Browse by: "2014"

• Countries where 15-year-old students perform at high standards internationally tend to be the same countries where these young adults tend to perform well at the age of 26 to 28.
• School systems need to ensure that their students perform at a high level by the time they complete compulsory schooling and that these skills are maintained and further developed thereafter.

La France est un acteur clé de l’Europe ferroviaire. Elle occupe, et de loin, la première place pour la grande vitesse ferroviaire (53 milliards de voyageurs-kilomètres en 2013). Grâce à l’importance de ce segment de marché, la France est le pays d’Europe qui affiche chaque année le plus grand nombre de voyageurs-kilomètres (92,4 milliards en 2013). En ce qui concerne le fret, ses 32 milliards de tonnes kilomètres la placent au troisième rang en Europe derrière l’Allemagne et la Pologne (Respectivement 112 et 40 milliards de TK en 2013). Ces résultats sont à mettre en relation avec les politiques publiques conduites en France depuis de nombreuses années dans le domaine du ferroviaire.

Shifting public and private investment from “brown” to “green” is an essential part of climate change. The post-2020 climate agreement to be agreed at COP 21 in December 2015 has the potential to play a significant role in signalling the importance of such a shift. This paper explores how the 2015 agreement could spur further mobilisation of climate finance by examining the current state of play regarding existing financing environments and mechanisms. These include examining the existing international institutional arrangements under the UNFCCC to see how balanced financing, co-ordination, streamlining and complementarity between institutions could be achieved. The paper also highlights the key role that in-country enabling environments can play in further mobilising public and private climate finance, and discusses how the 2015 agreement could enhance both “pull” and “push” factors for mobilisation. In addition, the paper also discusses how the agreement could facilitate the broad use of a spectrum of financial instruments and the further development of an enhanced system for measurement, reporting and verification of climate finance.

This paper outlines the competitiveness of ports in Durban, south Africa. It looks at port performance, impact, and policies and governance issues.

The Airports Commission was set up by the Government of the United Kingdom in 2012 to take an independent look at the UK’s future airport capacity needs. It has been tasked with setting out the nature, scale, and timing of steps needed to maintain the UK’s status as an international hub for aviation, alongside recommendations for making better use of the UK’s existing runway capacity by the end of 2013; and setting out recommendations on how to meet any need for additional airport capacity in the longer-term by the summer of 2015.

In December 2013 the Commission published its Interim Report, which included a short-list of three options for increasing the UK’s aviation capacity in the long-term: two at Heathrow and one at Gatwick. To determine which alternative would provide the largest benefits to passengers, freight businesses and the UK economy overall it is important to understand how airlines are likely to respond to increased runway capacity.

This report examines the likely responses from airlines in all segments of the market: the local hub carrier, BA, other network airlines, short and long haul low-cost carriers and charter airlines. It identifies the main drivers of airline behaviour and considers the possible influence of changes to existing business models and the introduction of new types of aircraft, such as the Boeing Dreamliner and Airbus A350. The report develops six sets of responses, three following expansion of Gatwick and three following expansion of Heathrow, to test the likely evolution of the market. As the future of the highly dynamic aviation market is uncertain, it checks the resilience of each across five different scenarios of how the global aviation sector may develop in the future. The analysis maps the implications for connectivity and potential benefits to the consumer through airline competition and relieving congestion at airports and reducing the associated economic rents.

This report is part of the International Transport Forum’s Country-Specific Policy Analysis (CSPA) series. These are topical studies on specific transport policy issues of concern to a country carried out by ITF on request.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have the potential to increase efficiency and improve resource allocation. However, contract renegotiations are common and make us question the benefits to PPPs. Under current accounting standards, PPPs allow intertemporal reallocations of infrastructure spending that do not occur under traditional methods of procuring infrastructure and which allow governments to escape the constraints of congressional purview. We review the theoretical results in Engel et al. [2009a] as well as data from Colombia, Chile and Peru, comprising 610 highway PPPs and 540 renegotiations processes to verify these predictions. The data and original analysis comes from Bitran et al. [2013], complemented with additional descriptive statistics. The empirical evidence supports the predictions of the theoretical model.

• Au Danemark, en Finlande, en Norvège, aux Pays-Bas et en Suède, plus de 60 % des adultes participent à des activités de formation ; ils ne sont en revanche qu’un tiers dans ce cas, voire moins, en Fédération de Russie, en Italie et en République slovaque.
• Plus le niveau de formation d’un adulte est élevé, plus il est susceptible de participer à des activités de formation : le taux de participation est ainsi d’environ 70 % parmi les adultes diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire, contre seulement 27 % parmi les adultes dont le niveau de formation est inférieur au deuxième cycle de l’enseignement secondaire.
• Les actifs occupés sont plus susceptibles de participer à des activités de formation pour adultes : dans la moitié des pays à l’étude, la différence de taux de participation entre les actifs occupés et les chômeurs est supérieure à 15 points de pourcentage.
• La motivation stimule la participation aux activités de formation pour adultes : les pays où un pourcentage important d’adultes expriment le souhait de participer à davantage d’activités de formation sont également ceux où l’on observe les taux les plus élevés de participation.

• In Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, participation rates in adult education and learning are over 60%, but they are one-third – or below – in Italy, the Russian Federation and the Slovak Republic.
• The more highly educated adults are, the more likely they are to continue with adult education and learning: about 70% of adults with a tertiary qualification participated, compared with just 27% among adults who did not complete upper secondary education.
• Employed adults are more likely to participate in adult education and learning: in half of the countries, the difference in participation between employed and unemployed individuals is more than 15 percentage points.
• Motivation encourages participation in adult education and learning: countries where a significant proportion of adults express a desire for more education also show the highest levels of participation.

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.

Land management faces a series of daunting challenges in the 21st century. These include contributing to the global mitigation effort and adaptation needed to prevent dangerous climate change, while providing enough food for a population of 9 billion by 2050 as well as shelter and livelihoods for rural populations and various ecosystem services. The existing mitigation reporting and accounting arrangements for the land sector are complex, not applicable to all Parties, and provide limited scope for pursuing more costeffective accounting approaches that would enable developing countries to address conflicting policy objectives such as addressing climate change while increasing agricultural output. This paper has two aims. The first is to lay out possible elements of a long-term vision for the post-2020 reporting and accounting framework for emissions and removals from the land sector, building on existing experience with reporting and accounting as well as previous studies. The second is to identify possible steps that could be taken at COP 20 in 2014, COP 21 in 2015, and in 2016-2020 to put Parties on a pathway towards realising this vision.

• According to the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), principals, on average, report frequently engaging in a number of activities that are consistent with instructional leadership. However, this is not the case in every country and large proportions of them report that their training did not include any instructional leadership training or course.
• Although continuous professional development could help fill those gaps, many school leaders report a number of obstacles preventing them from taking part in such learning, including a lack of support and opportunities, and personal and professional obstacles.

This Working Paper studies ways to stimulate the private rental sector (PRS) of the housing market – and compares experiences with policies and reforms in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the Czech Republic. Although in many countries the PRS has decreased in importance since the Second World War, there are signs of a growing importance and possible ‘revival’ of the PRS. A well-functioning PRS and neutrality in housing policies can improve the functioning of the housing market – by promoting residential mobility, increasing housing options for households and generating competitive supply and affordable prices. The PRS can have positive effects on the economy and labour mobility and reduce inefficiencies and risks of owner-occupied and social housing. Trade-offs between goals in housing policies, and regulatory impediments to a level playing field between segments of the housing market (owner-occupancy, social rental, private rental) are analysed. The article outlines policy options in promoting a well-functioning PRS: lessons are drawn on tenancy security, rent-setting regulations, social housing, demand subsidies, fiscal measures for rental and owner-occupied housing and barriers for PRS supply. Experiences from the countries show that it is hard to create a level playing field – there are inefficiencies in all four countries. Nonetheless, there are many positive experiences of stimulating the PRS: reforms in Finland and the Czech Republic stimulated the PRS to become a competitive and important part of the housing market, and Dutch policies are adapted to stimulate a level playing field. The ‘resilience’ of the German housing system during the economic crisis shows that the large PRS and tenure neutrality have important stabilising effects on the German economy.

The study assesses the role of feed-in tariffs (FITs) and renewable energy certificates (RECs) in creating incentives for cross-border investments and for investments in particular technological portfolios via M&A. The analysis explores the dataset on M&As in alternative energy sources worldwide over 2005-2011. The results suggests that FITs encourage more diversified M&A than RECs. With respect to foreign investment, the study finds a linear relationship between FITs and cross-border M&As in the wind energy sector, but an inverted U-shaped relationship in the solar energy sector. One possible explanation for the latter may lie in reduced policy credibility due to the public finance implications of ‘generous’ FITs. Another possible explanation for this finding concerns the use of high solar FITs by countries whose natural conditions provide little comparative advantage in solar energy, suggesting that low profitability and limited potential of solar energy in those countries might have deterred the entry of foreign investors.

Digital content, such as e-books and apps that are available through streaming, downloads or cloud computing platforms, has become the fastest growing e-commerce product category. To support further growth, it is important that consumers, including children, understand what their rights and obligations are when acquiring and using such products. In particular, consumers need to know about the conditions under which they may copy and share products, and on which devices the products may be used. They also need to be informed about how their personal data may be collected and used, with whom it may be shared and why, and the type of redress that may be obtained when problems arise.

Both generic and specialised ICT skills are becoming an important requirement for employment across the economy as the Internet becomes more engrained in work processes, but a significant part of the population lacks the basic skills necessary to function in this new environment. This paper examines the impact of the Internet on the labour market in this context. For example, between 7% and 27% of adults have no experience in using computers or lack the most elementary computer skills, such as the ability to use a mouse. In addition, the groups with the least ICT skills tend to be among the demographic groups at the most risk of losing jobs. Data also highlight a potential skills mismatch among those with the strongest ICT skills (youth) and those who actually use them at work (prime age and older adults).