Browse by: "2014"

This report considers the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 alongside the use of network technologies to prolong IPv4 use in the face of depletion of further IPv4 protocol addresses, but it does not aim to address all issues surrounding the transition to IPv6 or to detail the economic incentives faced by various Internet actors. It first provides a status update of address management issues and the run-out of IPv4. It then describes the advantages and limitations of increased use of network address translation as one response to sustain the use of IPv4 in the face of IPv4 address exhaustion. It provides an overview of the IPv6 protocol; the advantages of IPv6 deployment as a response to IPv4 address exhaustion and the IPv6 transition plan compared to actual deployment to date. Finally, the report examines the choices facing individual actors, their potential consequences, and the policy implications on openness and innovation for the future of the Internet.

• Entre 2000 et 2011, le salaire des enseignants a augmenté, en valeur réelle, dans la quasi-totalité des pays de l’OCDE, mais reste dans l’ensemble inférieur à celui d’autres actifs occupés diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire.
• Dans les pays de l’OCDE, le salaire statutaire des enseignants du premier cycle du secondaire après 15 ans d’exercice est supérieur de 35 % à leur salaire en début de carrière.
• Dans les pays de l’OCDE, les systèmes d’éducation qui rémunèrent davantage les enseignants par rapport au revenu national par habitant tendent à obtenir une performance légèrement supérieure en mathématiques, comme l’indiquent les résultats de l’enquête PISA.
• Un nombre croissant de pays ont désormais recours à des augmentations de salaire ciblées pour attirer les diplômés les plus qualifiés dans la profession, retenir les meilleurs enseignants ou encourager les enseignants les plus expérimentés à exercer dans les établissements défavorisés.

• Students in OECD countries are expected to receive a total of 7 751 hours of instruction on average during their primary and lower secondary education – the bulk of that time is compulsory.
• In general, the higher the level of education, the greater the number of instruction hours a year.
• Reading, mathematics and science take up around 50% of the compulsory curricular time in primary education but only 40% at the lower secondary level.
• The wide variation in instruction hours across OECD countries suggests there is little consensus on the most effective policies related to school time.

More than one-third of the European Union’s adult population would rather be self-employed than an employee if given the chance to choose, according to the 2012 Flash Eurobarometer survey. At the same time, there is a large entrepreneurial potential in social groups that are either disadvantaged in the labour market (e.g. youth, migrants, and the low-skilled) or underrepresented in the entrepreneurial population (e.g. women and seniors). Inclusive entrepreneurship policies aim to give the opportunity for people from these groups to start-up in business and self-employment both for economic reasons and to support the goal of social inclusion.

• Dans les pays de l’OCDE, les élèves sont censés suivre un total de 7 751 heures d’instruction, en moyenne, durant leur scolarité dans le primaire et le premier cycle du secondaire ; la majeure partie de ce temps d’instruction est obligatoire.
• En règle générale, le nombre annuel d’heures d’instruction augmente avec le niveau d’enseignement.
• La lecture, les mathématiques et les sciences représentent environ 50 % du temps d’instruction obligatoire dans le primaire, contre seulement 40 % dans le premier cycle du secondaire.
• La forte variation du temps d’instruction entre les pays de l’OCDE laisse penser qu’on est loin d’avoir trouvé un consensus concernant les politiques les plus efficaces en matière de temps scolaire.

• To do well on PISA’s first assessment of creative problem-solving skills, students need to be open to novelty, tolerate doubt and uncertainty, and dare to use intuition to initiate a solution.
• Just because a student performs well in core school subjects doesn’t mean he or she is proficient in problem solving. In Australia, Brazil, Italy, Japan, Korea, Macao China, Serbia, England (United Kingdom) and the United States, students perform significantly better in problem solving, on average, than students in other countries who show similar performance in reading, mathematics and science.
• Many of the best performers in problem solving are Asian countries and economies, where students demonstrate high levels of reasoning skills and self-directed learning. Meanwhile, compared to students of similar overall performance, students in Brazil, Ireland, Korea and the United States perform strongest on interactive problems that require students to uncover useful information by exploring the problem situation and gather feedback on the effect of their actions.

• Pour réussir la première évaluation PISA des compétences créatives en résolution de problèmes, les élèves doivent se montrer ouverts à la nouveauté, accepter le doute et l’incertitude, et oser utiliser leur intuition pour amorcer une solution.
• Le simple fait qu’un élève obtienne de bons résultats dans les matières scolaires fondamentales ne garantit pas sa bonne performance en résolution de problèmes. En Australie, au Brésil, en Corée, aux États-Unis, en Italie, au Japon, à Macao (Chine), en Angleterre (Royaume Uni) et en Serbie, les élèves affichent un niveau de compétence en résolution de problèmes significativement plus élevé, en moyenne, que celui des élèves d’autres pays dont la performance en compréhension de l’écrit, en mathématiques et en sciences est similaire.
• Parmi les participants du PISA les plus performants en résolution de problèmes figurent de nombreux pays et économies d’Asie, où les élèves font preuve d’un niveau élevé de compétences de raisonnement et de capacités d’apprentissage autodirigé. D’un autre côté, par comparaison avec des élèves présentant un niveau similaire de performance globale, les élèves du Brésil, de Corée, des Etats Unis et d’Irlande obtiennent les meilleurs résultats en résolution de problèmes interactifs, qui demandent aux élèves d’explorer la situation du problème afin de trouver des informations pertinentes et d’adapter leur stratégie en fonction des informations qu’ils découvrent à mesure qu’ils avancent dans la résolution.

This paper describes the econometric system approach developed by MKmetric to perform short and long-term air transport demand forecasts while considering various determinants such as socio-economy, policy, infrastructure and land use. The necessities for modelling air transport evoking from a transport system point of view and the changes of the aviation world occurred during the last decade are investigated. Based on these findings the mathematical framework is outlined considering shortfalls of traditional models used in aviation forecasting and restrictions caused by classical functional forms. The increasing gap of information for modelling is described and alternative data sources used for the development of the system approach are listed. As all models are imperfect describing just a part of real life, it sheds a light on the necessity to validate models and the prerequisite of complexity needed to cope with multi-sector scenario simulations for strategic, tactical and operational developments as well as political decisions. Finally some analysis examples demonstrate the power of the approach used focusing on the choice modelling reflecting consumers’ behaviour.

• Teachers’ salaries increased in real terms between 2000 and 2011 in virtually all OECD countries, but mostly remain below those of other tertiary-educated workers.
• Statutory salaries for lower secondary school teachers with 15 years of experience are 35% higher than starting salaries in OECD countries.
• Among OECD countries, education systems that pay teachers more relative to their national income per capita tend to perform slightly better in mathematics as shown by the PISA study.
• An increasing number of countries are now targeting salary increases to attract high-level graduates in the profession, to retain the best teachers or to assign the most experienced teachers to disadvantaged schools.

This paper extends the OECD Economics Department’s suite of short-term indicator models for quarterly GDP growth, which currently cover only the G7 countries, to the BRIICS countries. Reflecting the relative scarcity of high-quality macroeconomic time series, the paper adopts a small-scale bridge model approach. The results suggest that in terms of short-term forecast accuracy for the first and second quarter following the most recent GDP release these models outperform simple autoregressive or constant growth benchmarks. The small-scale indicator models would have allowed the identification of the growth slowdown during the global crisis of 2008-09 and the subsequent rebound several months ahead of official GDP releases. Overall, forecast accuracy appears to be similar to that of the existing indicator model suite for the G7 countries, especially once the higher GDP growth volatility in most BRIICS is accounted for.

Start-up firms play a crucial role in bringing to the market the innovations needed to move to a greener growth path. Risk finance is essential for allowing new ventures to commercialise new ideas and grow, especially in emerging sectors. Still, very little is known about the drivers and the characteristics of risk finance in the green sector. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a detailed description of risk finance in the green sector across 29 OECD and BRIICS countries over the period 2005-2010 and identifying the role that policies might have in shaping high-growth investments in this sector. Results are drawn from a comprehensive deal-level database of businesses seeking financing in the green industry combined with indicators of renewable policies and government R&D expenditures. The results suggest that both supply-side policies and environmental deployment policies, designed with a long-term perspective of creating a market for environmental technologies, are associated with higher levels of risk finance relative to more short-term fiscal policies, such as tax incentives and rebates. In addition, when focusing on renewable energy generation, the results confirm the positive association of generous feed-in tariffs (FITs) with risk-finance investment. However in the solar sector excessively generous FITs tend to discourage investment.

It is now six years since a devastating financial and economic crisis rocked the global economy. Supported strongly by the G20 process, international regulators led by the Financial Stability Board have been working hard ever since to develop new regulatory standards designed to prevent a recurrence of these events. These international standards are intended to provide guidance for the drawing up of national legislation and regulation, and have already had a pervasive influence around the world. This paper surveys recent international developments concerning the prudential regulation of financial institutions: banks, the shadow banking system and insurance companies. It concludes that, while substantial progress has been made, the global economy nevertheless remains vulnerable to possible future financial instability. This possibility reflects three sets of concerns. First, measures taken to manage the crisis to date have actually made the prevention of future crises more difficult. Second, the continuing active debate over virtually every aspect of the new regulatory guidelines indicates that the analytical foundations of what is being proposed remain highly contestable. Third, implementation of the new proposals could suffer from different practices across regions. Looking forward, the financial sector will undoubtedly continue to innovate in response to competitive pressures and in an attempt to circumvent whatever regulations do come into effect. If we view the financial sector as a complex adaptive system, continuous innovation would only be expected. This perspective also provides a number of insights as to how regulators should respond in turn. Not least, it suggests that attempts to reduce complexity would not be misguided and that complex behavior need not necessarily be accompanied by still more complex regulation. Removing impediments to more effective self-discipline and market discipline in the financial sector would also seem recommended.

After a brief overview of current financing difficulties for SMEs and policy measures to support SME lending during the crisis,this article presents a literature review related to difficulties in SME’s access to finance during the crisis, against a background of a sharp decline in bank profitability and an erosion of bank capital that negatively affected lending. The articles reviewed are classified according to four main issues of interest:the impairment of the bank-credit channel and its economic effects;factors potentially attenuating the effect of a financial squeeze;the role of global banking in mitigating but also transmitting financial shocks; and,looking ahead,issues related to so-called “credit-less recoveries” that should be relevant in guiding policy makers in the current environment of financial deleveraging. All the results hold important implications for policy making given the bail-outs and the large injections ofliquidity by central banks during the crisis.
 

 

More than 35 million people worldwide had dementia in 2010, when annual costs were estimated at USD 604 billion; the number of people with dementia is expected to exceed 115 million by 2050. Alzheimer’s disease is today considered the prototype problem for the Grand Global Challenge in healthcare. Despite decades of intensive research, the causal chain of mechanisms behind Alzheimer’s has remained elusive as reflected in recent failures of well-designed clinical trials on promising investigational new drugs. The multi-factorial nature of the disease requires the collection, storage and processing of increasingly large and very heterogeneous datasets (behavioural, genetic, environmental, epigenetic, clinical data, brain imaging, etc.). No one nation has all the assets to pursue this type of research independently. In an effort to tackle this huge challenge, the OECD held a consultation on "Unlocking Global Collaboration to Accelerate Innovation for Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia" which looked at ways to harness developments in life sciences and information technologies to accelerate innovation in the prevention and treatment of the disease. This paper reports on the opportunities offered by the informatics revolution and big data. Creating and using big data to change the future of Alzheimer’s and dementia requires careful planning and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Numerous technical, administrative, regulatory, infrastructure and financial obstacles emerge and will need to be hurdled to make this vision a reality.

This paper assesses the OECD’s projections for GDP growth and inflation during the global financial crisis and recovery, focussing on lessons that can be learned. The projections repeatedly over-estimated growth, failing to anticipate the extent of the slowdown and later the weak pace of the recovery – errors made by many other forecasters. At the same time, inflation was stronger than expected on average. Analysis of the growth errors shows that the OECD projections in the crisis years were larger in countries with more international trade openness and greater presence of foreign banks. In the recovery, there is little evidence that an underestimate of the impact of fiscal consolidation contributed significantly to forecast errors. Instead, the repeated conditioning assumption that the euro area crisis would stabilise or ease played an important role, with growth weaker than projected in European countries where bond spreads were higher than had been assumed. But placing these errors in a historical context illustrates that the errors were not without precedent: similar-sized errors were made in the first oil price shock of the 1970s. In response to the challenges encountered in forecasting in recent years and the lessons learnt, the OECD and other international organisations have sought to improve their forecasting techniques and procedures, to improve their ability to monitor near-term developments and to better account for international linkages and financial market developments.

France
Conseil d’État decision, 28 June 2013, refusing to suspend operation of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant

Slovak Republic
New developments including the Supreme Court’s judgment in a matter involving Greenpeace Slovakia’s claims regarding the Mochovce nuclear power plant
New developments in the matter involving Greenpeace’s demands for information under the Freedom of Information Act

Switzerland
Judgment of the Federal Supreme Court in the matter of the Département fédéral de l’environnement, des transports, de l’énergie et de la communication (DETEC) against Ursula Balmer-Schafroth and others on consideration of admissibility of a request to withdraw the operating licence for the Mühleberg nuclear power plant

United States
Judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granting petition for writ of mandamus ordering US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to resume Yucca Mountain licensing
Judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit invalidating two Vermont statutes as pre-empted by the Atomic Energy Act Judgment of the NRC on transferring Shieldalloy site to New Jersey’s jurisdiction