankruptcy and set them free!).

Meanwhile…