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Currently, there is limited international guidance available on setting national GHG baselines. The resulting variance and lack of transparency makes it difficult to understand emissions pledges defined as relative to BaU, and difficult to compare emissions scenarios across countries. Moving towards international guidance on setting baselines could improve transparency, clarity and comparability, while still allowing countries to maintain diversity in approaches. This paper discusses good practice and presents options for how guidance might be developed for key elements of baseline setting.
The options are presented as “tiers” that move from less detailed to more detailed guidance. The first tier describes guidance that would leave maximum flexibility for individual countries, whilst encouraging transparency. The second tier offers more detailed guidance for countries with greater domestic resources and capabilities. Countries could adhere to the tiers according to their capabilities, although they would be encouraged to follow the more detailed approach. The proposed tiers represent different levels of detail, rather than accuracy or data quality. More detailed guidance does not necessarily lead to “better” baselines, though it may help to improve understanding of different baselines.
- Dans les pays de l’OCDE, la taille moyenne des classes dans le premier cycle de l’enseignement secondaire s’établit à 23 élèves. On constate cependant des différences significatives entre les pays, les classes comptant plus de 32 élèves en Corée et au Japon, contre 19 ou moins en Estonie, en Islande, au Luxembourg, au Royaume-Uni et en Slovénie.
- La taille des classes, conjuguée au temps d’instruction des élèves, au temps d’enseignement des enseignants et au salaire de ces derniers, constitue l’une des variables clés sur lesquelles les décideurs peuvent jouer pour maîtriser les dépenses d’enseignement. Entre 2000 et 2009, de nombreux pays ont consenti des investissements plus élevés pour diminuer la taille des classes ; or la performance des élèves ne s’est améliorée que dans un petit nombre d’entre eux.
- La réduction de la taille des classes ne saurait, à elle seule, suffire à améliorer la performance des systèmes d’éducation. Cette mesure est également moins efficace que ne l’est l’amélioration de la qualité de l’enseignement.
- In OECD countries, the average class size at the lower secondary level is 23 students, but there are significant differences between countries, ranging from over 32 in Japan and Korea to 19 or below in Estonia, Iceland, Luxembourg, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.
- Class size, together with students’ instruction time, teachers’ teaching time and teachers’ salaries, is one of the key variables that policy makers can use to control spending on education. Between 2000 and 2009, many countries invested additional resources to decrease class size; however, student performance has improved in only a few of them.
- Reducing class size is not, on its own, a sufficient policy lever to improve the performance of education systems, and is a less efficient measure than increasing the quality of teaching.
- Immigrant students often have to overcome multiple barriers at once in order to succeed at school.
- Across most OECD countries, poor performance among immigrant students relative to other students is strongly related to social disadvantage at school, as reflected in the proportion of students whose mothers have low levels of education.
- The concentration, in a school, of immigrant students or of those who do not speak the language of instruction at home is not as strongly related to poor performance.
The differential between the interest rate paid to service government debt and the growth rate of the economy is a key concept in assessing fiscal sustanability. Among OECD economies,this differential was unusually low for much of the last decade compared with the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. This article investigates the reasons behind this profile using panel estimation on selected OECD economies as means of providing some guidance as to its future development. The results suggest that the fall is partly explained by lower inflation volatility associated with the adoption of monetary policy regimes credibly argeting low inflation,which might be expected to continue. However,the low differential is also partly explained by factors which are likely to be reversed in the future,including very low policy rates,the “global savings glut” and the effect which the European Monetary Union had in reducing long-term interest differentials in the pre-crisis period. The differential is also likely to rise in the future because the number of countries which have debt-to-GDP ratios above a threshold at which there appears to be an effect on sovereign risk premia has risen sharply. Moreover,debt is projected to increasingly rise above this threshold in most of these countries.
L'examen porte sur les stratégies, structures et pratiques en matière de promotion de l'entrepreneuriat dans les universités tunisiennes mettant en évidence l’enseignement des motivations entrepreneuriales pour favoriser la création d'entreprises par les diplômés. L'un des atouts essentiels du système tunisien est qu'il permet à un grand nombre d'étudiants d’accéder à un enseignement de base en entrepreneuriat. Le rapport expose les possibilités d'améliorer cet enseignement à l'aide de modèles internationaux de bonnes pratiques et en complément, par une importante aide au démarrage pour les étudiants prêts à aller plus en avant.
A cette fin, le présent rapport recommande la création d'une stratégie nationale de promotion de l'entrepreneuriat aux objectifs, indicateurs et mesures incitatives clairement définis, des méthodes d’apprentissage par des critères de référence et une base de données pour le matériel pédagogique. En outre, il recommande la création d'une plateforme d'échange pour les universités sur les pratiques de soutien à l'entrepreneuriat proposant une interface à travers des « champions de l’entrepreneuriat » dans les universités, une association académique et une meilleure formation des formateurs. L'enseignement de base à l'entrepreneuriat existant devrait être amélioré par de nouvelles activités et approches et le soutien à la création et à la croissance des entreprises renforcé par un niveau supplémentaire d’encadrement qui comprendra l'incubation, le coaching, l'orientation et le soutien poststart-up.
The review examines current strategies, structures and practices for entrepreneurship promotion in Tunisian universities highlighting activities to instil entrepreneurial intentions and to favour business creation among graduates. One of the core strengths of the Tunisian system is that it reaches a large proportion of students with basic entrepreneurship teaching. The report sets out the opportunities to improve this teaching using international best practice models and to complement it with more intense start-up support for those students ready to go further.
To this end, the report recommends the creation of a national graduate entrepreneurship strategy with clear objectives, indicators and incentives, methods for benchmarked learning and a resource bank of teaching materials together with an exchange platform for universities on entrepreneurship support practices, with an interface through university enterprise champions, an academic association, and improved training of trainers. The existing basic teaching in entrepreneurship should be improved with new activities and approaches and a new level of deeper business creation and growth support introduced including incubation, coaching and referral and post start-up support.
This paper analyses the change in the Austrian business cycle over time using data back to 1954. The change in the cyclical pattern is captured using a non-linear univariate structural time series model where the time of the break point is estimated. Results for GDP series suggest a break in the frequency of the cycle and in the parameter covering the variance of the disturbances of the cycle taking place in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, respectively. Using data for GDP components a break in these variables is found too, but the timing of the break differs among the series. In a further step the paper assesses the relevance of these findings for forecasting purposes. It is shown that during certain periods the out-of-sample forecasting performance of GDP does improve when a break in one of the two parameters is explicitly modelled.
The report is based to a large extent on existing OECD published material, in particular the latest edition of OECD Pensions at a Glance (2011) and the OECD Pensions Outlook 2012. It also draws on the OECD review of labour and social policy published in December 2011.