Browse by: "S"
Index
Title Index
Year Index
With the development and entry into force of the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement in 1995, the international community made a commitment to strengthen Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs), established to deal with the management of shared high seas resources. This study takes stock of the changes made in RFMOs, highlighting a gradual process of improvement that has translated into significant success stories. While there is no single recipe for this process, ensuring that the fundamental building blocks are in place to help create and maintain the economic and political momentum for change is important. Altering the underlying economic incentives may help to better align the interests of member countries, allowing coalitions for change to develop within the membership. The study and its analysis is built on evidence from a range of case studies of RFMOs, most notably the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CSBT), the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organisation (NAFO) and the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC).
Mainstreaming integrity policies throughout a public administration is a common challenge in many countries. Brazil’s Office of the Comptroller General (CGU) has implemented a series of measures to do so, including establishing the Public Integrity System of the Federal Executive Branch (SIPEF). This report analyses these recent developments and provides recommendations on how to better promote a culture of integrity through the Integrity Management Units with targeted support by the CGU. The report also highlights opportunities to improve the clarity and coherence of policies to promote public integrity and public ethics, manage conflicts of interest, and foster integrity risk management by streamlining these areas under the umbrella of public integrity.
The EU4Energy programme is a six-year initiative led and funded by the European Union. One of its key goals is to enable greater application of evidence-based energy policy and decision-making in participating countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The International Energy Agency (IEA), the Energy Community and the Energy Charter support the project, with the IEA taking lead responsibility for the policy development dimensions. As part of this programme, the IEA has prepared this high-level policy roadmap to help inform and guide policy practitioners as they seek to develop and implement policies to strengthen power system security in Kyrgyzstan, with a focus on improving power system reliability and resilience during periods of water shortage.
The analysis and proposals advanced in this document provide an integrated approach incorporating a suite of practical regulatory, supply-side and demand-side measures that reflect international experience and best practices. It avoids detailed prescription, recognising that Kyrgyz policy practitioners are better placed to draw on their local knowledge and experience to address practical details as they emerge. Accordingly, the roadmap’s proposed measures and pathways are intended to inform and guide the development of effective policies and programmes to help strengthen power system reliability and resilience, especially during periods of water shortage.
This paper begins by discussing power system security concepts and principles, focusing on how power system security is managed during normal operating conditions and how this can change in hydro-dependent power systems during periods of sustained water shortage. A description of the policy context for power system security in Kyrgyzstan follows. It highlights the key challenges for strengthening power system security, and provides an overview of the policy, legal, regulatory and institutional arrangements governing power system security in Kyrgyzstan. Finally, an integrated high-level policy roadmap is presented, including proposed strategic goals and a range of practical policy measures to pursue power system security over the next decade.
The report analyses the policy development process in Ireland. It focusses on three main areas that shape policy development: evidence, implementation, and legitimacy. It also discusses the skills, capacities, methods and tools in the Irish public sector that support effective policy development. The report highlights Ireland’s strengths, identifies gaps, provides examples of good practices, and suggests a number of areas of opportunity and action to bolster the policy development system and improve policymaking.
The impacts of epidemics and pandemics can go beyond health and the health sector, threatening livelihoods and other economic sectors. The complexity and uncertainty surrounding these events and the potential multidimensional and distributional impacts of response options imply that policy-making should be informed by evidence from the integration of disciplines and through intersectoral collaborations. Integrated epidemiologic-macroeconomic modelling (integrated modelling) can serve as a tool to explicitly adopt a multi-perspective and multi-dimensional approach to epidemics and pandemics and systematically consider the benefits and costs of different policy strategies and their distribution within society. Although integrated modelling promises to overcome the siloed disciplines and inherent tensions of priority-setting, the use of mathematical modelling in policy-making and the capacity of producing integrated models vary across country contexts. This guide proposes four initiatives and associated activities that can be adapted to context to enhance the production and use of integrated modelling before, during and after an epidemic or pandemic.
Many Emerging Asian countries have been refining macroprudential policies, particularly since the Global Financial Crisis. For instance, they have developed policies targeting housing markets and broadly transposed the Basel III requirements into their national legislation. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers now need to identify emerging vulnerabilities and their associated financial stability risks and respond with the appropriate macroprudential tools.
This publication provides a detailed overview of the current macroprudential policy situation in Emerging Asian countries and explores how the macroprudential policy toolkit has evolved. The report discusses some of the most pressing challenges to financial stability, including the interaction of macroprudential policy with other policies. It also devotes special attention to macroprudential policies for emerging priorities, such as achieving green goals and updating regulatory frameworks to reflect ongoing Fintech developments. Climate change will indeed create new challenges in financial markets, while Fintech developments bring about many economic opportunities and deepen financial systems, but present a variety of novel risks requiring rapid policy responses.
The Latvian government established the Housing Affordability Fund in mid-2022, a long-term self-sustaining financing model to channel investment into affordable housing. The fund is now being scaled up to ensure lasting impact on the Latvian housing market. This report identifies options for institutional arrangements, funding and financing opportunities, and operational tools to achieve this aim. It draws on the rich and diverse experiences of four peer countries in establishing and operating revolving fund schemes for affordable housing (Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Slovenia), and also reflects findings from engagement with a range of stakeholders in the Latvian housing sector.
This report reflects long-term, in-depth discussion and debate by participants in the Latin American Roundtable on Corporate Governance. It seeks to encourage the emergence of active and informed owners as an important lever for influencing better corporate governance, adapted to the Latin American context.
Education matters. It is a gateway to prosperity of individuals and economies alike.
Integrity in education matters too. Corruption hinders prosperity, causes long-term damage to societies, and diminishes the efficiency of investment in their human potential.
Driven by the insight that corruption in education can undermine even the best of intentions, the Republic of Serbia requested the OECD to assess the integrity of its education system – to collect evidence on shortcomings and strengths, to provide a forecast of corruption incidence, and to identify solutions for closing the gaps. This first of its kind integrity report seeks to give pragmatic answers to these queries and support authorities and stakeholders in taking informed decisions on how to strengthen integrity and prevent corruption in the sector. It uses a novel methodology for assessing the integrity of education systems (INTES) to identify the underlying causes of malpractice, and point out areas in need of attention.
The report gives a brief overview of education in Serbia and provides a note on the overall integrity climate in the country (Chapter 1). It moves on to identify issues that affect the capacity of the system to ensure fair access (Chapter 2) and deliver satisfactory quality (Chapter 3), to manage resources and staff diligently and professionally (Chapter 4) and to prevent and detect malpractice and corruption (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 contains the recommendations and suggestions for follow-up.
The behaviours of both top- and middle-level managers matter for promoting open organisational cultures, mitigating integrity risks and fostering ethical behaviour by their staff. This report examines key issues around integrity leadership in Brazil’s federal public administration, based on an extensive survey of senior public officials. Informed and inspired by behavioural insights, it provides concrete recommendations for strengthening integrity leadership in Brazil.
This publication is a complete collection of the papers presented at the workshop on "Pan-European Co-operation towards Strong Inland Waterway Transport: On the Move" held in Paris on 22 and 23 September 2005. The purpose of the workshop was to establish what progress had been made since the Pan-European Conference on Inland Waterways in Rotterdam in 2001 in preparation for the Bucharest Ministerial Conference, scheduled for September 2006. The papers focus essentially on the development of the inland waterway market in a pan-European context, conditions of competition, infrastructure development and the environment. A summary of the discussions at the workshop and its conclusions are also given. The workshop was jointly organised by the ECMT, UNECE, the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine and the Danube Commission.
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the critical need for health systems to be resilient against major disruptions. Despite the significant impact that crises such as pandemics, climate change effects, geopolitical conflicts, financial collapses or digital failures can have on economies and societies, policy makers in the health sector lack tools to test how their health systems would cope with extreme stress. Seizing a narrowing policy window in a post-pandemic context, the OECD and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, with support from the European Commission, developed a comprehensive methodology culminating in a handbook on "Strengthening Health Systems: A Practical Handbook for Resilience Testing." Inspired by stress tests in various sectors, this methodology was piloted in Finland, Greece, and Spain throughout 2023. The handbook provides health policy makers with tools to assess and enhance their systems' resilience. This is intended to foster policy dialogues and the identification of structural weaknesses as the starting point for targeted investments and remedial policies that will allow health systems to withstand the impact of future shocks more effectively.
Health data constitutes a significant resource in most OECD countries that could be used to improve population health, the quality of health care and the performance of health systems. Rising levels of chronic diseases; concerns about the quality and safety of patient care; the need to assure value for investments in health care; and the need to allocate health resources wisely; are all too important to be left without good evidence for decision making.
This book, based on studies of 19 countries on the development and use of personal health data and of 25 countries on development and use of electronic health record systems, includes results showing good practices, new opportunities and data privacy protection challenges. It finds that well-intended policies to allay concerns about breaches of confidentiality and potential misuse of personal health data may be limiting data use, but that the next five years appear promising, in terms of both the number of countries that plan to implement national electronic health record systems and the number that consider it likely that data from these systems will be used for some aspects of health care quality monitoring. They also appear promising for the further use of existing personal health databases and for the linkage of multiple data sources to generate new evidence.
Successfully managing and administering European Structural Investment Funds (ESIF) rests on the effective governance of the investment process, on the administrative capacity of Managing Authorities, and on the engagement of a diverse range of stakeholders, including beneficiaries. The OECD has developed an analytical framework with four dimensions – people management, organisational management, strategic planning, and framework conditions – to analyse the challenges and capacity gaps confronting Managing Authorities in the administration and management of these funds. Based on a pilot project with three national- and two regional-level Managing Authorities, the study identified a series of common challenges. These include being more strategic and innovative in how staff, processes and programmes are managed; managing the impact of framework conditions on stability and certainty in administrative and investment processes; and needing to ensure that capacity building among Managing Authorities and/or beneficiaries is undertaken at the appropriate scale. Capacity-building Roadmaps were built with each participant. This report recommends concrete actions for actors in the ESIF governance system to build and reinforce the administrative and investment management capacity of Managing Authorities throughout the EU. The findings can also benefit non-EU public actors in managing public investment.
In countries affected by the illegal wildlife trade, corruption is a key enabler and facilitator. Failure to address this corruption, and the institutional and governance gaps that allow it to take place, make tackling the illegal wildlife trade a significant challenge. This report provides a structured analysis of how corruption facilitates wildlife crime based on research in four source and transit countries in East and Southern Africa. It offers a series of specific recommendations targeted at national governments, donors, and intergovernmental organisations to address the issues of corruption and the illegal wildlife trade.
This report assesses the linkages between foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Slovak Republic. It provides policy recommendations to national and subnational governments on how to foster productivity and innovation spillovers from FDI to the local economy. The report looks at the quality of investment the country attracts, the absorptive capacity of Slovak SMEs, and a broad range of economic, business and policy conditions that can strengthen knowledge and technology diffusion from FDI to domestic SMEs. It also provides a diagnostic assessment of the core FDI-SME spillover diffusion channels, namely value chain linkages, strategic partnerships, labour mobility, and competition and imitation effects. The report provides an overview of the Slovak policy arrangements for promoting international investment, SME performance and innovation, and regional development. It does so by taking a close look at multi-level coordination, stakeholder consultation and impact evaluation. It then reviews the policy mix in support FDI-SME linkages and spillovers and proposes concrete areas for further policy reforms. The last chapter introduces a regional lens, focusing on the regions of Banská Bystrica and Košice. This report is part of a multi-year European Commission-OECD project on strengthening FDI-SME ecosystems and is the second pilot review for future country assessments.
This report assesses the enabling conditions for maximising the benefits of foreign direct investment (FDI) on SME productivity and innovation in Portugal. It looks at the quality of investment that Portugal attracts and the capacity of Portuguese SMEs to benefit from any knowledge and technology spillovers resulting from these investments. It studies the extent to which FDI-SME spillovers occur through value chain linkages, strategic partnerships, labour mobility, competition and imitation effects. The report provides an overview of Portuguese public institutions responsible for investment, SMEs, innovation and regional development policies, taking a close look at arrangements to ensure multi-level policy coordination, stakeholder consultation and evaluation of policy impacts. It then reviews the mix of government policies that are currently in place to support FDI-SME linkages and spillovers, noting areas for further policy reforms. The last chapter introduces a regional lens, focusing in particular on the regions of Norte and Alentejo. This report is part of a broader European Commission-OECD programme on strengthening FDI-SME linkages and serves as a pilot for future country assessments.
This report assesses the potential for linkages between foreign direct investment (FDI) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Czechia, and provides policy recommendations to foster productivity and innovation spillovers to the local economy. The report examines the quality of investment that the country attracts, the productive and innovative capacities of Czech SMEs, and a broad range of economic, business and policy conditions that can strengthen knowledge and technology diffusion from foreign multinationals to domestic enterprises. It also assesses Czechia’s institutional environment and policy mix across the areas of international investment, SMEs and entrepreneurship, innovation and regional development, noting areas for policy reform. The report includes a regional focus on the potential for FDI and SME linkages and spillovers in South Moravia and Usti.
Security and justice are core responsibilities of the State, and the foundations of good governance and healthy democracies. Moreover, they are precursors to economic growth and competitiveness, with potential impacts on businesses' transaction costs and the quality of human capital. Generating and utillising evidence on security and justice therefore is key to strengthening justice sector performance and reducing crime. This can pose a challenge to governments however as crime is a distrinctly territorial phenomenon, particularly in Mexico. This study offers a framework to treat security and justice as a central concern of public policy. It examines the availability and quality of sub-national level data in Mexico, and discusses how to transform this data into evidence that can feed into each stage of the policy cycle. It presents available indicators at sub-national level in Mexico and compares the extent to which crime and justice data follow regional paterns with respect to a sample of other OECD Member Countries.
The crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has been unlike any other the world has experienced, requiring social distancing and restrictions on mobility, and rendering some economic activity impossible. This publication explores and compares the characteristics that have affected the ability of firms, workers and consumers to maintain production, employment and consumption during the COVID-19 crisis, across industries and countries. It takes an analytical forward-looking perspective, considering a broad collection of indicators and evidence to guide policies. The aspects covered centre around topics of business dynamics; productivity; innovation and digital technologies; interconnectedness; inclusiveness; and skills.
The report incorporates both a short-term perspective – analysing the supply restrictions and lockdowns that have characterised containment responses – and a medium- to long-term view, focusing on changes in demand that have arisen through recessionary effects and changes in preferences.
The purpose of this publication is to provide insights to policy makers in three ways. First, by providing an overview of the different channels through which the crisis has affected firms differently across industries; then, by identifying country characteristics which may mediate these channels and mitigate or amplify the impacts of this and future shocks on the economy; and finally, by exploring systematic differences in the impact across population subgroups and the implications for policy.