The aim of the Peer Review was to share experiences on upstream analytical issues, as well as downstream policy outcomes that the measurement of labour market tightness can bring.

Ensuring a good match between labour supply and demand is a complex challenge for countries to solve. In this context, France used to publish labour market tightness indices (ratio of the number of job vacancies posted by Public Employment Services (PES) per registered unemployed).

However, since May 2017 this publication has been suspended due to data issues (including insufficient coverage of job vacancies data, relying only on PES job vacancies and therefore missing a large proportion of non-PES job vacancies, as well as the hidden labour market).

Subsequently, the Statistical Office for Research and Statistics (DARES) launched a review on labour market tightness based on:

• an inventory of relevant indicators from administrative data and existing surveys,
• an analysis of all these indicators at the sectoral and occupational level, and
• a principal component analysis (PCA) to make sense of these various indicators.

This peer review provided an opportunity for all participating countries to share their experiences with measuring labour market tightness, including data issues and good practices and solutions they to overcome such data issues.

It has also provided an opportunity to explore how labour market actors (government, PES, unions, companies, etc.) can make use of labour market tightness indicators to inform employment and other related policies.

The Peer Review was hosted by the French Statistical Office for Labour and Employment (DARES).