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Peter Dickinson, Senior Research Fellow at IER, has been appointed to the . The panel provides advice and support to central and local government on the design and implementation of evaluations of local economic policies. It helps ensure evaluations are high quality and supports policymakers in developing their evaluation skills, knowledge and capacity. Over the longer term, it will also expand the evidence have about ‘what works’.

Peter has also been appointed to the roster of consultants providing advice, expertise and support on skills policy and practice.

Despite information failures in the labour market and their consequences on unemployment and informality rates, countries like Colombia lack a proper labour market information system to identify skill mismatches and employer skill requirements.

The use of online job portals as a potential source of labour market information has recently gained researchers’ and policymakers' attention. However, debates continue about the efficacy and robustness of job portals for labour market analysis.

This new by Jeisson Arley Cardenas Rubiocontributes to our current understanding of the topic by developing a conceptual and methodological approach to identify skills, occupations, and skill mismatches using online job advertisements, which would otherwise be too complex to analyse.

Britain produces too much of relatively low value compared with many of its western counterparts. This is despite the country being a world leader in many industries. It is the country’s perennial productivity problem.

This , written by Sudipa Sarkar, Bhaskar Chakravorty and Clare Lyonette, analyses primary survey data from participants of a large-scale skill-training programme that targets rural poor youths in India.

Focusing on two dimensions of individuals' identity: caste and gender, the empirical findings suggest that training participants from the most socially disadvantaged groups - Scheduled Tribe (ST) and Scheduled Caste (SC) - have significantly lower income aspiration when compared to Other Backward Class (OBC) and Other Caste (OC) participants. Female participants also have significantly lower aspiration than their male counterparts.

The aspiration gaps exist even after controlling for various background characteristics, including participants' pre-training personality traits and soft skills. Individual-level and household-level factors mediate some of the aspiration gaps based on caste and gender.

The paper finds evidence that for SC/ST female participants, the disadvantages on both caste and gender dimensions add up; this is reflected in their lower income aspiration levels, in comparison with all other groups. Thus, the results support the hypothesis of "double jeopardy" instead of "intersectionality" in this context.

This is the first paper of an ongoing project funded through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).

As part of the ESRC Global Challenges Research Funded project ‘Inequalities and skills acquisition in young people’, the IER research team has designed and delivered research methods training to students working towards a Post Graduate Diploma in (Rural) Management at the in Ranchi, India.

The three online workshops took place on 17-18th August with more than 50 students participating.

As a follow-up to the training sessions students are invited to enrol on a University of ÌÇÐÄTV Moodle, where they can access relevant resources and work on a group assignment to practise what they have learnt in the workshops.