Puzzling older workers’ skills overconfidence in Mediterranean countries

The paper addresses the issue of skills gap in the context of ageing societies—specifically, the question of to what extent employees perceive the skills gap and whether there are differences between older workers and prime-age workers. The analysis is focused on the EU Mediterranean countries, which enables a comparative perspective, and also aims to compensate for the lack of empirical evidence encompassing smaller economies of the region. By relying on the European skills and jobs survey, it has been established that in most of the countries, prime-age workers are relatively more concerned about the potential inadequacy of their skills than the older workers (older than 55). The narrative remains the same when numerical, social, and technical skills gaps are concerned. While the gap is relatively small and not significant in all the countries, it is still contrary to the dominant narrative claiming lower skill levels of older workers. Decomposing the gap, by relying on the matching of observable characteristics, revealed that the compositional effect of these characteristics is important.