Paul Swaim

Senior Economist at EAP Division, OECD,

Paul Swaim has been an economist in the Employment Analysis and Policy Division since joining the OECD in 1995. In that position, Paul has written extensively for the OECD Employment Outlook, addressing such topics as job training, working time, employment protection legislation, wage-setting institutions, poverty dynamics, labour market adjustment to globalisation, the labour market dimension of green growth and the labour market impact of the global financial crises. He has also served as editor of that publication for a number of years. Paul played an active role in the reassessment of the OECD Jobs Strategy that was endorsed by Labour and Employment Ministers in June 2006 and also had a lead role in organising a meeting of OECD Employment and Labour Ministers in September 2009, where the main topic for discussion was the implications of the global economic crisis for labour market and social policy. Paul also participated in an OECD-wide initiative to develop a comprehensive Green Growth Strategy during 2009-2011, including by managing a project on green jobs and skills, and is still active in follow-up work on this topic. Since 2012, he has been managing a project on policies to ease the adjustments costs associated with plant closings and other permanent redundancies.

Before joining the OECD, Paul published widely in scholarly journals, including Labor Economics, The Journal of Human Resources, The Review of Economics and Statistics and Industrial and Labor Relations Review. During this period, he taught economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and held research positions in the Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Department of Labor and the Office for Income Security Policy of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Paul has a Ph.D. in economics from MIT and is of American citizenship.

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