Browse by: "2016"

Most emerging economies are characterised by lagging levels of productivity. While economic growth has been robust in much of the emerging world during the last two decades, it has generally been grounded on factor accumulation, with marginal contributions from productivity. With the economic literature pointing to human capital and skills as a key conduit of productivity, the inability of firms to find the skills they need appears as a key brake on development. This paper aims to identify the dimensions where this skill gap is more prevalent, particularly across emerging regions and industries. We devise an empirical analysis that uses two alternative specifications based on limited dependent variable analysis. The results place Latin America as the emerging region where firms have the greatest problems derived from the lack of adequate skills, well ahead of emerging Asia and Europe, but also of sub-Saharan Africa. In terms of sectors, two advanced manufacturing industries (machinery and motor vehicles) are particularly affected by this relative scarcity of adequately trained workers. Policy recommendations hinge on the need to solve the mismatch between the provision of skills by educational systems and the needs of the economy.

Graduation rates for bachelor’s and master’s degrees have dramatically increased over the past two decades, with 6 million bachelor’s degrees and 3 million master’s degrees awarded in OECD countries in 2013. Although women represent over half of the graduates at the bachelor’s and master’s level, they are still strikingly under-represented in the fields of sciences and engineering. The proportion of international students rises with every level of tertiary education: while 7% of bachelor’s graduates were international students in 2013, the figure increases to 18% among those awarded a master’s degree.

Les taux d’obtention d’un diplôme de licence et de master ont connu une augmentation considérable ces vingt dernières années, avec l’octroi de 6 millions de diplômes de licence et de 3 millions de diplômes de master dans les pays de l’OCDE en 2013. Bien que les femmes représentent plus de la moitié des diplômés de licence et de master, elles restent largement sous-représentées dans les domaines des sciences et de l’ingénierie. Le pourcentage d’étudiants en mobilité internationale augmente avec l’élévation du niveau d’enseignement tertiaire : en 2013, ils représentaient ainsi 7 % des diplômés de licence, contre 18 % de ceux de master.

In 2012, 15-year-old students spent over two hours on line each day, on average across OECD countries. The most common online activities among 15-year-olds were browsing the Internet for fun and participating in social networks, with over 70% of students doing one of these every day or almost every day. Students who spent more than six hours per day on line outside of school were more likely to feel lonely at school, arrive late and perform at lower levels in mathematics. On average across OECD countries, 7% of students spend this much time on line during a typical weekday.

The OECD is planning to enhance existing PISA assessment instruments in reading, mathematics and science so that they will be more suitable to the context of developing countries. The main purpose of this paper is to identify the main technical issues associated with this aim. The paper reports detailed analysis of the existing PISA item pool and its suitability for countries which have students of average limited capacity. The paper cautions that the fit of developing country data to the PISA model is not good and that modifications to address some of the deviations should be explored. The use of learning metrics to describe dimensions of educational progression is at the core of the PISA reporting methodology and requires a consistency across countries in item behaviour that is not apparent for developing countries. The paper recommends that any process to move towards enhancing the instruments must be undertaken with extensive consultation with the countries involved.

En 2012, les élèves de 15 ans passaient plus de deux heures en ligne chaque jour, en moyenne, dans les pays de l’OCDE. Surfer sur Internet pour s’amuser et participer à des réseaux sociaux sont les activités en ligne les plus répandues parmi les élèves de 15 ans : 70 % d’entre eux indiquent effectuer l’une d’elles tous les jours ou presque. Les élèves passant plus de six heures en ligne par jour en dehors du cadre scolaire sont plus susceptibles de se sentir seuls à l’école, d’arriver en retard et d’obtenir de moins bons résultats en mathématiques. En moyenne, dans les pays de l’OCDE, 7 % des élèves passent autant de temps en ligne un jour ordinaire de semaine.

This paper discusses the use of outcome indicators for policy monitoring. In addition to providing general recommendations on their design and implementation, it makes two contributions to the existing literature. First, it shows the importance of distinguishing outcome indicators from other types of indicators and demonstrates the need to develop clear policy objectives as a prerequisite for meaningful outcome indicators. Second, it analyses the use of outcome indicators in specific settings; on the sub-national level, in multi-level governance frameworks and in the context of EU cohesion policy. The paper argues that outcome indicators are better used in relational contracts than in transactional contracts between governments. Furthermore, it highlights the need to harmonise different monitoring frameworks within an administration.

A number of factors and trends have driven the development of financial education policies in Asia and the Pacific in recent years. In some countries and economies, the development of financial education policies has been mostly spurred by high levels of financial exclusion, both among households and small businesses, in a context of low financial literacy, low general education and high poverty. In others, current or anticipated population ageing is also playing an important role. Various countries and economies in the region have engaged in the development of financial education and financial consumer protection policy responses to help address these issues. This report provides an overview of the recent trends and developments on financial education in Asia and the Pacific. It describes the status of national strategies for financial education and highlights financial education programmes targeting different audiences and through a variety of delivery channels. Based on the analysis of these initiatives, the report offers policy and practical suggestions for policy makers and other stakeholders.

This paper provides a comprehensive discussion of the labour market security dimension of the OECD’s job quality framework, thereby complementing the analysis in Chapter 3 of the OECD Employment Outlook 2014 and Chapter 5 of the OECD Employment Outlook 2015. It makes three main contributions. First, it provides an in-depth discussion of the definition and measurement of labour market security. and discusses in detail the various methodological issues surrounding its measurement. Second, it offers a comprehensive statistical portrait of labour market security across countries, socio-economic groups and over time. Third, it investigates the statistical relationship between labour market insecurity and subjective measures of well-being. Importantly, we find that the risk of unemployment has a detrimental effect on the well-being of employed workers, and that this reflects to an important extent the risk of staying unemployed for a prolonged period of time. Policymakers should therefore focus not only on reducing the level of unemployment, but also on speeding up unemployment turnover at a given level of unemployment. Unemployment insurance also mitigates the adverse effect of unemployment risk, and particularly that of long-term unemployment, on the well-being of the employed.

Standard income inequality figures, based on official household survey statistics covering most of the population, report a steady rise of inequality across a majority of advanced countries. The usefulness of these data sources in providing a timely and internationally comparable picture of inequality is undisputed, but one well-known limitation is their under-reporting of top incomes. This matters insofar as separate data sources devoted specifically to top incomes evolution report substantially faster inequality growth in recent years compared to conventional statistics. This paper proposes a methodology to adjust household survey data for the under-reporting of top incomes. More specifically, the analysis delivers a set of top incomes-adjusted income distribution series that bring together the bottom 99% and the top 1%. Unsurprisingly, the results point to a significant increase of the level of inequality measured by standard statistics based on official figures: the Gini coefficient adjusted for top incomes was in 2011 on average 6 percentage points higher, moving from 0.31 to 0.37 for the average OECD country; similarly, the gap between the mean income of the richest and the poorest 10% rises from 10 to 15 as a result from the adjustment. Inequality trends are also significantly altered, albeit in ways that differ across countries.

The news that companies in OECD economies are increasingly bringing manufacturing activities back home has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Headline cases of a number of large multinational companies have given increased visibility to the phenomenon of reshoring in the economic press, academic research and policy discussions.. The debate on re-shoring (often also called “backshoring”, “nearshoring”, “onshoring”) is very lively with some even arguing that the time of offshoring has come to an end. But considerable disagreement exists about how important this trend actually is for economies in particular the number of jobs that reshoring is supposed to bring back. While policy makers in OECD economies hope that reshoring might help to revitalise their slumping manufacturing industries, the rationale for policy measures around reshoring is not clear-cut.

This study takes stock of the institutional setting, operational modalities, strengths and weaknesses of various forms of mutual recognition when used in different sector and country contexts. It aims to build a greater understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of one of the 11 mechanisms of international regulatory co-operation identified by the OECD Regulatory Policy Committee in OECD (2013), International Regulatory Co-operation: Addressing Global Challenges. The paper relies on an empirical stocktaking of mutual recognition agreements (MRAs) among selected OECD countries, the systematic review of mutual recognition clauses in trade agreements, case studies of the specific experience of the EU internal market, the Trans-Tasman arrangement, and the MRA between the US and the EU of 1998, and an extensive review of the literature.

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly used in agricultural innovation to leverage public funds, enhance efficiency, and improve the adaptation of innovation to demand so as to foster wider and faster diffusion. For governments, PPPs for innovation are but one policy option, whose costs and benefits need to be compared with those of other options. Governments have put in place a policy and regulatory environment to facilitate the development of PPPs for innovation, including financing mechanisms and Intellectual Property (IP) protection. Most programmes are not specific to the food and agriculture system, but apply to the economy-wide innovation system. The main a priori conditions for forming a successful partnership between public and private participants are existence of common objectives, sharing of mutual benefits, and complementarity of human and financial resources. Institutional arrangements need to be clear, but the degree of formality can vary. Elements of good governance include setting clear objectives and rules, and implementing regular monitoring and evaluation that use well-established, open and competitive processes to select PPPs for public participation. Transparency is desirable at all stages of implementation. Improving partners’ capacity to design, manage and participate in PPPs is an important factor of success, and is particularly relevant for agricultural innovation.

Outdoor air pollution is a major determinant of health worldwide. The greatest public health effects are from increased mortality in adults. However, both PM and O3 also cause a wide range of other, less serious, health outcomes; and there are effects on mortality and morbidity of other pollutants also, e.g. nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and sulphur dioxide (SO2). These adverse health effects have economic consequences; OECD (2014) suggests that the social costs of the health impact of outdoor air pollution in OECD countries, China and India was approximately USD 1.7 trillion and USD 1.9 trillion, respectively, in 2010. However, the study highlights that though the social costs of premature mortality account for the majority of these totals, the social costs of morbidity remain poorly estimated. The objective of this paper is to inform the development of improved estimates of the social costs of human morbidity impacts resulting from outdoor air pollution in two components; namely to develop a core set of pollutant-health end-points to be covered when estimating the costs of morbidity, and to review current estimates of the cost of morbidity from air pollution.