Browse by: "2017"

Over the past decade, behavioural insights have helped make consumer policies more evidence-based and effective. This report examines how behavioural insights have been used by governments and other public policy organisations to develop and implement consumer policy initiatives, primarily through the use of experiments and surveys. Behavioural insights have informed enforcement actions, new regulations, consumer empowerment initiatives and consumer education. Behavioural insights provide grounds and justification on why governments need to take actions and, helping identify how the impact of behavioural biases on consumer choice can be mitigated, for example through effective labelling and information disclosures. The report also identifies challenges to applying behavioural insights to consumer policy, relating to the conduct and interpretation of behavioural experiments as well as organisational and stakeholder issues.

This paper highlights India’s unique services export led growth path. Observing that Indian business services have helped manufacturers all over the world to become more efficient and productive, it raises the question how Indian business services can do the same for local manufacturers and thus support the Make in India initiative. The paper also explores the potential for broadening the export base in services. The services sector that appears to have the largest prospect for unleashing the potential of both manufacturing and knowledge intensive business services is the telecommunications sector, particularly broadband internet services. In addition reforms in the distribution sector that enable multi-channel wholesale and retailing could facilitate the development of marketing channels for SME manufacturers both across the vast Indian market and abroad. Reforms in the logistics sector would further improve the competitiveness of local manufacturers producing time-sensitive goods including inputs to global value chains. Finally, competitiveness in knowledge-intensive services is obtained through knowledge sharing across borders. A prerequisite for broadening the export base in these sectors is openness to foreign professionals. The set of proposed recommendations emerging from this analysis underlines the importance of streamlining sector-level regulatory frameworks in all sectors 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 as well as down-stream manufacturers more competitive.

While an apprenticeship is potentially very beneficial to students, employers and economies, many countries face difficulties in encouraging companies to provide apprenticeship places, and individuals to enter apprenticeship programmes. To encourage companies to provide apprenticeships, the government, and sometimes social partners, promote apprenticeships through a wide range of incentives, including financial incentives, such as subsidies and tax breaks, and non-financial incentives, such as adjustments in apprenticeship design to make it more attractive to employers. While financial incentives are common, their effect is often modest and depends on the amount of financial support and allocation criteria. Schemes that target specific sectors and are supported by social partners tend to be more successful. However, non-financial measures, which are often less costly than financial incentives, can also be helpful in increasing the provision of apprenticeships and merit further consideration.

Norway is one of the top spenders on health care among OECD countries in per capita terms but much closer to the average when seen as a share of GDP. The question is to what extent these two key measures are compatible, and how Norway really measures up to other relevant high-income countries in health spending. In considering the latter, Norway allocates more to long-term care services than any other country. So how comparable are countries in the measurement of sectors such as long-term care and does this play a key role in determining overall spending estimates?
Delving further, how does spending on the key sector of somatic specialist health care compared to other countries? If too much is spent, there is a risk that there is an over-emphasis on hospitals compared to primary care. On the other hand if there are too little resources in hospitals, there may be an over-expectation from the sector. However, estimates of spending based on inpatient care still mask a number of organisational and accounting differences, requiring adjustments to be made to the underlying figures. The resulting figures provide a new insight into cross-country comparisons and trends of somatic hospital spending.
Finally, to determine what is explaining the different levels of spending, the appropriate use of international spatial deflators is discussed. Recent advances in the methodology to compile comparative price information for the health and hospital sectors are used to reveal to what extent spending across the comparator countries is the result of price or volume effects.

This paper assesses inequality in longevity across education and gender groups in 23 OECD countries around 2011. Data on mortality rates by age, gender, educationals attainment and for, 17 countries, cause of death, were collected from national sources, with similar treatment applied to all countries in order to derive comparable measures of longevity at age 25 and 65 by gender and education. These estimates show that, on average, the gap in life expectancy between high and low-educationed people is 8 years for men and 5 years for women at age 25 years, and 3.5 years for men and 2.5 years for women at age 65. Other measures of inequalities in longevity by education (such as country averages of age-standardised mortality rates and the slope index of inequality) do not significantly change the inequality ranking of countries relative to one based on life expectancy measures. While significant, differences in longevity between groups with low and high educational attainment account, on average, for around 10% of overall differences in ages of death. Cardio-vascular diseases are the first cause of death for all gender and education groups after age 65 years, and the first cause of mortality inequality between the high and low-education elderly.

Despite fulfilling a crucial role in the delivery of public services, the finance function of line ministries has received little attention both in the past and in the present. This paper will focus on the finance function in line ministries, explain why a strong finance function is of paramount importance in the current era of lean and compact government and identify the reforms that need to be implemented in order to make this possible.

This article examines the Irish experience of spending reviews and seeks to identify key lessons that should enhance the effectiveness of this process both in Ireland and in other OECD countries. Since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis, spending reviews have played an important role in Ireland’s efforts to restore expenditure policy to a more sustainable footing. However, the purpose of future reviews will move from improving the deficit position to ensuring all expenditure is considered when Government is making budget decisions. The purpose of spending reviews is to increase the fiscal space available to government for new, high priority, policies. By systematically examining baseline expenditure using available evidence and data, the increasing tendency to focus only on incremental improvements in expenditure can be countered. Spending reviews should be used to further embed the principles of expenditure efficiency and effectiveness into the wider budget process. This can be facilitated through extending the availability of relevant evaluations and performance information and ensuring such evaluations become central to the budgetary process.

The present work investigates the relationship between administrative fragmentation and regional per capita GDP growth rate, using a panel of OECD TL2 regions in the period 1996-2011. According to the fiscal decentralisation literature, fragmentation should enhance growth as local governments can implement policies that better match citizens’ needs, thus providing services and public goods in a more efficient way. The presence of many local governments, however, may result in overlapping functions, (dis)economies of scale, and uncoordinated policies.