SEMAINE D'ÉTUDE SUR LE ROLE DE L’ANALYSE ECONOMETRIQUE ETC.
0.
d) The circuit of education and training. The purpose of
this circuit is to try to match the future demand for skills, as
determined by future output levels and techniques in different
industries, with the future supply of skills, as determined by
the demographic characteristics of the population and the
system of education and training. The idea is a simple one:
to get away from the assumption of homogeneity in the labour
force which is usually made in empirical work on production
functions, and to accord to labour skills an importance equal
to that usually accorded to changes in capital equipment. If the
productivity of labour is to rise, new techniques must be
adopted, but this will not come about easily unless more people
are trained in the appropriate skills. Nowadays technological
change is particularly rapid, and a failure to realise this may
make it impossible to take full advantage of the improvements
that science is offering.
The work we have done so far on this subject is contained
in [5] [6]. It relates entirely to the demand for skills and
suggests that, in Britain at any rate, the supply of the higher
and, more particularly, the medium skills is not keeping pace
with demand. This indicates the need to increase the number
of technicians and craftsmen turned out by the system of edu-
cation and training. The craftsmen, in particular, must be
trained in the newer crafts; there are many crafts that are
dving and do not need replacement.
But given that we know how the demand for skills is chang-
ing, how are we to change the supply to meet this demand?
Our intention here is to set up an activity model of the system
of education and training, including the very important element
of retraining. By this means we hope to be able to work out
the activity levels needed in different branches of the educa-
tional system to provide in the future an educational distribu-
tion of the population which, after allowing for ‘wastage’, that
is for skills not used in the productive process, will ensure an
1] Stone - pag. 59