the workplace due to age were in place in about 50 countries,<sup>159</sup> many of them developing countries. High informality or weak enforcement reduces the impact of these regulations, however. The general evidence on labor law enforcement in developing countries is not conclusive, largely due to the lack of studies addressing this issue.<sup>160</sup>

**Social campaigns to provide information and raise awareness have proved successful in influencing stakeholders toward employing older workers** . In Germany, a relatively low-cost local marketing campaign used banners, interviews, job fairs, and information brochures to debunk myths and inform employers (and others) about the value of mature workers. The intervention helped increase retention of mature workers.<sup>161</sup> More generally, raising awareness about implicit stereotypes can have significant payoffs: an intervention addressing implicit stereotypes about immigrants among Italian schoolteachers raised school grades for immigrant children.<sup>162</sup> Research undertaken by the World Bank shows that social media campaigns can be highly effective in influencing norms and can allow for very granular targeting.<sup>163</sup> Similarly, “edutainment” approaches that use entertainment media to convey educational narratives, aspirational role models, and “new” norms to a large population may work: evidence from TV series seeking to improve sexual health and attitudes toward gender-based violence (GBV) in Sub-Saharan Africa showed strong impacts on norms and practices.<sup>164</sup>

# Promoting firm investment in workers’ human capital

Firms can help extend productive working lives by providing mature workers with access to continuous skills development, complementary technology, and working environments adapted to their needs, along with targeted support that reduces health risks in old age.

**It is critical but difficult to increase firms’ investment in updating and upgrading workers’ skills, including among mature workers.** Leveraging private sector support is important to increase available resources for training, to increase private sector ownership of the skills agenda, and to garner the specific knowledge and insights of firms regarding their current and future skill needs.<sup>165</sup> Governments in many L/MICs have implemented different incentives, including private sector-financed approaches (e.g., training funds) and budget-funded financial incentives, but with mixed results.

**Training funds have been a common approach to provide resources to invest in training, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), but such funds require strong governance, transparency, and solid links to the private sector to work well.** In about half of the world’s developing countries, there is a national training skills or training fund in place, most of them financed through a payroll levy on employers.<sup>166</sup> These training funds have received criticism on several grounds, however. They tend to mainly benefit large firms and may represent large deadweight loss (subsidizing training that would have taken place without support) at the price of higher tax rates. Training funds have also sometimes been used to support the general budget, or for cross-subsidizing training in informal, noncontributing firms. Finally, training has often been delivered through public institutions that are less connected with the demand side. Many training funds are now being reformed to align contributions

159 Ghosheh 2008. 160 Ronconi 2019. 161 Homrighausen and Lang 2019. 162 Alesina et al. 2018. 163 https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/using-social-media-change-norms-and-behaviors-scale. 164 Banerjee et 2019a, 2019b.

165 UNESCO 2022.

166 Estimates based on World Bank Employing Workers 2020.

28