Future Demand for Skills in New Zealand Compared with Forecasts for some Western Countries: Relative Importance of Expansion and Retirement Demand

Future demand for skills is of considerable interest to policy makers and training providers of many countries, including New Zealand. Occupational employment projection have been implemented in countries such as the US, UK, Canada and Australia. These methods usually take into account growth in GDP of key industries, changes in labour productivity and the long­term changes in the occupational shares of employment by industry. In New Zealand, an assessment of the future prospects for employment by industries and occupations comparable to the overseas approaches has been undertaken over the past few years. These estimates have been used to assess the skills needs in the expanding segments of the labour market. In this paper we compare our forecasts of occupational employment growth with public sector agencies in other countries. The key forecast results of demand for high level skills, for specific broad occupational groups as well as for industry or sector groups for each of these countries as they recover from the economic downturn of varying magnitude and nature are discussed. We focus on both the expansion demand (due to new positions created) and the replacement demand (owing to current positions being required to be filled due to retirement, migration and job mobility) for New Zealand and other countries as applicable

Ageing Of The Workforce: Effects On The Labour Market With Participation And Retirement

Ageing of the work force in New Zealand is an important determinant of labour market dynamics. In addition to the median age and the proportion of workers in retirement age, the nature of occupations and health and financial security are also important determinants of participation and retirement.The baby boom generation has approached their retirement years and the age structure of the working age population has also significantly altered. Consequently, the retirement of older workers is expected to make-up an important source of new job openings over the coming decades.Estimating and forecasting likely future retirement rates by occupational groups is of considerable interest, and provides further insights into labour market dynamics.In this study, recent historical retirement rates for broad (3-digit) ANZSCO occupational groups were derived using an internationally accepted methodology known as the cohort component method, adapted to allow for some participation by older age groups. Occupational employment data by age extracted from the recently released 2013 Census was analysed along with the corresponding data from the 2006 Census to estimate the average retirement rates over the 2006-13 period. These rates are then used to project future retirement rates over the 2013-20 period for the same broad occupational groups. Projections were based on the Working Age Population projections for age groups and their associated participation rates

New Boolean satisfiability problem heuristic strategy: Minimal Positive Negative Product Strategy

This study presents a novel heuristic algorithm called the "Minimal Positive Negative Product Strategy" to guide the CDCL algorithm in solving the Boolean satisfiability problem. It provides a mathematical explanation for the superiority of this algorithm over widely used heuristics such as the Dynamic Largest Individual Sum (DLIS) and the Variable State Independent Decaying Sum (VSIDS). Experimental results further confirm the effectiveness of this heuristic strategy in problem-solving.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Forecasting Migration Flows for New Zealand: Arrivals of New and Returning New Zealanders & Departing by Destinations

The purpose of this paper was to outline the methods and to report results of an econometric attempt to forecast New Zealand migration flows. Flows were decomposed into eight components: two relating to arrivals and six components relating to departures by several destinations. Linear time series regression and the Holt­Winters exponential smoothing method were applied to quarterly data from June 1978 to June 2008 or from March 1990 to June 2008. Within­sample mean absolute percentage errors were presented and full­sample estimates from June 1978 to September 2010 or from March 1990 to September 2010 were used to forecast migration flows for each component for the next two years

Future Demand for Skills in New Zealand Compared with Forecasts for some Western Countries: Relative Importance of Expansion and Retirement Demand

Future demand for skills is of considerable interest to policy makers and training providers of many countries, including New Zealand. Occupational employment projection have been implemented in countries such as the US, UK, Canada and Australia. These methods usually take into account growth in GDP of key industries, changes in labour productivity and the long­term changes in the occupational shares of employment by industry. In New Zealand, an assessment of the future prospects for employment by industries and occupations comparable to the overseas approaches has been undertaken over the past few years. These estimates have been used to assess the skills needs in the expanding segments of the labour market. In this paper we compare our forecasts of occupational employment growth with public sector agencies in other countries. The key forecast results of demand for high level skills, for specific broad occupational groups as well as for industry or sector groups for each of these countries as they recover from the economic downturn of varying magnitude and nature are discussed. We focus on both the expansion demand (due to new positions created) and the replacement demand (owing to current positions being required to be filled due to retirement, migration and job mobility) for New Zealand and other countries as applicable

Impacts of Employment Rates (Demand) and Participation Rates (Supply) on Unemployment Rates: A Disaggregated Analysis

The interaction between the different macro labour market drivers and their influence on key labour market outcomes is of considerable interest to labour market analysts as well as policy makers. One of these relationships is between employment growth (or labour demand) and the associated reduction in the unemployment rate. This relationship is often determined by other labour market indicators, such as participation rates (or labour supply), and the working age population (amongst other factors). This paper reports on an integrated macro labour market forecasting framework developed by the Labour Group of MBIE, disaggregated into 11 five-yearly age cohorts across the working age population. The labour market dynamics during business cycles are affected by the ageing of the work force in New Zealand. This has varied consequences on labour market outcomes for different age cohorts, especially those at each end of the age spectrum. Forecasting likely future unemployment rates by age cohort level is of considerable interest, and will provide further insights into labour market dynamics. In addition to those in the prime age cohorts, other cohorts of interest include new entrants into the working age population; those age cohorts potentially involved in training; and those in the pre-retirement age cohorts

Ageing Of The Workforce: Effects On The Labour Market With Participation And Retirement

Ageing of the work force in New Zealand is an important determinant of labour market dynamics. In addition to the median age and the proportion of workers in retirement age, the nature of occupations and health and financial security are also important determinants of participation and retirement.The baby boom generation has approached their retirement years and the age structure of the working age population has also significantly altered. Consequently, the retirement of older workers is expected to make-up an important source of new job openings over the coming decades.Estimating and forecasting likely future retirement rates by occupational groups is of considerable interest, and provides further insights into labour market dynamics.In this study, recent historical retirement rates for broad (3-digit) ANZSCO occupational groups were derived using an internationally accepted methodology known as the cohort component method, adapted to allow for some participation by older age groups. Occupational employment data by age extracted from the recently released 2013 Census was analysed along with the corresponding data from the 2006 Census to estimate the average retirement rates over the 2006-13 period. These rates are then used to project future retirement rates over the 2013-20 period for the same broad occupational groups. Projections were based on the Working Age Population projections for age groups and their associated participation rates

Forecasting Migration Flows for New Zealand: Arrivals of New and Returning New Zealanders & Departing by Destinations

The purpose of this paper was to outline the methods and to report results of an econometric attempt to forecast New Zealand migration flows. Flows were decomposed into eight components: two relating to arrivals and six components relating to departures by several destinations. Linear time series regression and the Holt­Winters exponential smoothing method were applied to quarterly data from June 1978 to June 2008 or from March 1990 to June 2008. Within­sample mean absolute percentage errors were presented and full­sample estimates from June 1978 to September 2010 or from March 1990 to September 2010 were used to forecast migration flows for each component for the next two years

Towards Fair Disentangled Online Learning for Changing Environments

In the problem of online learning for changing environments, data are sequentially received one after another over time, and their distribution assumptions may vary frequently. Although existing methods demonstrate the effectiveness of their learning algorithms by providing a tight bound on either dynamic regret or adaptive regret, most of them completely ignore learning with model fairness, defined as the statistical parity across different sub-population (e.g., race and gender). Another drawback is that when adapting to a new environment, an online learner needs to update model parameters with a global change, which is costly and inefficient. Inspired by the sparse mechanism shift hypothesis, we claim that changing environments in online learning can be attributed to partial changes in learned parameters that are specific to environments and the rest remain invariant to changing environments. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm under the assumption that data collected at each time can be disentangled with two representations, an environment-invariant semantic factor and an environment-specific variation factor. The semantic factor is further used for fair prediction under a group fairness constraint. To evaluate the sequence of model parameters generated by the learner, a novel regret is proposed in which it takes a mixed form of dynamic and static regret metrics followed by a fairness-aware long-term constraint. The detailed analysis provides theoretical guarantees for loss regret and violation of cumulative fairness constraints. Empirical evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate our proposed method sequentially outperforms baseline methods in model accuracy and fairness.Comment: Accepted by KDD 202