Recent Changes in the Occupation Milieu of the EU27 Member States’ Labor Markets

Abstract The first two decades of the third millennium experienced an unprecedented swarm of economic, social and political changes that impacted virtually all the countries in the world. Under the increased pressures of demographic transitions, technological changes and environmental needs, the labor markets, on the one side, and the employees, on the other side, faced significant challenges as components of the national economic systems, in the first case, and as key agents of both the economic systems and the labor markets, in the latter, which resulted, among others, in a faster changing occupational milieu. In such a context, the paper aims to present an analysis of employment by occupation and age group and its quite recent changes in the EU27 member states. Such results reveal whether there is increased national specificity of the EU27 countries’ labor markets and their occupational composition or we may find some convergence patterns across countries, age groups or groups of occupations. These highlight not only certain necessary policy actions that might have to be enforced, especially in areas such education, labor market regulation, company regulation and so on, but also the imperative of an increased, better, and more efficient cooperation between the government and private economic actors in order to deal with and alleviate the already existing gaps, misallocations, misalignments, inefficiencies, etc. and to prevent as much as possible the occurrence of newer and (possibly) more hazardous ones for the European economies and societies.