Africa's recent growth is impressive, yet its rate of stable job creation is anything but. This column argues that Africa needs rapid growth in stable, wage-paying jobs in order to ensure future stable growth and prosperity. African governments must develop and implement targeted jobs strategies – which focus on labour-intensive, competitive industries – to get the most out Africa’s rapid economic emergence.

Many advanced country governments face the dual challenge of promoting job growth while pushing ahead with spending cuts. This column discusses how well-designed fiscal policy reforms can help boost employment without busting the government budget.

Does vocational education have advantages over general education? This column presents new evidence suggesting that when economies change rapidly and the full life-cycle is taken into perspective, this advantage comes at the disadvantage of reduced employment opportunities in old age.

In many OECD countries, the Great Recession has spawned new social programmes allowing employers to temporarily reduce hours works while reimbursing employees for lost income. The authors of CEPR DP8214 investigate how effectively these programmes prevent a surge in unemployment. They find, with a few caveats, significant benefits.

Workers at a Fiat plant in Turin recently voted to approve a new, innovative labour contract that promises higher wages and new investments in exchange for tighter discipline and oversight. This column says that if such a model of industrial negotiations were adopted across Italy, employment would rise in both the short and medium term.

The Great Recession worsened the already-intractable unemployment problem of many immigrant communities in western countries. Can acquiring citizenship improve employment prospects for immigrants? CEPR Discussion Paper 8182 argues that recent liberalization of citizenship regulations in Sweden and Canada has increased employment probabilities for immigrant groups in both countries.

Do immigrants take American jobs? Or does increased efficiency in firms that hire immigrants or practice offshoring generate new jobs for US natives? The authors of CEPR Discussion Paper 8078 develop and test a model which measures both the direct impact of offshoring and hiring immigrants on the employment share of US natives and the indirect gains to US natives from the "cost-savings" effect.

A controversial article recently published in the Lancet argues that mass privatisation is responsible for the increased mortality in post-communist societies during the 1990s. It suggests privatised firms cut employment, which hurt health and mortality. This column uses firm-level data to show that there is no evidence that privatisation systematically lowered firm-level employment.

Do firms reduce their domestic employment when they establish operations abroad? Evidence from South Korean firms suggests that the impact varies by destination and operation. This column shows that concerns about investment in developing countries slowing employment growth at home may have empirical support.

Germany has the largest number of foreign individuals in Europe, and foreign workers represent around 10% of the total labour force. The authors of CEPR DP6736 measure the effects of the substantial immigration of the 1990s on the Western German labour market and find that it had no adverse effects on native wages and employment levels, but instead led to adverse effects on previous immigrants.