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This report explores the scope and magnitude of selected product safety challenges faced by consumers when purchasing tangible goods via e-commerce. It provides an overview of the government and business initiatives that have been carried out to protect consumers from three categories of unsafe products that are available for sale online in a number of jurisdictions. Such products include those: i) which have been banned or recalled; ii) with inadequate labelling and safety warnings; and iii) which do not meet voluntary and mandatory safety standards. The report is informed by the results of an OECD online product safety sweep carried out in April 2015, in which 25 jurisdictions participated and inspected a total of 1 709 selected products available for sale online.
French
This paper firstly describes the role of models in producing OECD global macroeconomic forecasts; secondly, reviews the OECD's forecasting track record; and finally, considers the relationship between forecast performance and models. OECD forecasts are not directly generated from a single global model, but instead rely heavily on expert judgment which is informed by inputs from a range of different models, with forecasts subjected to repeated peer review. For the major OECD economies, current year GDP growth forecasts exhibit a number of desirable properties including that they are unbiased, outperform naïve forecasts and mostly identify turning points. Moreover, there is a trend improvement in current-year forecasting performance which is partly attributed to the increasing use of high frequency ‘now-casting’ indicator models to forecast the current and next quarter’s GDP. Conversely, the track record of one-year-ahead forecasts is much less impressive; such forecasts are biased, often little better than naïve forecasts and are poor at anticipating downturns. Forecasts tend to cluster around those from other international organisations and consensus forecasts; it is particularly striking that differences in one-year-ahead forecasts between forecasters are relatively minor in comparison with the size of average errors made by all of them. This may reflect herding behaviour by forecasters as well as the mean reversion properties of models. These weaknesses in forecasting performance beyond the current year underline the importance of increased efforts to use models to characterise the risk distribution around the baseline forecast, including through the increased use of model-based scenario analysis.
In April 2015, 25 jurisdictions participated in an OECD product safety sweep to determine the extent to which a selected number of products identified as: i) banned or recalled from the market; ii) presenting inadequate product labelling and safety warnings; or iii) not meeting voluntary and mandatory safety standards, were available for sale via e-commerce. This report provides a summary of the results of the sweep, which shows that a large proportion of the 1 709 inspected products were available for sale to consumers at domestic and cross-border levels. The results have been used to inform the OECD 2016 report “Online product safety: Trends and challenges”.
French
Les adultes sont de plus en plus nombreux à obtenir un diplôme de l’enseignement tertiaire, mais tous les diplômes de ce niveau d’enseignement n’ont pas la même valeur sur le marché du travail. Les diplômes post-licence, tels que les masters et les doctorats, sont en général associés à des taux d’emploi et une rémunération plus élevés que les diplômes de licence. En outre, les débouchés professionnels varient également en fonction du domaine d’études. La composition hommesfemmes diffère sensiblement dans certains domaines d’études, reflétant les stéréotypes de genre prévalant dans certaines professions. Le domaine d’études des diplômés est étroitement lié à leurs choix professionnels ; c’est pourquoi une meilleure compréhension des disparités hommes-femmes à cet égard peut aider à identifier certains des mécanismes sous-tendant les différences entre les sexes sur la marché du travail et au-delà.
English
More and more adults are earning a tertiary qualification, but not all tertiary degrees have the same value on the labour market. In general, postgraduate degrees such as master’s and doctoral degrees are associated with higher employment rates and earnings than bachelor’s degrees. Labour market outcomes also vary by field of education. Some fields of education differ markedly in their gender composition, reflecting the sex-typing of occupations and gender stereotypes. Graduates’ field of education is closely related with their occupational choices; therefore a better understanding of gender disparities in this area can help to identify some of the mechanisms that lie behind gender differences in the labour market and beyond.
French
A recurring issue for education policy-makers is the labour market effect of the long-term global mass expansion of higher education, particularly on what is a “graduate job”. The traditional assumption is that graduate jobs are virtually coterminous with professional and managerial occupations. A new indicator of graduate jobs, termed ISCO(HE)2008, is derived using task-based data drawn from the The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The new classification shows that several jobs in ISCO major group 3 “Technicians and Associate Professionals” are also classed as graduate jobs in many countries. Altogether, 27.6% of jobs are classified as graduate jobs in the 15 OECD country-regions for which we have data. Considerable variation in the proportion of graduate jobs is found across industries and countries and in the short period from 2011 to 2013, the proportion of graduate jobs has become more diverse across countries.
This paper examines the relationship between age and literacy using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL) and The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). A negative partial relationship between literacy and age exists with literacy declining with age, especially after age 45. However, this relationship could reflect some combination of age and birth cohort effects. The analysis shows that in most participating countries the negative literacy-age profile observed in cross-sectional data arises from offsetting ageing and cohort effects. With some exceptions, more recent birth cohorts have lower levels of literacy and individuals from a given birth cohort lose literacy skills after they leave school at a rate greater than indicated by cross-sectional estimates. The results for birth cohort suggest that there is not a general tendency for literacy skills to decline from one generation to the next, but that the majority of the countries examined are doing a poorer job of developing literacy skills in successive generations.
This paper examines how formal education and experience in the labour market correlate with measures of human capital available in The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The findings are consistent with the notion that, in producing human capital, work experience substitutes formal education at the bottom of the schooling distribution. First, the number of years of working experience correlates with literacy proficiency only among low-educated individuals. Secondly, low-educated workers who only perform simple tasks on their jobs (calculating percentages or reading emails) do better in numeracy and literacy tests than similar employees who did not perform those tasks. Thirdly, workers in jobs intensive in numeric tasks perform relatively better in the numeracy section of the PIAAC test than in the literacy part. Overall, our results suggest that the contribution of on-the-job learning to skill formation is about a third of that of compulsory schooling in most of the countries that participated in PIAAC.

This paper examines how women’s empowerment is essential for food and nutrition security and resilience in West Africa and suggests policy “pointers” arising from the West African experience that can help inform policies and strategies, particularly in view of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. West African women play a significant role at each stage in the food system, from production to distribution to nutrition, and they contribute to building resilience and adaptability to uncertainty and shocks including the effects of climate change. While it is clear that women significantly contribute to the eradication of hunger and malnutrition, it is also evident that there is a need for greater political representation and participation in policy dialogues.

This paper highlights the large contribution of services to the Brazilian economy and the under-exploited potential of services to sustain productivity gains and international competitiveness. The areas with the largest potential for regulatory reform include improvements in the general business and trading environment as well as specific policies in transport sectors, telecoms and financial services. Reforms targeting services that add value by favouring productivity and quality enhancements, as well as services that increase efficiency by reducing production costs, have strong potential to unlock manufacturing performance. The set of proposed recommendations emerging from this analysis underlines the importance of streamlining sector-level regulatory frameworks to encourage foreign entry and competition, and the role that cross-cutting improvements in the trade and business environment would play to render services providers more competitive.
Dual apprenticeship training is increasingly seen as an important educational track that provides youth with the skills necessary for a smooth transition into the labour market. However, providing skills at the workplace rather than at (vocational) school comes at a cost for firms that hire such apprentices. Nonetheless, as apprentices become part of a firm’s workforce, they also generate a benefit from working productively. This paper provides a theoretical framework and the latest empirical evidence about a firm’s costs and benefits that are associated with offering dual apprenticeship training. While many aspects of such training are determined by external factors such as government policies, training regulations, and labour market institutions, firms can still influence many other aspects. The available empirical evidence suggests that there is no single optimal model of dual apprenticeship training. However, given the differences in the institutional setting across countries, adjusting key framework conditions can allow training firms to generate a sufficiently high return on their training investments. The main parameters affecting the cost–benefit ratio are apprentice wages, amount of training provided at the workplace, apprenticeship duration, and the manner in which firms integrate apprentices into the production process (to perform both skilled and unskilled tasks). An important prerequisite to successful apprenticeships, however, is also an adequate supply of suitable apprentices, which in turn (among other factors) depends on the training quality at the workplace, certification of the acquired skills, and future wages and career opportunities from obtaining a vocational qualification.
This paper assesses national public expenditure on housing in Poland, within the context of recent trends in the housing market. It focuses on direct expenditure on housing by the former Ministry of Infrastructure and Development, which until 2016 was the primary ministry charged with housing policy. While Poland has made considerable progress in reducing the housing deficit and improving housing quality, housing affordability and limited diversity of the housing stock remain important policy challenges. A comprehensive and conclusive evaluation of housing policy instruments in Poland is difficult, due to limited relevant data. As such, this paper outlines a series of key questions to guide policy makers in selecting housing policy instruments and in facilitating a more robust framework to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of housing policy instruments.
This paper sets out a framework to estimate quality-adjusted price levels and price changes for fixed broadband services in OECD countries. We extend and adapt existing hedonic frameworks for international and interarea comparisons and consider the extended country product dummy approach. Hedonic pricing studies often are context and data dependent, and this study is no exception. We find that the multilevel structure of international broadband price datasets suggests modeling hedonic functions at the company level. This not only mitigates efficiency loss due to lack of subscriber information on individual plans but also allows for company costs and markups to influence estimates of hedonic function coefficients. Incorporating random variation in hedonic slope coefficients at the ISP level produces results that statistically dominate standard models where slope coefficients are the same across countries, and we suggest how price comparisons based on random coefficient hedonic models might be useful in telecommunications policy analysis.

Cities face the daily challenge of providing people with access to different activities through their public transport systems. Despite its importance, there is little research on accessibility that focuses on the use of this mode and even less accounting for the impact of level of service (i.e. travel time, waiting time, reliability, comfort and transfers). Thus, the aim of this paper is to propose a methodology to determine how access to opportunities and basic services through public transport systems is distributed in cities, and how the perceived level of service decreases or accentuates the existing gaps.
Three indicators are calculated for Santiago based on data from public transport operations, smart card validations and georeferenced information: walking accessibility to public transport stops considering the quality of urban furniture, safety and environment; connectivity provided by the system in each area to the rest of the city considering the level of service through a measure of generalised time (in-vehicle time); and a measure of attractiveness of the destinations, based on number of trips attracted by purpose. The methodology is applied to a case study in Santiago, a highly unequal and segregated city.
The results show that the accessibility gap between disadvantaged areas and more wealthy neighborhoods of the city increases if the user's perception of level of service for public transport is considered. We show that the three proposed indicators provide different dimensions of accessibility suggesting how and where to intervene to effectively improve equity. Thus, the indicators could be used to assist the prioritisation and focus of investment plans, the design process of urban policies or transport infrastructure and become a key input for planners and decision-makers.

This paper highlights the urban development in India and implications for low income households living in informal settlements or slums. The paper is divided into four sections. Section 1 describes urban development pattern in India. Section 2 presents a summary of policies since 1950 which have been implemented to address the housing needs of low income households in cities. Section 3 presents impacts of various housing and resettlement policies in selected cities in India. Section 4 summarizes key insights from self-planned low income settlements in cities-the slums, and expert planned low income settlements as part of resettlement policies.

In order to meet the challenges of providing affordable public transit services for the urban poor and at a cost that doesn’t impinge on the system’s financial sustainability, cities can consider setting fares at “cost recovery” levels for the majority of the population and targeting subsidies to those who need them most. Bogotá is a case in point—the new public transport system was designed so fares are set close to “cost recovery” levels to aim for greater financial sustainability. To provide affordable services, the city leveraged the adoption of smartcards in its new public transit system and the country’s poverty targeting instruments to implement a pro-poor public transit subsidy. This paper presents a critical analysis of Bogotá’s experience with trying to balance financial sustainability and affordability. The paper describes some of the features of Bogota’s tariff policy, namely, the concept of tariff set at “cost recovery” levels and lessons learnt in trying to achieve financial sustainability. The paper also lays out the rationale, design and implementation of Bogota’s pro-poor public transit subsidy, and the subsidy’s impact on its beneficiaries.

This technical paper provides an overview of the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s (CNT) H+T affordability index and its potential application outside of the United States (US), where it has played a prominent role in documenting the relationship between housing and transportation and in influencing local and national housing policies. After describing the index and its policy use, we detail some of the challenges and opportunities of applying the index in Mexico, apply a modified H+T index to the Mexico City metropolitan area, and examine the effect of accounting for transportation costs on maps and measures of housing affordability.
Finally, we conclude with a discussion of some of the opportunities and challenges of applying the H+T index in other OECD nations. The objective is to develop a better understanding of how an H+T index or similar tool could lead to improved public policy throughout the OECD.

This paper discusses and analyses whether congestion charges can be considered to be “fair” in different senses to the word. Two different perspectives are distinguished: the consumer perspective and the citizen perspective. The consumer perspective is the traditional one in equity analyses, and includes changes in travel costs, travel times and so on. Using data from four European cities, the analysis shows that high-income groups pay more than low-income groups, but low-income groups pay a higher share of their income. This paper argues that which distributional measure is most appropriate depends on the purpose(s) of the charging system. The citizen perspective is about individuals’ view of social issues such as equity, procedural fairness and environmental issues. This paper argues that an individual can be viewed as a “winner” from a citizen perspective if a reform (such as congestion pricing) is aligned with her views of what is socially desirable. Using the same data set, this paper analyses to what extent different income groups “win” or “lose” from a citizen perspective – i.e., to what extent congestion pricing is aligned with the societal preferences of high- and low-income groups.

This assessment of the present context for evolving socio-economic patterns and trends in the United States is intended to support consideration of prospects for gains in income shares among the lower income population, recognising that the United States is: a very large heterogeneous population; highly dispersed over a large geographic area; highly technologically developed; and with relatively high incomes by world standards. All of these factors conduce to the need to recognize the characteristics of individual nations as they move toward improved incomes for their populations. The key factor for the future in the US will be better utilisation of the underemployed population to abet the need for skilled workers to support a large aging dependent population, including better education, and greater mobility providing access to employment and to other social and economic opportunities. It is hoped that this assessment adds further dimension to the important challenges addressed here.

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