Christopher Pissarides: 'I'd like to see a UK equivalent of Germany's Work 4.0 white paper'

In late 2016, the German government published the white paper ‘Work 4.0‘, the result of 18 months of discussion with academia, trade unions, employer organisations and the public. The paper was a blueprint for how society should face the technological disruption taking place in the world of work and business. This is what Sir Christopher Pissarides thinks the UK should do if it wants to create “new and preferably better jobs to take on labour that is displaced by technological advances”. Sir Christopher was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University and Peter Diamond of MIT, for his work in the economics of unemployment and other policy-relevant outcomes in markets with frictions. He is Regius Professor of Economics at LSE and co-chair of the Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW). “I’d like to see a White Paper on the Future of Work within a couple of years – a UK equivalent of the German ‘Work 4.0”. He spoke with Anna Thomas, founding director of IFOW.