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Megatrends such as demographic change, globalisation and digitalisation influence all societal spheres, be it the economy, labour market, education or culture. Consequently, it is important to estimate how strong these effects are and collect qualitative information on the nature of their impact. Whilst the effects of demographic change and globalisation have already been broadly discussed, changes resulting from digital transformation have scarcely been reflected upon systematically, especially in the case of labour markets. Against this background, the European Network on Regional Labour Market Monitoring (EN RLMM) has chosen the digital transformation of societies and economies and its effects on labour as its guiding theme for 2016. Together with the members of the network, we seek to present the state of the current knowledge, specify first action requests and options and capture the relevance of digital transformation for regional and local labour market monitoring. The current anthology of the EN RLMM constitutes the first building block in this process: it brings together contributions discussing the effects of digital transformation on specific sectors and occupations as well as labour market target groups. Furthermore, it contains regional good practice examples describing and analysing the digital transformations of regions.

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Prof. Dr. Alfons Schmid ist Professor für Volkswirtschaftslehre und Direktor des Instituts für Wirtschaft, Arbeit und Kultur (IWAK), Zentrum der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Forschungsschwerpunkte: regionale Beschäftigungsentwicklung und Arbeitsmarktpolitik, neue Kommunikationstechnologien und Beschäftigung, regionale Wettbewerbsfähigkeit, Einstellungen zum Sozialstaat, regionale Armuts- und Reichtumsforschung sowie regionale Prognosesysteme.

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Prof. Dr. Alfons Schmid is Professor for Economics at the faculty of Social Sciences at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main and scientific Director of the Institute for Economics, Labour and Culture (IWAK). His main areas of research are regional developments of employment and labour markets, regional competitiveness, regional forecasting, regional studies on poverty, wealth and attitudes towards the welfare state.

Dr. Christa Larsen is a social scientist and Managing Director of the Institute for Economics, Labour and Culture (IWAK) at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main. Her current work concentrates on regional labour market monitoring, regionalised analyses of labour markets for health workers, systems for information and diagnoses of labour markets and regional prognoses.

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