Browse by: "2012"

This paper sets out a strategy calling for a radical overhaul of the manner in which both the EU and aspiring member states define and implement what the Copenhagen criteria refer to as the “Rule of Law” in pursuit of the elusive goal of sustainability. While pointing to the limits of the current “anatomical method” centered on legal and institutional checklists, the paper stresses the existence of a fundamental dilemma between, on the one hand, the need to be more ambitious in assessing and promoting the “Rule of Law” and, on the other hand, the imperative to exercise humility and restraint regarding the claims made by the EU on behalf of “Rule of Law” assessment and assistance.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions baselines are reference emissions levels. This paper focuses on projected forward-looking baselines that can be used both to inform national climate policy and to set goals that are defined relative to a business-as-usual (BaU) scenario. As some developing countries have defined national mitigation goals for 2020 in this way, the underlying assumptions and methodologies used in setting these emissions baselines are relevant for assessing the magnitude of both the country's expected total emissions reductions and the global aggregate emissions mitigation effort.

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.

Concerns about health expenditure growth and its long-term sustainability have stimulated the development of health expenditure forecasting models in many OECD countries. This comparative analysis reviewed 25 models that were developed by, or used for, policy analysis by OECD member countries and other international organisations...

Indonesia has come a long way in improving its tax system over the last decade, both in terms of revenues raised and administrative efficiency. Nonetheless, the tax take is still low, given the need for more spending on infrastructure and social protection. With the exception of the natural resources sector, increasing tax revenues would be best achieved through broadening tax bases and improving tax administration, rather than changes in the tax schedule that seems broadly in line with international practice. Possible measures to broaden the tax base include bringing more of the self-employed into the tax system, subjecting employer-provided fringe benefits and allowances to personal income taxation and reducing the exemptions from value-added taxes. Similarly, broad-based investment credits would be a less distortive way to enhance investment incentives than selective tax holidays. Introducing a targeted, simplified tax regime for small and medium-sized enterprises, as currently planned by the government, could foster their integration into the tax system in the longer run, even if its short-run revenue potential is limited. Upgrading tax administration has made substantial progress in Indonesia since 2002, although there is still scope to improve the training of tax officers and the administration’s audit and litigation capacities, while strengthening internal control systems and enhancing the transparency of administrative decisions. The audit system could be further improved by allocating more tax audits on the basis of compliance risks. In the natural resources sector, particularly in mining, there is a case for increasing the government’s share of resource rents through higher tax rates imposed on these rents, as opposed to taxing revenues. This would imply a willingness of the government to bear a larger share of the exploration and development risk than heretofore, which Indonesia, with its improved access to international financial markets and a diversified resource portfolio, is now well placed to do. In the mining sector, a powerful rent tax regime with a large government take would serve the country better than export taxes and ownership restrictions that have been decided recently. This Working Paper relates to the 2012 OECD Economic Review of Indonesia (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/Indonesia).

Ce rapport présente les principales conclusions et recommandations d’un examen sur l’enseignement de l'entrepreneuriat et le soutien à la création d'entreprises par les universités et des universités des sciences appliquées tunisiennes. Il s’insère dans le cadre des revues portant sur les qualifications et les compétences à l'entrepreneuriat menées par le Programme de développement économique et de création d’emplois au niveau local (LEED) de l'Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques (OCDE).

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.

Books have undergone a massive transformation from a physical object to something entirely different: the electronic book, or “e-book”. This report provides background on e-book markets and examines various policy issues related to e-books. These include differing tax rates in countries between physical books and e-books, consumer lock-in to specific platforms, limitations on how users can read and share their purchased content, and a lack of transparency about how data on their reading habits is being used.

This paper discusses how to improve Canada’s business innovation in order to boost labour productivity and output growth. Many general framework conditions are highly favourable to business risk-taking and innovation, including macro stability, openness, strong human capital, low corporate tax rates, low barriers to firm entry and flexible labour markets. However, they can be improved further by reduced external and interprovincial barriers in network and professional service sectors, more efficient capital markets, fewer capital tax distortions and improved patent protection. A second focus should be on ensuring that incentives arising from government subsidies are targeted on actual market failures. The very high level of support to business R&D via the federal Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit and provincial top-ups may affect the incentives of small firms to grow and should be redesigned. A plethora of small, fragmented granting programmes, mainly geared to SMEs, should be streamlined for better government-business collaboration. The large public share in venture capital should be wound down, as it may crowd out more productive private finance. A final focus should be on boosting manager and worker skills that are intrinsic to all forms of innovation, by filling gaps in training, mentoring and education. This Working Paper relates to the 2012 OECD Economic Review of Canada (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/Canada).

This report provides the main findings and recommendations of a case study review of entrepreneurship education and business start-up support in Tunisian universities and universities of applied sciences as part of a series of reviews on Skills and Competences for Entrepreneurship carried out by the Local Economic and Employment Development (OECD) Programme of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

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.

In 1993, the British government turned to the private sector to finance much needed investment in public infrastructure and manage services under its Public Private Partnerships (PPP) policy (Edwards et al., 2004), with transport forming by far the largest component by value of the PPP programme...

This paper investigates the role of policies and institutions for aggregate labour market dynamics during the global financial crisis using firm-level data. The use of firm-level data is important if firms are heterogeneous in their labour input adjustment technologies. In this case, cross-country differences in aggregate labour market dynamics may not just stem from cross-country differences in average labour input technologies - here assumed to be largely due to differences in institutional settings -, but also from differences in the distribution of shocks across firms within countries and the composition of firms across countries. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, the paper provides comparable estimates of the labour input adjustment behaviour of firms in response to output shocks across countries, industries and firm-size groups. Second, it makes use of decomposition methods to get a first indication of the importance of cross-country differences in adjustment technologies, the distribution of shocks across firms and the composition of firms across countries. We find that differences in the adjustment behaviour of firms account for about 40% of the cross-country variation in aggregate employment growth during the global financial crisis. We interpret this as prima facie evidence that differences in institutional settings accounted for a substantial part of the variation in aggregate employment growth during the crisis. Third, we find that employment-protection provisions with respect to regular workers reduce the output elasticity of employment, but increase the output elasticity of earnings per worker. Thus, employment protection tends to shift the burden of adjustment from the extensive to the intensive margin. However, the quantitative impact of employment protection for explaining the variation in aggregate labour dynamics during the global financial crisis is relatively small.

The correlation between a firm’s size and its productivity level varies considerably across OECD countries, suggesting that some countries are more successful at channelling resources to high productivity firms than others. Accordingly, we examine the extent to which regulations affecting product, labour and credit markets influence productivity, via their effect on the efficiency of resource allocation. Our results suggest that there is an economically and statistically robust negative relationship between policy-induced frictions and productivity, though the specific channel depends on the policy considered. In the case of employment protection legislation, product market regulations (including barriers to entry and bankruptcy legislation) and restrictions on foreign direct investment, this is largely traceable to the worsening of allocative efficiency (i.e. a lower correspondence between a firm’s size and its productivity level). By contrast, financial market under-development tends to be associated with a higher fraction of low productivity relative to high productivity firms. Furthermore, stringent regulations are more disruptive to resource allocation in more innovative sectors, though the nature of innovation turns out to be important.

This paper considers the choice between different approaches to contract for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure projects. The need to control for user costs over the life cycle of an asset is demonstrated to be a core aspect of contract design. The more likely it is that a certain problem in the current infrastructure could be sorted out in several different ways, the more strongly should the tendering agency consider innovative design alternatives such as performance contracts of Public Private Partnerships. It is also demonstrated that contracts which cover both construction and subsequent maintenance must be accompanied by bonuses and penalties for remunerating or punishing the entrepreneur for delivering (or not) appropriate infrastructure quality.

Mathematical optimisation models, supported by suitable data, can assist decision making about allocating funds between alternative maintenance tasks and about the size of the maintenance budget. The maintenance optimisation problem is, in essence, to find the optimum balance between the costs and benefits of maintenance, while taking into account various constraints (Dekker 1996). For a given road segment, choices have to be made between alternative treatment types and the times to implement those treatments. Where maintenance funds are limited, there is an additional problem of balancing the competing needs of the different segments. Maintenance tends to be underfunded relative to investment because the smaller, less obvious nature of maintenance works relative to new infrastructure (Semmens 2006, Zeitlow 2006). But deferring maintenance in the short term can be expensive in the long term, a point that can be brought to the attention of decision makers by quantifying the costs of underfunding maintenance.

This paper reviews the recent development of the funded pension system in the Russian Federation and considers it role in the context of the overall retirement income system. By describing current OECD practices and policy recommendations and comparing them with the current Russian pension system, the report aims to facilitate ongoing discussions between the OECD and the Russian Federation regarding the latter’s pension system.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a few issues related to how best to communicate uncertainty about projections of future pension benefits to members of DC plans, and especially to present a pension risk simulator developed by the Chilean regulator (Superintendencia de Pensiones, SP) that addresses directly how to convey that uncertainty and aims at eliciting a pro-active response from individuals in terms of contributing more and for longer.