Browse by: "2014"

La croissance dans les économies des marchés émergents (EMEs) va se ralentir durablement par rapport à la période 2010-2012 à mesure de la disparition des effets cycliques, du déclin de la croissance potentielle et du durcissement des conditions financières externes. D’importants déficits de la balance des transactions courantes rendent certains EMEs vulnérables à des inversions soudaines des flux de capitaux tandis que des expansions rapides des crédits, comme ceux observées ces dernières années au Brésil, en Chine, Pologne et Turquie, ont pu augmenter les risques financiers. Ce papier montre les récents développements et les vulnérabilités des EMEs ; il utilise en outre des simulations d’un modèle macroéconométrique pour donner une estimation quantitative des effets sur les pays à haut revenu. Les résultats suggèrent que pour chaque ralentissement de 2 points de pourcentage des EMEs, les pays à haut revenu auraient une croissance environ ⅔ point de pourcentage plus basse en moyenne, avec à peu près ½ point de pourcentage qui viendrait du commerce. Au vu de l’expérience des EMEs avec les crises passées, cet effet pourrait être augmenté par des effets via les taux de change et des turbulences sur les marchés financiers. Les pays de l’OCDE les plus touchés seraient la Belgique, le Japon et les Pays-Bas, ce qui reflète principalement les liens commerciaux importants qu’ils ont avec les EMEs.

The increase in the human life span is a testament to the economic, social and medical progress made over the course of the last century. However, an ageing population brings some new challenges both to healthcare systems and to medicine in terms of the increased manifestation of specific diseases primarily seen in the elderly. Biomedical innovation, and in particular research into “omics technologies”, offers the promise of new means of detection, prevention and treatment of age-related disabilities and diseases. But the development of these new technologies will not be without challenges, in particular with respect to the difficulty of translating technological advances into innovation in the clinical setting. This report provides a synthesis of a March 2013 workshop organised by the OECD and the Human Genome Organisation (HGO) which focused on latest advances in omics technologies for healthy ageing and the policies and practices needed to facilitate their responsible development and integration in medical research, innovation and health policy.

Malgré une relative prospérité, le stress au travail constitue une caractéristique importante du marché du travail aux États-Unis. Dans la mesure où il génère des problèmes de santé, soit directement par une hausse de la tension artérielle, de la fatigue, des douleurs musculaires, etc., soit indirectement par une augmentation de la consommation tabagique, il semble utile d’entreprendre des actions visant à atténuer le stress au travail. Ce rapport, qui porte essentiellement sur les États-Unis, passe en revue les articles publiés sur diverses problématiques économiques liées au stress au travail et à la santé. Parmi les domaines dans lesquels les économistes pourraient apporter un éclairage intéressant sur le stress au travail, on peut citer les problèmes de sélection empirique lors de la détermination de l’effet du stress sur la santé, les erreurs de mesure en rapport avec le stress, la présence et l’ampleur des différentiels compensatoires liés au stress, ainsi que l’effet – propre aux États-Unis – de « rétention de l’emploi » créé par un système d’assurance-maladie fournie par l’employeur. Le présent rapport se conclut par une brève analyse des mesures prises dans le pays pour lutter contre le stress au travail. Ce document de travail est lié à l’Étude économique 2014 des États-Unis menée par l’OCDE (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/United States).

After having explained the smaller gender gap in social entrepreneurship compared to commercial entrepreneurship, this paper provides information on female management style and on the innovation capacity of social enteprises led by women. This Report is based on SELUSI data and presents three specific case studies from Hungary, Russia and Chile.

Swiss women are now as well educated as their male counterparts. However, progress remains to be made in the job market where both the supply and price of female labour are below that of men. While the participation rate for women is high and rising, it is offset by a heavy incidence of part-time work, reflecting both personal preferences and factors that limit their labour supply. The lack and high cost of childcare options for parents, as well as burdensome marginal income tax rates for second earners, create disincentives to work more. A falling but persistent net (i.e. unexplained) wage gap of about 7% in favour of men, coupled with under-representation of women as managers and entrepreneurs, further reduce the incentive for women to take full advantage of their high levels of human capital. Priority should be given to removing those barriers by increasing public spending on childcare and out-of-school-hours care at the cantonal and municipal levels. Existing regulations regarding childcare provision should also be investigated to see whether a broader range of price and quality childcare options is feasible. The implicit tax penalty for married women should also be removed, as the Federal Council is currently considering. More flexibility in working arrangements could further alleviate women’s cost of reconciling work and family life. For instance, facilitating flexi-time, annualised hours, job-sharing, part-time and telework options for both women and men, and creating paternity and/or consecutive, take-it-or-leave-it parental leave could facilitate transition in and out of the labour market. Increasing competition in product markets should help reduce the wage gap by replacing old habits with the hunt for talent regardless of gender. Finally, a corporate governance code in favour of a more equal representation of women in leadership positions, and setting ambitious quantitative targets for women on boards combined with the “Comply or Explain” practise, or quotas, should help remove the so-called glass ceiling. This Working Paper relates to the 2013 OECD Economic Review of Switzerland (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/Switzerland).

A key issue for policy makers and regulators across the OECD area is the market structures that will best deliver efficient and inclusive mobile communication services. This has led to two issues addressed in this report, namely: the recent experience in selected countries, which have changed or held constant the number of facilities based operators; and the initial experience and key questions that have arisen with wireless network sharing. These questions are related because they converge around the issue of how many facilities-based networks are optimal in providing competitive services in the same geographical location. In all OECD countries there are at least three mobile network operators (MNOs), which broadly compete on a national basis, with some countries having four or five facilities-based networks operating nationally or in the same region. Historically, the coverage and capabilities of these networks have been important factors used by operators to differentiate their offers and attract customers. Nonetheless, sharing the expense of network facilities between multiple MNOs can significantly reduce costs, especially at a time when there are demands on operators to roll out new networks or extend coverage.

• Across OECD countries, 18% of students skipped classes at least once in the two weeks prior to the PISA test, and 15% of students skipped a day of school or more over the same period.
• Few students in high-performing school systems skip classes or days of school.
• For students in OECD countries, skipping classes is associated with a 32-point lower score in mathematics, while skipping days of school is associated with a 52-point lower score.
• Truancy is observed among all students, whether advantaged or disadvantaged.

• Many countries have implemented reforms to develop and support doctoral studies and postdoctoral research, stressing the crucial role of doctorate students and degree holders in terms of economic growth, innovation and scientific research.
• The number of advanced research qualifications being awarded across OECD countries significantly increased over the past decade, growing from 158 000 new doctorates in 2000 to 247 000 in 2012, a rise of 56%. International students get one in five of these new doctorates.
• Even though the share of women in doctorate programmes has increased over the last decade (as in other levels of education), by 2012 women were still less likely than men to earn an advanced research qualification.
• On average, individuals with advanced research qualifications benefit from higher employment rates compared to other university-level graduates (Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees combined).
• The business enterprise sector offers better wages for new doctorate holders than the higher education and government sectors, but also unequal opportunities, depending on the field in which they graduate.

• In most school systems, over 50% of 15-year-olds students attend schools that compete with another school to attract students from the same residential area.
• Across countries and economies, performance is unrelated to whether or not schools have to compete for students.
• When choosing a school for their children, parents look at a range of criteria; for disadvantaged parents, cost-related factors often weigh as much as, if not more than, the factors related to the quality of instruction.
• School systems with low levels of competition among schools often have high levels of social inclusion, meaning that students from diverse social backgrounds attend the same schools. In contrast, in systems where parents can choose schools, and schools compete for enrolment, schools are often more socially segregated.

Assessing railway efficiency is complex for a number of reasons. Railways produce a wide range of outputs including passenger service, freight service and, in some cases, separated infrastructure access services. Railways that differ in scale or in the mix of these services inherently differ in their apparent “efficiency.” Railway data sets, though probably more detailed than in other modes, are fraught with issues of quality, consistency and cost and asset allocation. Assessing “efficiency” necessarily requires both cross-sectional indices to put each railway into proper context and time series data to show changes in performance over time in response to changes in the railway’s economic and policy environment. This paper assembles a wide database of railway data relating to operating scale and various indices of performance over the period of 1970 to 2011. We show, as expected, that railways differ widely in scale and mix of services, which may partly explain differences in ranking by performance indices. We show also that railway performance has changed greatly over time and that, in some cases, changes in performance can at least partly be attributed to reforms in structure, ownership and management incentives.

• The report New insights from TALIS 2013: Teaching and learning in primary and upper secondary education (OECD, 2014a) presents an overview of teachers and teaching in primary and upper secondary education for a sample of countries that participated in the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) in 2013.
• Women represent the majority of the teaching workforce for most countries at all levels of education. Despite this and the fact that most principals are former teachers, significantly fewer principals are women at all education levels.
• Primary teachers tend to work in schools where principals report material and personnel shortages that hinder the delivery of quality education more often than upper secondary teachers. Moreover, schools with high proportion of socio-economically disadvantaged students face greater shortages in terms of key resources in many countries. This further exacerbates the already-challenging circumstances for teachers and students.

This paper estimates agglomeration benefits based on city productivity differentials across five OECD countries (Germany, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States). It highlights the relationship between cities’ governmental fragmentation and productivity, and represents the first empirical analysis of how metropolitan governance structures affect this relationship. The comparability of results in a multi-country setting is supported through the use of Functional Urban Areas – an internationally harmonised definition of cities based on economic linkages rather than administrative boundaries. In line with the previous literature, the analysis confirms that city productivity tends to increase with city size; doubling city size is found to be associated with an increase in productivity of between two and five percent. What is more, city productivity is positively associated with the population size of nearby cities. On the governance side, the paper finds that cities with fragmented governance structures tend to have lower levels of productivity. For a given population size, a metropolitan area with twice the number of municipalities is associated with around six percent lower productivity; an effect that is mitigated by almost half by the existence of a governance body at the metropolitan level.

• Less than one in three teachers across countries participating in the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013 believes that the teaching profession is valued by society.
• Nevertheless, the great majority of teachers in all surveyed countries are happy with their jobs.
• Challenging classrooms with large proportions of students with behavioural problems and the perception that appraisals and feedback are done simply as administrative tasks are among factors that tend to lower job satisfaction.
• Collaboration between teachers and positive teacher-student relationships, on the other hand, are among factors that can boost teacher job satisfaction.

Ce document évalue l'importance des différents déterminants des flux commerciaux à un niveau industriel dans 54 pays membres et non membres de l’OCDE. La méthode empirique étend l'approche de travaux empiriques antérieurs à la quantification explicite de l’impact que les dotations factorielles des partenaires commerciaux et les politiques ont sur le commerce bilatéral et à l’analyse des effets des tarifs sur le volume et la composition des échanges. Nous constatons d’une part, que la distance, la langue et la frontière communes ainsi que les accords commerciaux régionaux sont autant de facteurs déterminants des échanges commerciaux et, d’autre part, que les dotations factorielles ainsi que les politiques et institutions des pays exportateurs et de leurs partenaires commerciaux ont une influence cruciale sur la composition des exportations et leur destination. En revanche, nous constatons que les politiques commerciales qui reposent sur les droits de douanes des biens importés nuisent, non seulement, aux partenaires commerciaux en réduisant leurs exportations mais peuvent aussi nuire à leurs propres exportations en particulier dans les industries qui dépendent davantage des biens intermédiaires.

• Rising levels of tertiary attainment seem not to have led to an “inflation” eroding the labour-market value of qualifications. However, tertiary graduates have the highest relative earnings advantage when they live in a country with low tertiary attainment rates.
• On average, compared to those with an upper secondary education, tertiary-educated adults earn about 1.6 times more than their peers, while individuals without an upper secondary education earn 24% less.
• Higher educational attainment and literacy skills increase earnings, but the advantages are more pronounced for men than for women and seem to increase as adults get older.
• The crisis has widened the wage gap between less educated and highly educated individuals: across OECD countries, the average difference in earnings from employment between these two groups increased from 75 percentage points in 2008 to 79 percentage points in 2012.
• Qualifications are more rewarded than skills: attaining a higher level of education has a stronger positive impact on earnings than better literacy proficiency.

• The social sciences are the most popular field for non-vocational tertiary education programmes. One in three new students choose a programme in social sciences, business and law.
• Gender equality has been virtually achieved in many fields of study, especially in social sciences and services but significant gender differences persist in computing and engineering (maledominated) and in health and welfare and education (female-dominated).
• Almost one in four international students in OECD countries follow programmes in the field of business and administration (23%). The proportion of international students from fields oriented to the public function such as education (3%) or health and welfare (9%) is lower on average.

Ce document analyse les mécanismes de détermination des salaires des agents hospitaliers dans huit pays de l’OCDE. Il décrit les similitudes et les différences entre ces mécanismes et évalue la capacité d’adaptation dont ils ont fait preuve ces dernières années face aux réformes des systèmes de santé, à la dynamique du marché du travail et aux pressions économiques. Il ressort d’un examen de la documentation parallèle et d’entretiens menés avec des experts des pays concernés que si, avant la crise économique, plusieurs pays de l’OCDE avaient annoncé que la détermination des salaires dans le secteur hospitalier allait être plus locale et flexible, la plupart d’entre eux semblent ne pas avoir complètement atteint ces objectifs dans les hôpitaux du secteur public. Les difficultés budgétaires ont en effet contraint à une « recentralisation », notamment en France, au Portugal et au Royaume-Uni. L’intérêt de la centralisation fait l’objet d’un large débat, mais dans les pays couverts dans ce document, il semblerait que les décideurs mettent généralement en avant les avantages de la centralisation et/ou de l’harmonisation de la détermination des salaires. La base de recherches sur l’efficacité des différentes approches est actuellement limitée et le processus décisionnel gagnerait à meilleur compréhension des effets de la détermination des salaires sur l’amélioration de la performance et de la qualité des hôpitaux.

Les systèmes de protection sociale sont confrontés à de nombreux défis. La récente crise économique a été un test de robustesse avec son lot de chômage élevé et de hausse de la dette publique dans de nombreux pays. La crise a également réduit le PIB potentiel et donc la base de financement des régimes de protection sociale. Dans le même temps, le vieillissement et les autres tendances séculaires soulèvent des questions de durabilité financière à long terme. Les caractéristiques structurelles des institutions sociales déterminent leur capacité à faire face aux chocs et aux changements de tendance, et également le partage des risques entre les institutions et leurs parties prenantes. Elles définissent aussi la possibilité d’ajustements automatiques ou discrétionnaires lorsqu’il faut faire des arbitrages entre la durabilité financière, l’adéquation des services et des gains d’efficacité. Ce rapport examine la viabilité des institutions sociales et leur capacité à absorber et à faire face aux chocs à court terme et aux tendances de long terme par le partage des risques et le lissage des dépenses, en se concentrant sur les régimes de retraite, de soins de santé et d'assurancechômage.

La récente crise économique a fourni un test de résistance des institutions sociales. Ce document évalue la vulnérabilité des institutions sociales à la lumière de la crise actuelle, et analyse les épisodes passés, quand les institutions sociales ont été confrontées à des défis similaires. Les systèmes de retraite publics en répartition ont généralement bien résisté à la crise, mais les fonds de pension privés ont été durement touchés par la crise financière. Alors que les dépenses de soins de santé ont augmenté jusqu'au début de la crise, elles se sont stabilisées en 2010 et 2011 en moyenne dans l'OCDE. Cette période de deux ans sans croissance des dépenses de santé est sans précédent dans l’OCDE. Mais, dans les pays durement touchés par la crise, les dépenses publiques en soins de santé ont considérablement diminué. Les dépenses de l'assurance chômage ont augmenté au cours de la crise dans la plupart des pays de l'OCDE. Dans certains pays , les dépenses ont augmenté beaucoup plus que le nombre de chômeurs , ce qui reflète une extension ou des prestations plus généreuses, tandis que dans d'autres, l'augmentation a été nettement plus faible, indiquant des problèmes d'adéquation de ces régimes d'assurance-chômage . Cinq études de cas de pays sont également examinés en se concentrant sur la façon dont les institutions sociales ont absorbé les chocs dans un passé plus lointain et des leçons sont tirées de ces expériences.