Browse by: "2015"

“Green growth” and transport combines several different concepts that are central to sustainable mobility, including sustainable economic activity, reduced environmental impact and sustained growth in high quality jobs. It attempts to balance the importance of economic growth, with environmental damage and social priorities through assessing positive actions that can be taken by a wide variety of public and private stakeholders. It has arisen out of the concern over the use of non-renewable resources in transport, increasing emissions of carbon and other pollutants, and the expected levels of growth in mobility over the next 40 years. But it also acknowledges the importance of transport to the economy, and its role in helping to create jobs, improving levels of productivity and output, and in promoting agglomeration benefits. This means that transport should be efficient, but at the same time make less demand on the environment through less use of resources, through recycling and reuse of materials, and through embracing a life cycle perspective...

Manufacturing features again high on the policy agenda in a lot of OECD countries. While deindustrialisation and offshoring have dominated the news about manufacturing during the past decades, recent years have witnessed a number of examples of companies re-shoring activities back to OECD economies. It is then not surprising that the discussion about the need for industrial policies in favour of manufacturing has gained importance in recent years. Policy discussions however often ignore the profound changes manufacturing has undergone in recent years, for example manufacturing today is much more than the pure production of tangible things and includes a growing services content. This paper addresses this issue against the background of long-term structural change of OECD economies and discusses the changing role of manufacturing and services in OECD economies.

This report examines the different channels through which trade openness (and reforms to achieve it) can affect a country’s food security. The overall conclusion is that trade openness has a positive net impact on food security, although specific constituencies, including some poor households, could see their immediate food security threatened by the withdrawal of trade protection. The challenge for policymakers is to design flanking policies which enable countries to reap aggregate gains yet mitigate specific losses. Those policies include social protection and the provision of risk management tools, allied with investments in productivity so that average incomes rise to the extent that any adverse shock to incomes is unlikely to jeopardise food security. Developing countries are increasingly able to deploy such targeted instruments. Lessons are also being learned with respect to the political economy of trade reform, such that changes can be introduced in a way that minimises adjustment stresses and helps build the consensus needed to lock in the benefits of trade policy reform.

This report considers developments in agricultural patents since 1990 and their economic implications. It first provides an overview of the international framework for intellectual property protection and of the general trends in the stringency of protection in OECD countries. It then presents developments in the number of patents originating from OECD and other countries that are granted in Europe and the United States, for all fields and for agriculture and food technologies. These illustrate the leading role played by OECD countries in the provision of successful applications, although non-OECD countries increased their share of the total between 1990 and 2010. Finally, econometric analysis is used to assess the relationships between patenting and selected indicators of innovation and economic performance. The results points to favourable economic developments associated with the patent reforms in the recent decades.

Potential output losses from the global financial crisis are estimated by comparing recent OECD published projections with a counter-factual assuming a continuation of pre-crisis productivity trends and a trend employment rate which is sensitive to demographic trends. Among the 19 OECD countries which experienced a banking crisis over the period 2007-11 the median loss in potential output in 2014 is estimated to be about 5½ per cent, compared with a loss in aggregate potential output across all OECD countries of about 3½ per cent. The loss does, however, vary widely across countries, being more than 10% for several smaller European, mainly euro area, countries. The largest adverse effects come from lower trend productivity, which is a combination of both lower total factor productivity and lower capital per worker. Despite large increases in structural unemployment in some countries, the contribution of lower potential employment is limited because the adverse effect on labour force participation is generally much less than might have been expected on the basis of previous severe downturns. This may partly reflect pension reforms and a tightening up of early retirement pathways. Pre-crisis conditions relating to over-heating and financial excesses, including high inflation, high investment, large current account deficits, high total economy indebtedness and more rapid growth in capital-per-worker are all correlated with larger post-crisis potential output losses. This suggests that underlying the potential output losses was a substantial misallocation of resources, especially of capital, in the pre-crisis boom period. On the other hand, more competition-friendly product market regulation is associated with smaller losses of potential output, suggesting that it facilitates a reallocation of resources across firms and sectors in the aftermath of an adverse shock and so helps to mitigate its consequences.

JEL classification: E32; E44.
Keywords: Banking crisis, financial crisis, global financial crisis, potential output.

This paper examines the extent, reasons and impacts of excess capacity in the global steel industry, as well as the implications of new investment projects that continue to take place at a rapid pace in many parts of the world. By focussing on new investments projects taking place in the global steel industry, this study intends to help governments and industry better understand the extent to which global steelmaking excess capacity may evolve in the future. The paper finds that global steelmaking capacity will continue to expand, with regions that are currently net importers of steel products expected to record the largest capacity increases. Global nominal steelmaking capacity is projected to increase to 2.36 billion tonnes by 2017, up from 2.16 billion tonnes in 2013. Non-OECD economies will continue to lead the capacity expansion in the global steel industry, with their share of world capacity expected to increase to 71.4% by 2017. Of particular importance for governments in this context will be to work towards removing market distorting policies such as subsidies that promote the emergence of new capacity or delay the closure of failing companies.

Quantifying the effect of public interventions aimed at mobilising private finance for climate activities is technically complex and challenging. As a step towards addressing this complexity, the report presents a framework of key decision points for estimating publicly mobilised private finance. This framework outlines different methodological options and choices needed to make these estimates. It assesses trade-offs and implications of these choices in terms of their accuracy, the incentives they provide, their potential to be standardised across entities, and their practicality (data availability, expertise and resource demands). The report further identifies and suggests practical options available in the short-term for estimating mobilised private finance, while underlining the need to provide transparency about underlying definitions, assumptions and limitations. It also recommends longer-term actions to improve these methods, including the need to converge on definitions, to build data systems and to improve and standardise estimation methods.

The primary objective of this report is to inform the development of methods to measure in a transparent manner progress towards the fulfilment of the financial commitments made by developed countries in the context of international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It also aims to encourage careful examination of the links between public interventions and private climate finance. This is to ensure that methods to estimate mobilisation help encourage the efficiency and effectiveness of public interventions aimed at mobilising such finance.

Worldwide, primary corporate bond markets have become an increasingly important source of financing for non-financial companies. This trend is coupled with a relative decrease in traditional bank lending to non-financial companies and low levels of bond interest rates. Just as shareholders, bondholders can play an important role in corporate governance. They can use both exit and voice. This report provides a comprehensive global overview of all corporate bond issues since 2000 and experiences of governance engagement by bondholders. The report builds on issue level data for more than 100,000 individual bond issues in 108 jurisdictions between 2000 and 2013. Data is provided with respect to the type of issues and numerous bond characteristics, such as country of origin, investment grade, maturity, covenants and conditions for redemption. The report also analyses trends in secondary bond markets, including market liquidity, the role of market makers and the relatively slow introduction of electronic trading systems. In order to analyse trends over time with respect to governance, we provide detailed time series data on the use and relative importance of 15 different categories of covenants. By constructing an overall “covenant protection index” we suggest that bond investors in their search for yield have overall traded governance rights for higher expected returns. This shift also seems to be associated with higher risk-taking. We also conclude that the degree of governance engagement primarily is linked to the business model of the bond investor. We end the report with a discussion about the scope for institutional changes that may build a larger community of truly informed and motivated bond investors.

The constant market share analysis framework is used to decompose changes in Spain’s share of the global market for goods exports into competitiveness and structural effects (i.e. the impact of specialisation, either in product or geographical terms) over 1996-2013. As other high-income countries, Spain has experienced competitive pressures from China and other emerging economies that have resulted in a loss of global market share. Nevertheless, the loss has been smaller than in other European advanced economies, thanks to better competitiveness. By contrast, the structure of geographic markets to which Spain exports, with a large-weight on relatively slow-growing areas and a small weight on fast-growing emerging countries, has exerted a negative impact on Spanish exports. In the same vein, the product structure, focused on relatively slow growing product lines, has not been conducive to better export performance either. This Working Paper relates to the 2014 OECD Economic Survey of Spain (http://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-spain.htm).

This paper identifies over 50 000 patents filed worldwide in various water-related adaptation technologies between 1990 and 2010, distinguishing between those related to water availability (supply) and water conservation (demand) technologies. The paper then analyses the innovation activity – including inventive activity by country and technology, international collaboration in technology development, and international diffusion of such water-related technologies. The results suggest that although innovation activity in water-related technologies has been increasing over the last two decades, this growth has been disproportionately concentrated on supply-side technologies. Moreover, most innovation worldwide occurs in countries with low or moderate vulnerability towards water scarcity. While this is a reflection of the fact that most developed economies do not face severe water stress, this result highlights the importance of international technology transfer and policies that facilitate broad diffusion of these technologies in water-stressed countries.

This paper presents an analysis of the effect of international co-authorship of scientific publications on patenting in wind energy technologies. It is found that the number of scientific publications co-authored by researchers in OECD countries has a positive and very significant impact on the number of wind energy innovations patented in OECD countries. However, non-OECD countries produce a greater number of patent filings when their researchers collaborate with OECD countries. This suggests that there exist knowledge spillovers between OECD and non-OECD countries that particularly benefit non-OECD countries. This empirical finding is important because it strengthens the case for international research cooperation between OECD and non-OECD countries in the area of climate mitigation.

This report is an assessment of the programme “Lernen vor Ort” [LvO – “Learning Locally”] initiated by the German federal government in order to support the development of local governance structures in education. LvO ran between 2009 and 2014 in about 40 participating local governments, which were chosen in a competitive process. It aimed at promoting cooperation between local governments and civil society stakeholders, creating sustainable structures in educational monitoring, management and consulting as well as improving local capacities in knowledge management. Besides providing important background information on the German education system and the design of the LvO programme, this study engages in five detailed case studies of the implementation of the LvO programme in different local authorities. These studies are mainly based on approximately 90 interviews with local and national experts, and stakeholders. The main findings are that LvO can be regarded as a success due to the fact that it had a lasting and probably sustainable impact in the cases studied in this report, in particular with regard to those structures that produce concrete and visible outputs, such as educational monitoring. The case studies also reveal a number of local factors that influence the relative effectiveness of the implementation of the programme. Political leadership and support from the head of the local government are crucial, in particular during critical situations during the implementation. Furthermore, the impact of the programme was particularly positive, when the process of local implementation was characterised by clear communication strategies, broad stakeholder involvement in governing bodies and the implementation of concrete goals and projects. However, relative success also depended on important background factors such as local socio-economic conditions as well as financial and administrative capacities, which could not be adressed directly by the programme’s goals. The report concludes with some general recommendations and lessons learned of relevance for other countries.

This paper uses newly released OECD data on services trade restrictions (STRI) to analyse the relationship between services trade restrictions, cross-border trade in services and trade in downstream manufactured goods. A standard gravity model is enhanced by the STRI indices in a cross-section regression analysis. Services trade restrictions are negatively associated with both imports and exports of services. The surprisingly strong effect on services exports is probably explained by a negative relationship between the STRIs and sector performance indices. Consequently, services suppliers are less competitive abroad. A negative relationship is also found between the STRI indices and exports, imports and intra-industry trade in manufactured goods. The statistical significance and the elasticities vary across services and goods sectors in ways that intuitively make sense.

This paper investigates farmers’ incentives to participate voluntarily in carbon offset markets when environmental credit stacking is allowed, that is, farmers can stack water quality credits with carbon credits. The implications of stacking on additionality of environmental services in interlinked markets, market participation rates, and market equilibrium prices are analysed by developing a conceptual framework of environmental credit stacking, which is applied with data estimates for the US Corn Belt. Analysis shows that credit stacking increases farmers’ participation in carbon offset markets, and that such increased participation provides additionality in environmental service provision. It is further shown that ecosystem markets are interlinked so that credit price changes in one market will shift credit supply in another market, thus affecting equilibrium prices. Empirical application of the framework shows that provision of CO2-eq offsets through reductions of nitrogen application or through the establishment of green set-asides is not profitable without water quality credits. A conversion from conventional tillage and reduced tillage to no-till is profitable in some cases, although current low carbon offset prices and transaction costs have a significant negative impact on the number of participating parcels. When farmers are allowed to stack water quality credits the profitability of carbon sequestration practices increases. Reduced nitrogen application levels becomes a profitable option and 21% of field parcels - representing 4.6 million acres- participate in the market with water quality credit prices at base levels of USD 3/lb for N and USD 4/lb for P. The establishment of green set-aside and streamside buffer strips becomes profitable in the lower productivity and highly erodible lands with base prices of nutrient credits. If water quality trading markets are small then high participation rates among farmers may result in an oversupply of nutrient credits and as a consequence equilibrium credit prices and farmers’ credit revenue would decrease.

This paper provides insights into what partner country governments anticipate will be their main development challenges within five to ten years, and into how they expect their relationships with DAC development assistance providers to evolve in order to meet these challenges. Based on results from an OECD-commissioned survey of 40 developing country governments, it finds that demand for development co-operation will remain strong given the economic and environmental challenges that lie ahead. However, the countries surveyed expect DAC providers to shift to a more enabling role in the coming years: providing vital finance, but in support of government-led sector programmes; delivering more and better technical and policy support; and leveraging more private finance. This paper will inform the OECD Development Co-operation Directorate’s ‘Agency of the Future’ project, which seeks to identify how DAC members’ development administrations will need to adapt in order to be fit for purpose in a rapidly changing world.

This study uses a unique dataset of investment flows to analyse the role of two categories of public interventions (finance and policies) in mobilising flows of private climate finance worldwide and in the more specific context of flows to and in developing countries. The objectives are threefold. First, the paper presents ‘observed’ ratios of total private to public finance in selected climate-related sectors. Second, it seeks to understand the determinants of private climate finance flows by analysing the role of key public finance (bilateral, domestic and multilateral) and public policy instruments (feed-in tariffs, renewable energy quotas, the Clean Development Mechanism), while taking into account a number of market and country conditions. For reasons of data availability, the focus of this econometric analysis is on a subset of six renewable energy sectors (wind, solar, biomass, small hydro, marine and geothermal). Finally, the paper assesses the likely mobilisation impact of past public interventions in these six sectors, and draws a comparison with approaches that ignore the role of policy as well as country and market conditions.

Results suggest that both public finance and public policies have played an important role in private finance mobilisation globally. In the context of finance to and in developing countries, the results highlight the currently untapped potential of domestic public policies to increase mobilisation. The methodology proposed in this report is an initial attempt to estimate private climate finance mobilisation empirically. It should be seen as a first step towards developing more comprehensive methodologies for analysing and estimating private finance mobilisation in the global climate policy context.

• Une plus grande anxiété vis-à-vis des mathématiques est associée à de moins bons résultats dans cette matière, que ce soit entre les pays ou au sein de ces derniers.
• Plus les camarades de classe d’un élève sont bons en mathématiques, plus son anxiété vis-à-vis de cette matière est grande.
• L’utilisation de pratiques d’évaluation formative par les enseignants est associée à une anxiété moindre vis-à-vis des mathématiques dans 39 pays et économies.

The issue of a “level playing field” has re-emerged as a major issue in international aviation. This issue has been around for decades but has been raised in recent policy debates. One policy forum in which this has been raised is the European Commission’s proposed revision to Regulation 868/2004, which some view as a response to allegations by some legacy carriers to the rapid growth of the Middle East carriers such as Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways. Another dimension to the concern over the level playing field is the evolution in foreign ownership rules, such as the type of treaty clauses being negotiated by the European Union. Could broader acceptance of service by carriers owned by third-party nationals create conditions for a flag of convenience regime of the kind that characterises parts of maritime liner shipping? The flag of convenience issue has been discussed in the U.S. media with regard to Norwegian Air Shuttle. Norwegian’s long haul services are operated by subsidiaries Norwegian Long Haul AS and Norwegian International Ltd. The former is registered in Norway while the latter is registered in Ireland and operates flights for its parent. Some long haul flights have operated with contract flight attendant labour based in Thailand.

• The annual number of teaching hours of teachers differs greatly from one country to another and tends to decrease as the level of education increases.
• On average across countries, teachers spend half of their working time in non-teaching activities including planning lessons, marking and collaborating with other teachers.
• Keeping order in the classroom, generally the biggest concern for new teachers, occupies an average of 13% of all teachers’ time across countries.
• Schools could further benefit from developing ways to use teachers’ time more efficiently so that they could devote more time to professional development, teaching-related work and learning.