This paper explores enhancements to international large-scale assessments (ILSAs). It advocates for diversification, targeting specific groups or individuals for more precise diagnoses, and flexibilisation, refining the item bank for assessments' relevance and adaptability. The paper also introduces prototypes for new assessment tools, representing a significant evolution in ILSAs' design and application, aiming for broader impact and increased adaptability in ILSAs.
Presumptive tax regimes (also known as simplified tax regimes) intend to reduce tax compliance costs for micro and small businesses (and enforcement costs for the tax administration) while levying a lower tax burden as compared to the standard tax system.
This working paper compiles detailed information on the presumptive tax regimes existing in a selection of OECD and non-OECD countries, identifies common practices adopted across the countries examined and provides multiple examples of best practices observed in these regimes. These examples can serve as guidance to policy makers and tax administrations to strengthen particular features of the presumptive tax regimes implemented in their jurisdictions. Lastly, the paper highlights the main challenges generally observed in the presumptive tax regimes under study, which might undermine the role of these regimes in incentivising business formalisation and strengthening tax compliance over time.
Rising uncertainties and geo-political tensions, together with increasingly complex trade relations have increased the demand for monitoring global trade in a timely manner. Although it was primarily designed to ensure vessel safety, information from the Automatic Information System, which allows for the tracking of vessels across the globe, is particularly well suited for providing insights on port activity and maritime trade developments, which accounts for a large share of global trade. Data are available in quasi real time but need to be pre-processed and validated. This paper contributes to existing research in this field in two major ways. First, it proposes a new methodology to identify ports, at a higher level of granularity than in past research. Second, it builds indicators to monitor port congestion and trends in maritime trade flows and provides more granular information to better understand those flows. Those indicators will still need to be refined, by complementing the AIS database with additional data sources, but already provide a useful source of information to monitor trade, at the country and global levels.
Open unemployment and joblessness in Switzerland are low compared to OECD standards. Yet a comparatively high proportion of working-age individuals remain weakly attached to the labour market, with unstable jobs, or with limited working hours. As an initial step towards a possible in-depth project, this Faces of Joblessness feasibility study provides insight into the nature and incidence of the structural barriers that are likely to prevent individuals from fully engaging in employment and speculates on their possible links with underutilized employment potential. It shows that lack of recent work experience and substantial non-labour or partner income are two key employment barriers in Switzerland. Partner income can be a barrier for women in particular and might be one of the reasons why many women leave stable employment at childbearing age, alongside low supply and high cost of early childhood education and care programs. Workers over 60 also represent a significant underutilized employment potential, as many have taken early retirement. Non-EU migrant are particularly exposed to potential labour market difficulties at younger age, and many of them have low levels of education, poor professional skills or limited work experience. This study also suggests that many jobless are confronted with complex and inter-related employment obstacles.
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This analytical report, the third in a series of four, was prepared by the OECD Higher Education Policy Team as part of the Education and Innovation Practice Community (EIPC) initiative, an action of the European Union’s New European Innovation Agenda, flagship 4 on “Fostering, attracting and retaining deep tech talent”. The EIPC initiative seeks to bring together policymakers and practitioners to advance understanding of the competencies that can trigger and shape innovation for the digital and green transitions.
This report provides analysis and case studies examining how traditional higher education programmes, like bachelor’s degrees, can effectively cultivate competencies crucial for green and digital innovation. It highlights four key action areas: tracking and assessing competencies; developing curricula; boosting student engagement; and enhancing partnerships with the private sector.
The Scottish Government and the OECD co-facilitated an international peer learning event in May 2023 to explore ways and approaches for clarifying the roles and responsibilities of school improvement support provided at different levels of the education system. The event brought together Scottish stakeholders and international experts from Ireland, Norway and Wales (United Kingdom) to collectively reflect on the country’s school improvement system. This report, written between May and September 2023, captures and summarises the peer learning event discussions and proposes policy options to help advance Scotland’s education reform agenda. This report will be valuable not only for Scotland, but also to the many countries that are looking to strengthen their school improvement support systems.
This paper presents tagging methodologies for 22 environmental domains in the OECD Policy INstruments for the Environment (PINE) database, including seven domains on environmental protection (air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, solid waste, ozone layer, noise and radiation), six domains on natural resource management (fisheries, forests, freshwater, renewable energy, fossil fuels and minerals) and nine cross-cutting domains (climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, land degradation, biodiversity, ocean, chemicals management, energy efficiency, circular economy and mercury). The environmental domains in the PINE database support tracking progress towards domestic and international environmental objectives. Tagging environmental domains allows harmonised comparisons across countries, years and policy instrument types.
In the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), the Big Five personality traits were assessed using the BFI-2-XS, the 15-item extra-short form of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2). For this purpose, the instrument was translated into 24 languages and adapted to 29 countries, resulting in 39 language versions. This translation and adaptation process followed state-of-the-art procedures to generate language versions of the BFI-2-XS that are maximally comparable across countries and regions. In the present paper, we describe this general translation procedure from a methodological point of view. We also document each resulting language version and report in detail the decisions taken during the translation process and the adaptations made to preexisting national versions of the BFI-2-XS. Our aim is to share with researchers the resulting BFI-2-XS language versions developed with high quality standards to allow maximal cross-cultural comparability. Our intention in so doing is to enable their wider usage beyond PIAAC.
Parliaments have a unique role in ensuring that adopted laws, regardless of who initiated them, are evidence-based and fit-for-purpose. For the executive branch, laws are vital instruments through which they deliver public policy. Governments therefore rely on parliaments to scrutinise and adopt legislation in a timely, well-planned and co-ordinated manner. Parliamentary scrutiny of government lawmaking and its role in ex post evaluation of law implementation helps the legislature hold the executive to account. Evidence-based lawmaking is especially critical to EU integration processes as they involve adoption of many new laws. This paper reviews how laws are planned, initiated, prepared, scrutinised and evaluated by the parliaments of six Western Balkan administrations. The report discusses the concept of lawmaking within a parliamentary system of government. It considers how parliaments and governments co-operate and co-ordinate their legislative activities throughout the lawmaking cycle, providing a comparative analysis of existing rules and procedures as well as lawmaking practices. A set of key findings and policy recommendations are provided to support the Western Balkan administrations to plan and implement future reforms.
AI can bring significant benefits to the workplace. In the OECD AI surveys of employers and workers, four in five workers say that AI improved their performance at work and three in five say that it increased their enjoyment of work. But the benefits of AI depend on addressing the associated risks. Taking the effect of AI into account, occupations at highest risk of automation account for about 27% of employment in OECD countries. Workers also express concerns around increased work intensity, the collection and use of data, and increasing inequality. To support the adoption of trustworthy AI in the workplace, this policy paper identifies the main risks that need to be addressed when using AI in workplace. It identifies the main policy gaps and offers possible policy avenues specific to labour markets.
This paper conducts an in-depth mapping of global value chain (GVC) vulnerabilities, using granular product-level trade data to identify vulnerable products with limited suppliers and substitutability. The study reveals that, in OECD countries, approximately 8% of foreign-sourced intermediate products are vulnerable, with about 50 products identified as highly vulnerable, particularly in the pharmaceutical, mining, and manufacturing sectors. The paper also introduces a quantitative framework for simulating supply shock transmission from upstream suppliers to downstream industries over the short and medium term. This framework leverages unique data that combine Inter-Country Input-Output with detailed product-level trade data from Comtrade. Through simulation exercises, the paper highlights the role of supplier concentration and geography in shock transmissions, as well as the effectiveness of policies in mitigating these impacts. This novel cross-country assessment of GVC disruptions provides new insights on how to manage supply chains in a global economy subject to multiple risks.
This paper reviews the digital tools developed by the insurance industry to improve the health and wellness of policyholders. These tools are said to offer a win-win: better health for policyholders and reduced claims for insurers. Many tools apply lessons from behavioural economics by seeking to influence policyholder behaviour and overcome short-term barriers to change. This paper identifies issues and challenges, such as data privacy and security, safety risks, data quality, overall effectiveness, and relevant policy and regulatory frameworks.
Despite numerous measures, gender stereotypes about abilities in mathematics and reading persist in schools, affecting both boys' and girls' schooling and educational choices. Inequalities also persist outside the classroom, where women, despite greater educational attainment, experience lower employment rates and often receive lower salaries than men with similar levels of education. Nonetheless, the many measures taken by countries have brought some encouraging signs of progress. However, more work is needed to ensure that improvements in education are also reflected in improvements once boys and girls transition into the world of work.
Cette synthèse présente un cadre conceptuel pour comprendre la performance non financière des entreprises par le prisme du Cadre de mesure du bien-être de l'OCDE. S'appuyant sur les approches existantes pour mesurer la performance sociale, elle propose un cadre et une série d'indicateurs pour ce que l'on peut appeler la « 1ère dimension de la performance sociale ». Il s'agit des résultats en termes de bien-être des parties prenantes qui évoluent au sein du périmètre organisationnel de l'entreprise, à savoir les salariés, et des ressources nécessaires au bien-être futur qui sont générées ou appauvries directement par entreprise elle-même et qui sont utiles à la société dans son ensemble. Il est intéressant de suivre l’évolution des résultats des entreprises dans le domaine social pour les personnes qui souhaitent comprendre les effets concrets des entreprises sur la société, ainsi que pour celles qui visent à maximiser la valeur à long terme de l’entreprise.
Increasingly, countries are integrating personalised public services to enhance access to, and the experience of those services to significantly improve outcomes for service users. Integrated services are particularly valuable for those with multiple and complex needs who require a range of tailored and, in some cases, specialised supports and services from more than one agency or service provider. Service specialisation can make it difficult for these service users to get the right mix of services and at the right time that best meet their needs. This paper provides a summary of how countries are integrating services to improve the lives and outcomes of care experienced by young people, people with disabilities, and people leaving prison. The paper is intended for policymakers who are seeking new or improved approaches to improving the outcomes of those who rely on personalised services.
This paper presents the first international assessment of the Lightcast vacancy data representativeness based on benchmarking against officially reported vacancy data in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The analysis compares distributions in the Lightcast data versus official data across large (TL2) regions, industrial sectors and occupational categories. The analysis shows differences in representativeness across countries and on the three dimensions considered. In general, regional representativeness is considerably better than both occupational and sectoral representativeness.
Data on online job postings represents an important source of information for local labour markets. Many countries lack statistics on labour demand that are sufficiently up-to-date and disaggregated across regions, sectors and occupations. Web-scraped data from online job postings can provide further insights on the trends in labour demand and the skills needed across regions, sectors and occupations. This paper assesses the comparability and validity between Lightcast and other data sources for Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden, for the years 2019 to 2022 across regions, sectors and occupations. It concludes with some recommendations for labour market analysts that want to use data on online job postings for assessing labour demand trends.
Despite women’s increased participation in the labour market significantly contributing to past economic growth, persistent gender gaps across OECD labour markets hinder full realization of the potential gains of women’s economic participation. This paper analyses the economic implications of these gaps and evaluates the potential for future growth through greater gender equality in labour market outcomes. Utilising two methodological frameworks, the paper first employs growth accounting to measure the contribution of women's employment to past economic growth. The paper then uses a simplified version of the OECD Long-Term Model in conjunction with projections on future labour force dynamics to estimate the impact of greater gender equality on the labour market. These analyses provide insight into the potentially significant economic benefits of closing persistent gender gaps across OECD countries.
Several states in West Africa have experienced significant episodes of political violence since the early 2010s. These have included civil wars, religiously motivated terrorism, separatist insurgencies, military coups and communal strife, each of which have local, national and transnational dimensions. Intended to help guide responses to the region’s political challenges, the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC/OECD) created an interactive, spatial tool for policy makers in 2019, the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi). The SCDi monitors political violence at subnational scales. It combines different quantitative dimensions of conflict into a mappable tool that describes the circumstances in each location. The latest enhancement to the SCDi brings two new features to aid the identification of local conflict trends. First, the tool now identifies regions that are newly entering into or exiting from conflict. This allows a more detailed picture of how the geography of conflict is spreading or contracting within and across national borders. Second, the tool now characterises the current conditions in a location as either worsening or improving, based on past conditions at the same location. The SCDi is implemented in SWAC’s new Mapping Territorial Transformations in Africa (MAPTA) platform.
En Afrique, les conflits armés impliquent une myriade de forces étatiques, groupes rebelles et organisations extrémistes entretenant des relations d’alliance et de rivalité en constante fluctuation. Des organisations alliées un jour peuvent s’affronter le lendemain, puis coopérer à nouveau. Cette note met à jour les travaux précurseurs menés par le Club du Sahel et de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (CSAO) de l’OCDE sur les réseaux de conflit de la région à l’aide d’une approche formelle des réseaux, connue sous le nom d’analyse dynamique des réseaux sociaux. S’appuyant sur les données collectées par l’Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) sur 3 800 acteurs et 60 000 événements violents au cours de la période 1997-2023, elle étudie l’évolution dans le temps des liens d’alliance et de rivalité entre acteurs violents, à l’échelon régional et local. Elle souligne l’augmentation du nombre de belligérants, la densification des relations de rivalité et la polarisation croissante des réseaux de conflit. Ces dynamiques sont extrêmement inquiétantes pour l’avenir de la région, puisqu’en plus de rendre les efforts de paix plus ardus que jamais, elles contribuent à la hausse du nombre de victimes civiles potentielles.