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L’emploi et la protection sociale sont deux moyens déterminants d’assurer l’instauration d’une croissance pro-pauvres et la réalisation des Objectifs du millénaire pour le développement. Dans les pays en voie de développement la majorité des pauvres travaillent, mais principalement dans le secteur informel de l’économie, où les conditions d’emploi sont médiocres, la productivité faible et les revenus insuffisants. Une action visant à créer des conditions plus propices à la création d’entreprises à l’échelon local entraînera une amélioration des résultats obtenus sur le plan de l’emploi dans les pays en développement. La protection sociale est un investissement dans les personnes. Elle offre aux ménages la possibilité d’investir dans des activités productives et dans leur capital humain, et d’accroître ainsi leur productivité et leurs revenus. La protection sociale et l’emploi sont des priorités de développement permanentes, mais ils revêtent encore plus d’importance en période de difficulté économique. Il est jugé de plus en plus souhaitable, dans les pays en développement, que les pouvoirs publics intensifient leur action dans ces deux domaines.

English
This report examines the performance of the Public Employment Service (PES) and the effectiveness of activation strategies in Finland. It covers the role of the key actors, the placement function of the PES, the structure of out-of-work benefits and the related incentives and disincentives for taking up work, and provides an overview of the different active labour market programmes (ALMPs).
This paper reports on the progress in the research and development of the set of patient safety indicators developed by the Health Care Quality Indicators project. The indicators presented here have been recommended by an expert group for further consideration in international reporting on the quality of care on the key dimension of safety. The indicators have been selected by expert consensus, undergone validity testing and have been tested for comparability. While concern remains related to differences in coding and reporting from administrative hospital databases, the rigour with which the indicator work has been undertaken has resulted in the improved ability of countries to report on the quality of care. The work on the development of the patient safety indicators highlights the technical progress made in constructing measures and the ongoing need for methodological improvements. The indicators reported here should not be considered as making inferences on the state of patient safety in countries, but are intended to raise questions towards improving understanding of the reported differences.
Governments and other stakeholders have become increasingly interested in assessing the skills of their adult populations in order to examine how well prepared they are to meet the challenges of the modern knowledge-based society. The current paper provides a conceptual framework for the assessment of reading component skills in the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The assessment of component skills is intended to provide a greater level of information about the skills of individuals with low levels of literacy proficiency than has been available from previous international assessments. The ‘component skills ’identified for the assessment are vocabulary knowledge, sentence processing and passage comprehension.
The current paper provides an overview of the conceptual framework for the assessment of numeracy developed for the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).
This research review reports on articles presenting empirical research in the area of how teacher-training institutions work on preparing future teachers for the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) in their future classrooms. It was conducted mainly in English and French and covers research in 11 OECD-countries during the years 2002–2009. The research is unanimous, even if it is not comprehensive, and it shows that ICT is not used regularly or systematically in the countries reviewed. There are good examples, carried out by enthusiastic teacher trainers, but only a minority of the student teachers benefit from this. Very few articles report innovative use of recent technology. Most of the research reports on the use of computers and traditional computer software. Overall, student teachers do not integrate technology into their teaching. A number of reasons for this are identified. The overall picture is that implementation is necessary at all levels (macro, meso, micro) for a successful outcome, but research also gives examples of how problems can be overcome at a micro-level, which is the level of the actors' pedagogical practice. Enthusiasts do seem to have room for maneuver, but the lack of incentives makes it difficult to involve everyone.
Overweight and obesity rates have been increasing relentlessly over recent decades in all industrialised countries, as well as in many lower income countries. OECD analyses of trends over time support the grim picture drawn in the international literature and so do projections of overweight and obesity rates over the next ten years. The circumstances in which people have been leading their lives over the past 20-30 years, including physical, social and economic environments, have exerted powerful influences on their overall calorie intake, on the composition of their diets and on the frequency and intensity of physical activity at work, at home and during leisure time. Many countries have been concerned not only about the pace of the increase in overweight and obesity, but also about inequalities in their distribution across social groups, particularly by socio-economic status and by ethnic background.
Governments and other stakeholders have become increasingly interested in assessing the skills of their adult populations for the purposes of monitoring how well prepared they are for the challenges of the new information world. The current paper provides an overview of the conceptual framework developed for the assessment of problem solving in technology-rich environments for the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This covers the specific class of problems that people encounter when using information and communication technologies. These include problems where the existence of the problem is a consequence of the availability of new technologies, where the solution requires the use of computer-based applications or where the problem relates to the management or use of information technologies.
Previous happiness research has explicitly assumed that subjective well-being is U-shaped in age. This paper sheds new light on this issue testing several functional forms. Using micro data from the World Values Survey on 44 000 persons in 30 economically advanced OECD countries with long life expectancies, we reveal a hyperbolic functional form. We find that life satisfaction reaches another local maximum around the age of 83, with a level identical to that of a 26-year old. This hyperbolic well-beingage relation is robust to the inclusion of cohort effects. We test this relationship for each OECD country separately, and corroborate the functional form using a sample of non-OECD countries.

Dynamic scoring – taking full account of all the economic effects of policies when estimating their budgetary effects – is almost self-evidently attractive. But it is formidably difficult to achieve. This paper assesses the key conceptual and practical challenges it poses and considers the pros and cons of adopting it. The objective should be to provide more useful information while being robust to the political debate.

The movement for greater fiscal transparency has been gaining momentum in recent years. To contribute to these efforts, the International Budget Partnership (IBP) developed the Open Budget Survey in 2006. The 2008 survey finds that the state of budget transparency around the world is deplorable, although a number of countries have improved their performance over the past two years. This article discusses the results of the 2008 survey and ways of improving budget transparency.

This paper first presents information on trends and composition of social expenditure across the OECD. Gross public social expenditure on average across OECD increased from 16% of GDP in 1980 to 21% in 2005, of which public pensions (7% of GDP) and public health expenditure (6% of GDP) are the largest items. This paper then accounts for the effects of the tax system and private social expenditure which leads to a greater similarity in social expenditure-to-GDP ratios across countries and to a reassessment of the magnitude of welfare states. After accounting for the impact of taxation and private benefits, social expenditure (1) amounts to over 30% of GDP at factor cost in Belgium, Germany, and France and (2) ranges within a few percentage points of each other in Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United States.
Labour market outcomes have improved markedly in the past years as the beneficial effects of the economic upswing were reinforced by important structural reforms.With the economy on the verge of a severe economic downturn, it is important to avoid alleviating measures that adversely affect the functioning of the labour market in the long run. Moreover, several structural challenges remain which require further reform efforts. Firstly, to raise labour force participation of the elderly the pension system needs to be reformed by removing incentives for early retirement and facilitating gradual exits from the labour force. Secondly, to increase employment rates of younger age cohorts, the length of tertiary studies needs to be reduced by strengthening incentives for rapid graduation. Moreover, potential negative employment effects associated with the relatively high minimum wage compared to the average wage should be avoided. Thirdly, to combat increasing labour market dualism, employment protection legislation on regular work contracts needs to be eased once the current economic crisis subsides and the preferential treatment of student work should be phased out. This Working Paper relates to the 2009 OECD Economic Survey of the Slovenia (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/slovenia).
This paper examines various aspects of fiscal policy in Slovenia, in particular fiscal consolidation, pension reform, efficiency of government spending and the tax system. It finds that Slovenia belongs to the group of new EU member countries, which have given in the past a high priority to fiscal prudence. This both stabilised the economy and paved the way for entry to the EU in 2004 and adoption of the euro in 2007. It also created room to counteract the current weakening of the economy. But fiscal policy has to cope with four main challenges: i) ensuring a return to fiscal consolidation after the current economic downturn; ii) achieving longer-term fiscal sustainability by continuing pension reform; iii) limiting growth of public spending and improving its quality; and iv) making the tax system less distorting for job creation and growth. This Working Paper relates to the 2009 OECD Economic Survey of the Slovenia (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/slovenia).

This article discusses Indonesia’s economic and fiscal performance following the 1997/98 financial crisis and the transition to democracy, as well as the budget formulation process and the role of Parliament. Aspects of budget implementation are discussed throughout the article. Jón R. Blöndal, Ian Hawkesworth and Hyun-Deok Choi

The concept of fair value accounting was introduced in 1993 to make financial statements easier to compare and balance sheets more reflective of real values. This article discusses the true consequences of fair value accounting and its impact on the stability of financial institutions.

By Peter J. Wallison, American Enterprise Institute

The competiveness of the diverse sector of higher education sees universities increasingly reliant on marketing to position themselves within their main stakeholder groups. In doing so, the use of marketing techniques developed for the service industry are being adopted at strategic and tactical levels with little research to support such undifferentiated action. This paper discusses a number of issues joining marketing with the moral leadership of the university in a persistently competitive and commercial market place.  We seek to offer practical actions to ensure that marketing remains a service to the institution and does not convert the mission of all institutions to one of consumerisation. We do this by discussing how a relationship model of engagement with stakeholders might be grounded in a virtue ethics imperative and how this might contribute to brand development and accountability.

This chapter reviews the role of the Mexican legislature in the budget process. Over the past decade, the Mexican Chamber of Deputies has become a much more active participant in the budget process. This development reflects the changes in the political system and the nature of the legislative-executive relationship. On a number of occasions, the budget process has become the focal point of conflict between the two branches. Recent reforms to the legislative budget process have provided tools to strengthen legislative oversight and have helped to some extent to clarify the respective roles of the legislature and the executive. Combined with a growing cross-party willingness to co-operate on the budget and greater emphasis on fiscal responsibility, the legislative budget process has been greatly improved.

Mexico, like most OECD countries, is under pressure to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending. An important step in this process is to obtain objective information on the performance of programmes and agencies. Performance information allows governments to measure progress towards achieving their goals and to know what programmes and policies are working and those that are not. The majority of OECD countries are seeking to improve the development and use of performance information through performance management and budgeting reforms. These reforms aim to shift the emphasis of budgeting and management away from a focus on controlling inputs and following rules and regulations towards a focus on results.

Over the past decade, the evolution of budgeting in Mexico has been driven by two main trends. First, in order to avoid crises like those of the 1980s and 1990s, the government has been working on developing an institutional framework for stable and sustainable fiscal management. Second, the country has completed the process of transition from a political system where one party dominated to a competitive multi-party system.

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