Browse by: "T"

Over 100 million workers in Southeast Asia have jobs that are directly or closely linked to the environment, making them vulnerable to climate change impacts. These same workers likely earn at least 20% lower than the national average and are largely in informal employment. The region’s necessary transition towards greener growth could affect them in several ways: some sectors will create jobs and others will lose jobs or disappear altogether. Understanding the effects of both climate change and green growth policies on jobs and people is thus essential for making the transition in Southeast Asia an inclusive one. The study explores these issues, with emphasis on the potential effects on labour of an energy transition in Indonesia, and of a transition in the region’s agricultural sector, illustrated by a simulated conversion from conventional to organic rice farming.

The re-opening of Samoa’s borders in late-2022 kickstarted the country’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. This offers an opportunity to rebuild sustainably its tourism, maritime transport, and fisheries sectors. Samoa’s ocean resources can also augment its resilience to future shocks such as climate change. Through an analysis of Samoa’s economic trends and environmental pressures, institutional set-up and policy tools, as well as financing landscape, this report identifies opportunities and challenges for Samoa’s ocean economy to drive sustainable and resilient development. The Samoa Ocean Strategy offers a blueprint for such a pursuit, but there remain gaps and impediments. To address them, the report provides several cross-cutting and sector-specific policy recommendations to accelerate Samoa’s transition to a sustainable ocean economy.

The growing demand for raw materials in the Hungarian economy projected up to 2050 is expected to exert significant additional pressure on the environment, putting the country at risk of missing important environmental goals and opportunities to strengthen the competitiveness and resilience of its economy. Despite the notable progress in decoupling environmental pressures from economic activities over the past 20 years, several challenges remain. The transition to a circular economy has significant potential to address these challenges. To fully realise the circular potential of its economy, Hungary will need to adopt a comprehensive circular economy policy framework. This report outlines a set of key elements for the development of the Hungarian national circular economy strategy and action plan. It identifies priority areas that are deemed critical to the Hungarian circular economy transition, including: biomass and food, construction and plastics, as well as cross-cutting horizontal tools to facilitate an economy-wide circular transition. It also provides 45 policy recommendations and suggests specific implementation actions across the priority areas for the short, medium and long term.

The past decade has seen increasing international recognition of civic space as a cornerstone of functioning democracies, alongside efforts to promote and protect it. Countries that foster civic space are better placed to reap the many benefits of higher levels of citizen engagement, strengthened transparency and accountability, and empowered citizens and civil society. In the longer term, a vibrant civic space can help to improve government effectiveness and responsiveness, contribute to more citizen-centred policies, and boost social cohesion. This first OECD comparative report on civic space offers a baseline of data from 33 OECD Members and 19 non-Members and a nuanced overview of the different dimensions of civic space, with a focus on civic freedoms, media freedoms, civic space in the digital age, and the enabling environment for civil society. It provides an exhaustive review of legal frameworks, policies, strategies, and institutional arrangements, in addition to implementation gaps, trends and good practices. The analysis is complemented by a review of international standards and guidance, in addition to data and analysis from civil society and other stakeholders.

The report Tax Capacity Building: A Practical Guide to Developing and Advancing Tax Capacity Building Programmes aims to assist tax administrations globally in advancing their tax capacity building programmes by describing good practices, by looking at tools and approaches that improve co-ordination, and by sharing knowledge. While the report primarily focuses on the development of a tax administration’s own capacity-building programme, elements of this report may also prove useful to those providing other forms of assistance, for example, through the support of programmes undertaken by the domestic development agency or through the support of regional or multilateral initiatives.

The issue of trust between Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and tax administrations is a vital part of the tax system, but relatively little studied. Building on previous OECD research on tax morale, which measures taxpayer perceptions and attitudes towards paying and evading taxes, this report presents new data on how tax administrations perceive MNE behaviour towards tax compliance. With a particular focus on the challenges facing developing countries, this report brings together this data with previous data on MNE perceptions, and the outcomes of a series of regional roundtables on tax morale held between tax administrations and MNEs. Having identified a number of challenges around trust, transparency and openness, the report sets out a range of approaches to help build trust, improve communications, and build more effective relationships between taxpayers and tax administrations.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected Fiji, hitting at backbone economic sectors, such as international tourism and export fisheries. It has also brought to the fore the need to embark on a more sustainable model of development. This report examines Fiji’s economic and sustainability trends, as well as the governance and financing of its ocean economy before and during the COVID-19 crisis. It provides an initial mapping of promising initiatives and funding instruments that can be developed and scaled up to foster a sustainable blue recovery, focusing on four main areas: sustainable fisheries, sustainable tourism, green shipping and marine conservation.

In February 2019, the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) adopted its Recommendation on the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus, in order to foster greater coherence among actors working to strengthen resilience in fragile contexts and address the root causes of humanitarian challenges. In advance of the monitoring report due in 2024, this interim progress review analyses adherents’ efforts to align their work with the principles of the Recommendation. It documents the progress of DAC and United Nations adherents in taking forward the triple nexus approach, while pointing to remaining gaps between the Recommendation’s aspirations and these adherents’ practice across co-ordination, programming, and financing. The report identifies nine areas where to accelerate the move from policy to action.

Delivering the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement will require all sources of finance — public and private — to be scaled up and aligned with sustainable development. Blended finance can play an essential role in unlocking and channelling commercial finance towards sustainable development in developing countries. However, it remains a relatively new tool in development co-operation. While many donors have well-established blended finance programs, others are just now starting to deploy blended finance. The OECD DAC Blended Finance Guidance is a policy tool to help all providers of development finance — donor governments and agencies, multilateral donors, philanthropies and other stakeholders — to put the Blended Finance Principles into practice and effectively design and implement blended finance programs. Approved by the DAC in September 2020, the Guidance outlines policy recommendations and provides good practice examples as well as practical checklists and key references on blended finance. The Guidance is the result of an extensive, multi-stakeholder consultation process, involving international experts, practitioners and researchers. The Guidance ultimately aims to enhance the growth and improve the quality of finance that is mobilised and invested in sustainable development in developing countries.

Sovereign wealth funds manage a large share of the world’s invested capital. The action or inaction of these funds on climate finance is of crucial importance to the world’s ability to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement, and restrain global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. However, sovereign wealth funds have so far played a very limited role in climate finance. This report provides guidance on how governments can support their sovereign wealth funds in becoming climate-aligned commercial investors. The establishment of synergies between sovereign wealth funds and strategic investment funds can help scale up investments in clean-energy infrastructure.

Violence against women remains a global crisis. Worldwide, more than one in three women have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. OECD’s inaugural conference on violence against women, entitled “Taking Public Action to End Violence at Home,” facilitated a survivor-centred exchange of ideas and experiences. Held on 5-6 February 2020, attendees convened to share experiences, practices and ideas on how to prevent, address, and eradicate intimate partner violence (IPV), a particularly insidious form of violence against women. Just a few weeks after this OECD conference concluded, the regional health crisis of COVID-19 in Asia had turned into a global pandemic. In less than a month, the entire world was grappling with the massive health, social, and economic effects of the crisis – including the consequences of millions of women becoming trapped at home with their abusers, as governments implemented containment measures to stop the spread of the virus. The issues, challenges, and solutions to intimate partner violence that were debated at OECD conference have taken on a new and even more pressing urgency in the face of the global crisis.

African governments are increasingly confronted with new forms of political violence. The situation is particularly worrying in the Sahara-Sahel where violence is on the rise. This degrading security situation has prompted African countries and their partners to intervene militarily to stabilise the region and to prevent the spread of extremism and violence against civilians. However, these initiatives face many obstacles due to the transnational nature and geography of violence. Tensions regionalise across state borders when armed groups, defeated by counter-insurgency efforts, relocate to other countries. This study maps the evolution of violence across North and West Africa, with a particular focus on Mali, Lake Chad and Libya. In the regions experiencing the highest levels of political insecurity, it identifies whether and how conflicts tend to cluster or spread, potentially across national borders. The work is based on a new spatial indicator of political violence designed to assess the long-term evolution of conflicts and provide policy options.

This report updates the data published in the 2015 OECD Compendium of Agri-environmental Indicators to present a summary of the environmental performance of agriculture in OECD countries as of end-2015. It also includes new and innovative material to further strengthen its relevance as a reference document. In particular, the four thematic chapters each cover a targeted set of indicators for which data coverage is generally more consistent across time in OECD countries and that capture the main pressures agriculture exerts on the environment. The thematic chapters cover the following areas: the interlinked issues of land use, pesticides and farmland birds; ammonia and greenhouse gas emissions, the main air pollutants from agricultural activities; nitrogen and phosphorus balances, two indicators that signal air and water pollution; and water use and irrigation in agriculture.

This report examines land-use trends, policies and practices in Korea, in particular in the city of Busan, through the lens of urban regeneration and citizen participation. Land-use planning is critical for the efficient and inclusive management of cities, pursuing sustainable and balanced development and improving quality of life and regional competitiveness. Korea has benefitted from comprehensive and well-structured, hierarchical land-use planning and urban regeneration frameworks. However, faced with a series of demographic and economic challenges, together with geographic factors and historical developments, Korea needs to re-evaluate land-use management and urban regeneration to leverage inclusive growth and boost competitiveness in Korean cities. This report argues that involving citizens in land-use planning and urban regeneration is essential to collect better quality information as a basis for plans, decisions and outcomes. This report is of relevant to urban planners, land use especialists, and city managers who work on urban regeneration projects and citizens’ participation.

Almost one in four people in OECD countries is currently obese. This epidemic has far-reaching consequences for individuals, society and the economy. Using microsimulation modelling, this book analyses the burden of obesity and overweight in 52 countries (including OECD, European Union and G20 countries), showing how overweight reduces life expectancy, increases healthcare costs, decreases workers' productivity and lowers GDP. The report makes the urgent economic case to scale up investments in policies to promote healthy lifestyles and tackle this growing global public health problem. The book evaluates a number of policies which could significantly improve health outcomes while being an excellent investment for countries.