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Work-based learning can provide a bridge into careers and its potential benefits are particularly noticeable for youth at risk – those most likely to face difficulties in accessing jobs and learning opportunities. If this potential is to be fully realised, work-based learning programmes must be attractive to employers. Achieving this requires a closer look at the costs and benefits for employers when they offer work-based learning. This paper looks at tools designed to help get employers on board for work-based learning, with an emphasis on work-based learning for youth at risk. International experience suggests that financial incentives, such as subsidies and tax breaks are not the answer. Attention should be focussed instead on non-financial measures that improve the cost-benefit balance of apprenticeship to employers. These include adjusting key parameters of apprenticeship schemes, better preparing youth at risk for apprenticeship and providing support (e.g. remedial courses, mentoring) to youth at risk during apprenticeship.

Realising the potential of work-based learning schemes as a driver of productivity requires careful design and support. The length of work-based learning schemes should be adapted to the profile of productivity gains. A scheme that is too long for a given skill set might be unattractive for learners and waste public resources, but a scheme that is too short will fail to attract employer interest. Ensuring that the design of work-based learning schemes balances the interests of both employer and trainee is key to successful implementation. Carefully organising what trainees do while in the workplace and integrating learning into productive work can yield higher benefits for firms, while maintaining the quality of learning. Strengthening capacity within firms to effectively manage work-based learning can help achieve this. Enhancing that capacity, for example through training for trainee supervisors can help employers reap more benefits from work-based learning schemes while meeting quality requirements.

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.

No country or economy participating in PISA 2012 can claim that all of its 15-year-old students have achieved basic proficiency skills in mathematics, reading and science. Some 28% of students score below the baseline level of proficiency in at least one of those subjects, on average across OECD countries. Poor performance at age 15 is not the result of any single risk factor, but rather of a combination and accumulation of various barriers and disadvantages that affect students throughout their lives. Students attending schools where teachers are more supportive, have better morale and have higher expectations for students are less likely to be low performers in mathematics, even after accounting for the socio-economic status of students and schools.
French
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.
French
With the emergence of global value chains (GVCs), production processes are increasingly fragmented and dispersed across different countries. Although many MNEs still exhibit an important ‘home bias’ in their global innovation activities, a growing number of firms have offshored R&D and innovative activities to foreign locations. Is the more recent offshoring of R&D and innovation linked to the prior waves of manufacturing offshoring? The fear in OECD economies is that because of co-location effects between production and innovative activities, the loss of certain manufacturing/assembly activities may result in a loss of innovative capabilities (R&D, design, etc.) in the longer-term. The offshoring of R&D and innovation within GVCs poses new challenges to economic policy in OECD and emerging economies. For example, how can countries attract inward R&D investments by foreign MNEs? Should outward R&D investments by MNEs be a concern for the countries in which the MNEs are headquartered?
This paper applies the Inclusive Growth framework to the OECD Regional Well-being Database in order to compute multidimensional living standards (MDLS) among OECD regions from the early 2000s to 2012. MDLS are based on the equivalent income approach, where, for different income groups, the monetised value of health status and unemployment are added to disposable income and aggregated with a generalised mean function to allow inequality to be taken into account. Results highlight that, due to the spatial concentration of good and bad outcomes, regional disparities are amplified when observed through the lens of MDLS as opposed to income-based regional disparities. The paper also shows that people living in metropolitan regions experienced, on average, higher levels of MDLS but also a sharper decline during the economic crisis. Growth of MDLS in metropolitan regions during this period was characterised by a higher contribution of life expectancy and a lower contribution of income inequality with respect to the other regions.
Highly-educated and highly-skilled individuals are more likely to report better health than the less-educated and less-skilled, even when comparing individuals with similar background characteristics. The difference in self-reported health that is associated with schooling is largest in Norway and the United States and smallest in France, Italy and Sweden. The association between self-reported health and literacy is highest in Austria and the United States. Cross-country differences in the association between schooling and self-reported health and between literacy proficiency and self-reported health suggest that healthcare and social welfare systems play an important role in shaping the association between schooling, literacy and health.
French
The challenge of providing more and better education with tightening public budgets has made governments increasingly interested in the efficient allocation of education resources. Results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that, among countries with a comparatively high gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, the amount spent on education is less important than how those resources are used.
French
The Survey of Adult Skills finds that even adults with the lowest proficiency in literacy possess some basic reading skills, although the level of these skills varies considerably across countries. Basic reading skills are revealed in both the accuracy in and speed of responding to reading tasks, which indicate the level of ease and automaticity of reading. Among adults with low proficiency in literacy, those who took the survey in a language different from their mother tongue had much poorer basic reading skills than native speakers.
French
The Survey of Adult Skills finds that adults aged 55 to 65 are less proficient in literacy and numeracy than adults aged 25 to 34. But differences in skills proficiency that are related to age vary widely across countries, implying that skills policies can affect the evolution of proficiency over a lifetime. And while older adults are generally less proficient than younger adults, they do no worse – and often better – than younger adults in terms of labour market outcomes.
French
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.
  • 16 Jun 2016
  • Monika Queisser, Willem Adema, Chris Clarke
  • Pages: 5
  • in OECD Observer
Early childhood education and care programmes (ECEC) have become more accessible in recent years, with high enrolment rates in both early childhood educational development and preprimary education. The educational results of students at the age of 15 may be partially explained by attendance at pre-primary education, which sharply decreases the likelihood of low performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Pre-primary education can play a strong role in promoting equality at an early age, particularly by targeting disadvantaged groups such as first- and second-generation immigrants. Assuring and monitoring the quality of programmes is key to guaranteeing that early childhood education and care has a positive impact on both equity and performance in education.
French
What are the characteristics of a school as learning organisation? This paper should be seen as an attempt to work towards a common understanding of the school as learning organisation concept that is both solidly founded in the literature and is recognisable to all parties involved, i.e. educators, policy makers, parents and others alike. The paper provides an in-depth analysis of the learning organisation literature in general, and within a school context. It identifies and operationalises the characteristics of the school as learning organisation in an integrated model that consists of seven overarching ‘action-oriented’ dimensions: 1) developing and sharing a vision centred on the learning of all students; 2) creating and supporting continuous learning opportunities for all staff; 3) promoting team learning and collaboration among staff; 4) establishing a culture of inquiry, innovation and exploration; 5) establishing embedded systems for collecting and exchanging knowledge and learning; 6) learning with and from the external environment and larger learning system; and 7) modelling and growing learning leadership. The dimensions and underlying key characteristics are intended to provide practical guidance on how schools can transform themselves into a learning organisation and ultimately enhance student outcomes.
In response to on-going discussions on the relationship between international climate finance and development finance, this paper explores what enables effective international climate finance in the context of development co-operation. Through interviews, views were elicited from selected international climate finance stakeholders representing climate finance recipient and provider countries, as well as experts from international organisations and research institutions. Identified enabling conditions reveal common grounds and differences across stakeholder groups. This offers a possible starting point for further dialogue aiming to advance the international climate and development finance agendas in a harmonised manner.

Fueled by a burgeoning population, urbanisation and income growth, West African food demand is rapidly transforming, with striking increases in total quantities demanded, growing preference for convenience, diversification of diets towards more perishable products, and an increased concern for product quality. These changes provide great opportunities for the West African food system to increase production, value added, job creation and food security. Yet a number of structural and policy constraints continue to threaten the ability of West Africa to seize these opportunities. This paper analyses the key drivers of change and their implications on the various demands facing the food system. It then looks at how different elements of the food system respond to evolving demands, discusses the constraints to more effective responses, and finally considers some policy implications and key recommendations, particularly in the context of the ECOWAS-led efforts to develop and implement more effective regional agricultural policies.

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