Two recent trends affect public policy and strategy in addressing both the investment priority for education in Mexico and the labor absorption policies for new market entrants in Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

• The first is the increasing labor market premium for workers in Mexico with partial or complete secondary education. Education inequality correlates strongly with income inequality. Although education services have been improving in Mexico, a strong implication is that changing technology is changing the skill profile of higher earning jobs (thus the premium for workers with the necessary education level) faster than the improving education distribution is raising education profiles.
• The second is the slowing of demographic increases in the younger cohorts (0-14 years; 15-24 years) affecting both the feasibility of improving the distribution of education and improving quality and the ability of Mexico to absorb increasing percentages of each age cohort in its domestic labor market. The growth rate of the 15-24 years age cohort is slowing and will begin to decline within the next five years both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of total population.

As Canada and the United States will increasingly rely on Mexican-born workers to meet the labor demand in a broad range of low and high-skilled occupations, they also will be called to maximize the development of such workers and facilitate their integration into their own labor markets. A related issue is the access for Mexican migrant workers to quality education and life-long learning in the United States and Canada.

The challenge to Canada, Mexico and the U.S. is that these countries share a common need for a skilled, well-educated workforce. In the case of Canada and the U.S., the need is fairly immediate and it is becoming critical for their competitiveness; in the context of Mexico, investment in human capital will be also critical for ensuring high-paid jobs and thus better prospects for economic growth and development.

These needs are manifested in a context of growing labor market interdependence. This clearly is the case between Canada and the U.S., especially with respect to workers in high skill occupations. The volume and velocity of labor movements between Mexico and the U.S. suggest that many workers and businesses regard the labor markets of the two countries as de facto integrated. Our project starts with the proposition that the labor markets of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico are connected inextricably. We then seek to determine the educational, workforce and economic development policy consequences that flow from this proposition.

Our approach is to ask a diverse group of researchers, public policymakers, business and union leadership, senior educators and demographers, and representatives of foundations and funding agencies from Mexico, the U.S. and Canada to address economic and workforce development in North America. They will be asked to examine the likely scenarios over the next decade or two of expected trends in the demographic size and education profile of young workers as well as of economic and technologic changes affecting productivity and competitiveness in both countries.