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This paper uses data from PISA and the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to examine the evolution of socio-economic and gender disparities in literacy and numeracy proficiency between the ages of 15 and 27 in the sample of countries that took part in both studies. Socio-economic disparities are exacerbated between the age of 15 and 27 and the socio-economic gap in proficiency widens, particularly among low-achievers. Gender disparities in literacy at age 15 are marked across the performance spectrum but are particularly wide among low-performers. However, by age 24 there is no difference in the literacy proficiency of males and females. The gender gap in numeracy at age 15 is quantitatively small when compared with the gap in literacy, although it is more pronounced among high achievers. The paper canvasses possible explanations for the trends observed and discusses implications for policy and practice, including the extent to which the lack of an established link between PISA and PIAAC limits the analytical value of the two studies.
Results from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) confirm that mastery of the host country’s language is essential if immigrants are to integrate successfully into their new communities and into the host country’s labour market. Given these findings, host countries could design and implement policies to provide language training to immigrants as soon as feasible after they arrive. This is particularly important for immigrant children, who can then attend school with their native-born peers.
This discussion paper presents an introduction to safety management systems (SMS) as they apply to transportation organisations across modes and industries, and provides a broad overview of SMS and its processes, activities and tools. The discussion is grounded on conceptual foundations, but does not neglect the practical aspects of SMS implementation. The Discussion Paper draws to an extent – but not exclusively – on the experience of international civil aviation and the urban transit industry in the United States. The contents, however, are generic and presented in a fashion commensurate to the nature of SMS as a management system, the principles, processes and activities of which cut across inter-mode and inter-industry boundaries.
Despite the obvious benefits derived from education, governments face difficult trade-offs when balancing the share of public and private contributions to education.
Understanding how private expenditure is sourced, through public transfers or through private funds, can make a difference in enabling access to education and provide insights into how the cost of education shifts between public and private sources of funding over time.
- Local governments are the main contributors to the financing of early childhood education, particularly with regards to core goods and services such as staff salaries and school buildings.
- Households and other private entities bear a greater share of the cost than in other levels of education, particularly for ancillary services such as meals, school health services and transport.
- Public expenditure on educational institutions, transfers and subsidies to the private sector, and the way funds are allocated, can help increase participation in early childhood education.
- Increased spending on early childhood education does not always translate into higher enrolment, as funds may be used to improve the quality of learning, through raising teachers’ salaries, investing more in school facilities or prioritising a smaller number of teachers per student.
Of the OECD countries that participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Turkey has one of the lowest levels of performance and the highest rates of improvement in PISA scores between 2003 and 2012. New evidence presented in this paper suggests that existing accounts have underestimated both progress and inequity in Turkey because they did not take into account the large proportion of 15-16 year-olds that are ineligible for the PISA sampling frame, either because they are no longer in school or because they are severely delayed. Using Turkey’s Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for 2003, 2008 and 2013 we show that the proportion of 15-16 year-olds that were eligible for the PISA sample in Turkey has nearly doubled from 45% in PISA 2003, to 80% in PISA 2012. By combining DHS data on access/attainment and PISA survey data on learning outcomes we show that: (1) the improvement in the percentage of 15-16 year-olds reaching Level 2 in PISA (functional literacy and functional numeracy) is up to twice as large as that reflected in official PISA reports, (2) the gap in functional literacy rates between rich and poor youth in 2012 is 2.3 times as large as was previously thought, and (3) contrary to earlier research the gap between rich and poor has not declined between 2003 and 2012. The paper emphasises the importance of accounting for sample eligibility and representivity when making inter-country and inter-temporal comparisons using international assessment data, particularly for developing countries with expanding education systems.
The United Kingdom is preparing a modern industrial strategy to boost labour productivity across the whole country and to narrow regional gaps in living standards. This raises the question of the optimal allocation of scarce resources in meeting these targets. This study identifies industrial strengths of each region and scope to boost regional productivity through the channel of higher capital intensity. Overall regional investment ratios appear weakly linked to regional productivity, but the sectoral composition of regions and their type of investment are more important determinants. Each region has productivity leaders, but the concentration of such firms is the highest in the south of England. Differences in the representation of the most productive firms in regions are strongly related to differences in regional productivity. The empirical methodology quantifies the productivity effects of raising the capital intensity in each sector-region, focusing on viable firms falling behind the national productivity frontier in all but the finance and insurance sectors over 1995-2014. To enhance labour productivity of lagging regions, the industrial strategy should promote the catch up of firms with the national best performers in services sectors, in particular knowledge intensive services such as ICT and business services, but also wholesale and retail trade. This finding is consistent with the UK’s leading global position in high value-added services sectors. The type of investment matters: boosting research and development in the manufacturing sector in some lagging regions would also be effective in stimulating productivity. Manufacturing investment cannot be a substitute to investment in services given the small size of the manufacturing sector and its high exposure to competition from rapidly emerging global hubs. However, this study does not quantify the effects of skills, the benefits of greater industrial diversification and the positive impact that larger cities would have on agglomeration effects.
The persistence of social inequities in education – the fact that children of wealthy and highly educated parents tend to do better in school than children from less privileged families – is often seen as a difficult-to-reverse feature of education systems. Yet countries across the world share the goal of minimising any adverse impact of students’ socio-economic status on their performance in school. PISA shows that, rather than assuming that inequality of opportunity is set in stone, school systems can become more equitable over a relatively short time.
Knowledge transfer between industry and science is fundamental to innovation. There are important differences across scientific disciplines and sectors of activity in that, for instance, the financial and pharmaceutical sectors have different demands for science inputs. This paper reviews the data sources and associated methodologies available to measure different types of science-industry interaction. It applies these insights to re-assess the contributions of social sciences to industry and the disciplinary needs of the ICT sector. The paper finds that commonly used methodologies fail to shed light on a number of important industry-science interaction channels, and introduce biases in assessing connections. Using new evidence from labour force and university graduate surveys can help to some extent. The paper shows how these additional data allow to better capture the contributions of social scientists and the complexity of disciplinary demands of the digital economy. However, new data sources and methods should be further explored.
On average across OECD countries, almost one in four students – whether boy or girl – expects to work
in an occupation that requires further science training beyond compulsory education. This brief highlights the kinds of science careers 15-year-olds anticipate for themselves in the future.
High-performing countries use various mechanisms to select the best candidates to the teaching profession. In Finland, Hong-Kong (China), Macao (China) and Chinese Taipei, students who wish to enter teacher-training programmes must pass a competitive entry examination. In Japan, teaching graduates must pass a competitive examination to start teaching and in Singapore, they must complete a probation period. These requirements, however, are also found among some low-performing countries suggesting that early selection, while important, is not enough to ensure a highly qualified teaching force.
Across OECD countries, the proportion of fully certified teachers has a positive, albeit modest association with student performance in PISA.
In countries that performed above the OECD average in science, at least 80% of the students are in schools that invite specialists to conduct teacher training or organise in-service workshops for teachers or where teachers cooperate with each other. This is higher, on average, than what is observed among other countries.
Globalisation and digital technologies have made financial services and products more widely accessible and at the same time more complex to handle. Responsibility for investing in higher education or planning for retirement is increasingly assumed by individuals. Young people are now more likely to encounter situations where they need to set their spending priorities, be aware of new types of fraud, know that some items that they want to buy will incur ongoing costs, and be alert that some purchasing offers are simply too good to be true.
Financial literacy performance is strongly correlated with performance in mathematics and reading. Students should be helped to make the most of what they learn in subjects taught in compulsory education, which could also be complemented with more specific financial literacy content. Fostering the development of financial literacy skills in school could also be a way to offer students learning opportunities beyond those provided by parents and peers, to help overcome socio-economic inequalities, and to expose students to more balanced messages than those they might receive through media and advertising.
Although girls and boys perform similarly in the PISA science assessment at age 15, girls are less likely than boys to envision a career in science and engineering, even in countries where they outperform them.
Current gender disparities in the labour market will not be addressed by the inflow of new graduates: in all OECD and partner countries, women significantly outnumber men in education while men largely outnumber women in engineering, manufacturing and construction in both fields of study and the labour market.
Male-dominated fields of study such as engineering, manufacturing and construction have high employment rates but also the greatest difference between the employment rates of men and women.
This paper estimates agglomeration benefits across five OECD countries, and represents the first empirical analysis that combines evidence on agglomeration benefits and the productivity impact of metropolitan governance structures, while taking into account the potential sorting of individuals across cities. The comparability of results in a multi-country setting is supported through the use of a new internationally-harmonised definition of cities based on economic linkages rather than administrative boundaries. In line with the literature, the analysis confirms that city productivity increases with city size but finds that cities with fragmented governance structures tend to have lower levels of productivity. This effect is mitigated by the existence of a metropolitan governance body.
The Sahel and the Sahara are faced with exceptional political instability involving a combination of rebellions, jihadist insurgencies, coups d’état, protest movements and illegal trafficking. The backdrop to this accumulated violence is a globalised security environment, which blurs the traditional lines between what is local and global, military and civilian, domestic and international, politics and identity. The purpose of this paper is to analyse these patterns of violence. The first section presents the geographic distribution and development over time of the main sources of violence in North and West Africa before examining the events behind the increase in political violence in the Sahel and the Sahara. The second section analyses the patterns of violence, and focuses on the geographic scales thereof and the strategies of the warring parties. In its conclusion, the paper highlights the need to strengthen regional co-operation, restore the legitimacy of governments, and establish inclusive governance solutions in conflict zones.
This note describes a new database on innovative start-ups and companies, called Crunchbase, with a focus on its potential for economic and managerial research. Crunchbase is rapidly being discovered by scholars from different fields. It has notably already informed studies on specific sectors as well as studies of networks in the start-up ecosystem. This note first describes the contents of Crunchbase and then reviews academic research that has used it. We further suggest that many more valuable avenues for economic and managerial research can be opened through the combination of Crunchbase with selected supplementary data sources and provide two such examples.