Browse by: "G"
Index
Title Index
Year Index
This document describes good practices for the licensing of protected elements included in OECD Test Guidelines (TGs). Transparency and communication are needed around protected elements resulting from innovation in sciences and techniques that are gradually integrated in OECD TGs. This Guidance specifies the information required from a test method developer when submitting a proposal for a new TG that contains protected elements. This document contains a broad overview of the intellectual property and similar protections that affect the OECD TG Programme. Laws governing intellectual property and similar rights vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; anyone seeking to answer specific questions about the interpretation of the concepts in this paper in a specific jurisdiction must seek the advice of a specialised lawyer.
The Guiding Principles for Durable Extractive Contracts (the Guiding Principles) provide guidance on how resource projects can be developed to reflect the balance of risks and rewards that underpins durable contracts, while taking into account community interests and concerns since the very beginning. The Guiding Principles offer a blueprint for the content and negotiation of durable extractive contracts that can reduce the drivers of renegotiation and can provide adaptive and flexible provisions that, for example, can automatically adjust to prevailing market conditions. They also aim to assist host governments and investors in explaining the content of the contract to the public, thereby helping to overcome tensions between stakeholders. The Guiding Principles set out eight principles and supporting commentary that host governments and investors, as well as negotiation support providers and legal practitioners, can use as a common reference for future negotiations of enduring, sustainable and mutually beneficial extractive contracts.
This document is intended to provide universal Guiding Principles that should be considered when developing or augmenting systematic approaches to Weight of Evidence (WoE) for chemical evaluation and Key Elements to formulating a systematic approach to WoE. The ultimate goal is to facilitate that regulators follow a consistent, clear and transparent delivery of evidence using the Principles and Elements described in this document. This can be especially helpful for countries with no existing WoE frameworks or those looking to augment their approaches. It also allows for stakeholders to understand a WoE decision-making process, including potential for unreasonable bias. These Guiding Principles and Key Elements can be employed to develop frameworks that range from simple and pragmatic approaches to more elaborate systems, depending on the context.
These guidelines discuss cross-cutting issues that can affect the effective procurement of infrastructure and associated services necessary to host Olympic and Paralympic Games. Designed for organising committees responsible for the overall delivery of the Games, the guidelines offer examples, good practices and practical tools to help mitigate these risks. They also provide checklists to help organisers of large international events assess their exposure to the risks identified in this report.
Development practitioners are often ill equipped to analyse the potential of communities to cope with the complex, interconnected and evolving risks they face. As a result, development and humanitarian programmes only partially integrate those resilience aspects. These guidelines propose a step-by-step approach to resilience systems analysis, to help field practitioners prepare for, and facilitate, a successful multi-stakeholder resilience analysis workshop; design a roadmap to boost the resilience of communities and societies; and integrate the results of the analysis into their development and humanitarian programming.
The following guidelines provide detailed guidance on how to organize a Resilience System Analysis workshop. They support the OECD’s “Guidance for Resilience System Analysis”.
With the recent increase in cross-border higher education, systems of quality assurance, accreditation and recognition of qualifications face big challenges.
The Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education provide an international framework to protect students and other stakeholders from low-quality provision and disreputable providers. They provide guidance to key stakeholders on how to share the responsibility of assuring quality provision of cross-border higher education between the sending country and the receiving country. The Guidelines were elaborated in close collaboration with UNESCO.
FURTHER READING
The trends and challenges of cross-border higher education are addressed in more details in Quality and Recognition in Higher Education: The Cross-border Challenge (OECD, 2004); and Internationalisation and Trade in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges (OECD, 2004).
Improving the environmental performance of agriculture is a high priority in OECD and many non-OECD countries. This will be of increasing concern in the future given the pressure to feed a growing world population with scarce land and water resources. Policy has an important role to play where markets for many of the environmental outcomes from agriculture are absent or poorly functioning.
This study focuses on the design and implementation of environmental standards and regulations, taxes, payments and tradable permit schemes to address agri-environmental issues. It deals with the choice of policy instruments and the design of specific instruments, with the aim of identifying those that are most cost-effective in very different situations across OECD countries.
Key conclusions from the study are that: there is no unique instrument that promises to achieve all agri-environmental policy goals; the cost effectiveness of payments systems could be improved by using performance-based measures; and policy mixes need to combine policy instruments that complement and not conflict with each other.
The Guidelines for Consumer Protection in the Context of Electronic Commerce are designed to help ensure that consumers are no less protected when shopping on line than they are when they buy from their local store or order from a catalogue. By setting out the core characteristics of effective consumer protection for online business-to-consumer transactions, the Guidelines are intended to help eliminate some of the uncertainties that both consumers and businesses encounter when buying and selling on line. The Guidelines reflect existing legal protections available to consumers in more traditional forms of commerce. Their aim is to encourage: - fair business, advertising and marketing practices; - clear information about an online business’s identity, the goods or services it offers and the terms and conditions of any transaction; - a transparent process for the confirmation of transactions; - secure payment mechanisms; - fair, timely and affordable dispute resolution and redress; - privacy protection; and - consumer and business education.
A Defined Approach (DA) consists of a selection of information sources (e.g in silico predictions, in chemico, in vitro data) used in a specific combination, and resulting data are interpreted using a fixed data interpretation procedure (DIP) (e.g. a mathematical, rule-based model). DAs use methods in combination and are intended to overcome some limitations of the individual, stand-alone methods. The first three DAs included in this Guideline use combinations of OECD validated in chemico and in vitro test data, in some cases along with in silico information, to come to a rules-based conclusion on potential dermal sensitisation hazard. The DAs included in this Guideline have shown to either provide the same level of information or be more informative than the murine Local Lymph Node Assay (LLNA; OECD TG 429) for hazard identification (i.e. sensitiser versus non-sensitiser). In addition, two of the DAs provide information for sensitisation potency categorisation that is equivalent to the potency categorisation information provided by the LLNA.
This guidebook outlines and discusses the steps involved in selecting, implementing and evaluating policy actions and interventions to improve public health. The guidebook is applicable to all types of public health interventions such as those addressing alcohol and tobacco consumption, obesity, physical inactivity, multimorbidity and mental health as well as infectious diseases. Although designed primarily for policy makers, the guidebook is also a useful reference for other stakeholders such as those responsible for delivering an intervention.
The world remains far off track to reach universal access to electricity by 2030 – a key target canonised in UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7). While many countries have set targets to advance universal electrification, it remains challenging to collect timely data on their progress, making it difficult to build or refine their electrification plans and policy strategies.
To provide governments with the tools to achieve their goals, the Guidebook for Improved Electricity Access Statistics (hereafter “Guidebook”) focuses on methodologies using readily available supply-side data from electric utilities, mini-grid operators, and off-grid system distributors to track access to electricity trends. This approach can be adopted at a low-cost and provides accurate estimates on access rates with a potential time lag on the order of months, instead of years. Supply-side data complements household or census surveys, which can give a more nuanced, detailed picture, but are typically only run every five to ten years due to their expense.
This report provides step-by-step guidelines on how to implement an improved supply-side data collection process, and produce more time-sensitive and comprehensive access to electricity indicators. In addition, the Guidebook proposes a standard method to capture mini-grids and stand-alone off-grid systems in calculating access to electricity, which are becoming increasingly more commonplace in strategies to reach universal access. Finally, the Guidebook suggests further steps practitioners can take to advance geospatial data collection and reporting, which has become the new best practice for electrification planning supporting both electric utilities and the vibrant off-grid industry.
Peer reviews are a standard co-operative OECD working tool that offer member countries a framework to compare experiences and examine best practices in a host of areas. The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has developed a proven methodology for conducting peer reviews in radioactive waste management and nuclear R&D. Using this methodology, the NEA Radioactive Waste Management Committee’s Working Party on Decommissioning and Dismantling (WPDD) developed the present guide as a framework for decommissioning cost reviewers and reviewees to prepare for and conduct international peer reviews of decommissioning cost estimate studies for nuclear facilities. It includes checklists that will help national programmes or relevant organisations to assess and improve decommissioning cost estimate practices in the future. This guide will act as the NEA reference for conducting such international peer reviews.
The Guidance is intended to offer host governments the tools they need to assemble and manage a multidisciplinary team, and engage effectively in extractive contract negotiations. The Guidance aims to help governments to put in place recommended processes and identify the skills that governments may need to prepare for and conduct effective contract negotiations. This Guidance further suggests ways to ensure coordination within government and better integration between government officials and expert advisers. Annexed to this Guidance is a Terms of Reference Template that governments may use to recruit and to monitor external advisers engaged during extractive contract negotiations. The Template can also be utilised by support providers who recruit external advisers on behalf of governments for the same purpose. While recognising that human and institutional capacity building is a long-term endeavour, the Guidance suggests, wherever possible, practical ways to capture and retain the necessary soft and technical skills for successful negotiations.
Several models, tools and methods have been published in the past 20 years to include bioavailability in risk assessment and several OECD member countries already have developed frameworks and published guidance documents for taking metal specificities into account in environmental risk assessment. The aim of the current guidance is not to replace the aforementioned frameworks or guidance documents, but rather, to provide an overarching framework on how to apply these tools depending on which data are actually available/needed to assess the bioavailability of the metal under scrutiny. Further harmonisation of these approaches and methodology, where appropriate, over the different OECD countries is recommended and could facilitate a more worldwide application and the Mutual Acceptance of Data since using common assessment approaches may help comparing and exchanging data sets, which could result in significant resource savings.
The peer review process can lead to changes in the interpretation of the slides and the reported results, and potentially the outcome and conclusions of the study. The purpose of this document is to provide guidance to pathologists, test facility management, study directors and quality assurance personnel on how the peer review of histopathology should be planned, managed, documented and reported in order to meet GLP expectations and requirements. This document is a complement to the guidance provided in section 3.6.3.7 of OECD Guidance Document 116 (series on testing and assessment), whose focus is on how histopathology peer review should be conducted.
This document contains revised standards for transfer pricing documentation and a template for country-by-country reporting of revenues, profits, taxes paid and certain measures of economic activity. These new reporting provisions, and the transparency they will encourage, will contribute to the objective of understanding, controlling, and tackling BEPS behaviours. Countries participating in the BEPS project will carefully review the implementation of these new standards and will reassess no later than the end of 2020 whether modifications should be made to require reporting of additional or different data. Effective implementation of the new reporting standards and reporting rules will be essential. Additional work will be undertaken to identify the most appropriate means of filing the required information with and disseminating it to tax administrations.
This document contains revisions to the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines to align transfer pricing outcomes with value creation in the area of intangibles. The changes clarify the definition of intangibles and provide guidance for related parties; including transactions involving intangibles and the transfer pricing treatment of local market features and corporate synergies. Some transfer pricing issues relating to intangibles are closely related to other issues that are to be addressed during 2015, most notably in relation to the allocation of risk among MNE group members and recharacterisation of transactions. Because of those interactions some sections of this document are in intermediate form and will be finalised in 2015.
This publication offers a general introduction to sustainability impact assessment, which is an approach for exploring the combined economic, environmental and social impacts of a range of proposed policies, programmes, strategies and action plans. Such assessments can also assist decision-making and strategic planning throughout the entire policy cycles. It is not an in-depth or detailed user manual, but rather outlines basic principles and process steps of sustainability impact assessments, drawing on examples from Switzerland, Belgium and the European Commission, among others. This publication is a valuable source of information for policy makers on sustainability impact assessments.
In this document a strategy is presented to facilitate the ecological risk assessment of organometallic compounds (OM) and organic metal salts (OMS), outlining key steps that are based on elucidation of the fate of these substances in the environment. This document puts forth the recommendation that the initial determination of their fate in the environment is a primary factor for deciding how these substances should be assessed recognising that regulatory and program requirements will vary with each jurisdiction.