President participates in the OECD discussion on employment

Paris, 25.5.2011  |  press release

On the third day of his working visit to Paris, the President of the Republic of Slovenia, Dr Danilo Türk, participated in a panel discussion at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 50th Anniversary Forum, entitled “Bringing people back to work”.

In the discussion, President Dr Danilo Türk drew attention to the problem of people’s unwillingness for changes and structural reforms, which he characterised as a mainly political issue. He mentioned the heated discussions in Slovenia, which is preparing a referendum on reform of the pension scheme. He stressed that the EU is putting a great deal of focus on the coordination of policies to maintain budgetary and fiscal discipline but not enough focus on measures for stimulating economic growth, which could be of benefit to individual countries.

In the discussion, the President also spoke about the significance of a high quality education system and, in particular, higher education which, in his opinion, should be more technology-oriented, in which he highlighted in particular information technologies. He presented the efforts of the Slovenian Government to link the research sphere with the economy through centres of excellence. Another issue that the President mentioned was the discordance between the skills gained by university students and those required on the market. He said that he believes the experience of countries that have developed high quality professional education, such as Sweden, should be more closely examined.

President Dr Danilo Türk also touched on the issue of the increase in precarious employment among young people. He mentioned numerous debates on the concept of so-called flexicurity and how everybody agrees that we will need various forms of flexibility and security in the future, but the most appropriate combination of the two has not yet been decided. It would be unfair to shift a disproportional burden of the labour market’s flexibility onto the young generation. In his opinion, the OECD could substantially contribute to the definition of the right formula of flexicurity by examining and presenting various models already applied in practice.