Over the last decade, the space economy has seen significant shifts, welcoming new entrants and types of capital. Annual launch activity has increased, in large part thanks to the influx of private investment. This raises questions about the future development of the sector. Drawing on OECD insights within science, technology, and innovation, this policy paper examines public and private investment trends in the space economy and discusses how public policy decisions and instruments can contribute to attracting more and higher-quality private investment.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented global economic downturn, affecting productivity, business dynamics, and digital technology adoption. Using a comprehensive commercial database from Spiceworks Ziff Davis, this study analyses the firm-level drivers of digitalisation during the pandemic across 20 European countries. The findings show that a considerable share of firms introduced new digital technologies during the COVID-19 crisis. Notably, firms that were larger, more digitalised, and more productive before the pandemic were more likely to introduce new digital technologies in 2020 and 2021. Additionally, firms with pre-existing complementary technologies had a higher likelihood of adopting digital applications that gained momentum during the pandemic (such as digital commerce, collaborative software, cloud, and analytics). These patterns may increase polarisation among the best-performing firms and the rest of the business population. Public policy can play a key role in fostering an inclusive digital transformation in the post-pandemic era.

The choice and diversity of upper secondary education create great potential to respond to the needs of Indigenous learners, and high stakes at this level make it critical to promote learners' success. Having historically been marginalized in educational settings around the world, it is essential that Indigenous students receive a supportive environment and the resources to succeed at this level. This policy brief provides reflections on the topic of supporting Indigenous learners in upper secondary education from a Peer Learning Discussion hosted by the OECD’s Above and Beyond: Transitions in Upper Secondary Education project. In December 2021, the project organised an informal discussion with participants from New Zealand and two provinces in Canada (Alberta and Manitoba), focusing on the systems’ experiences of supporting Indigenous learners at this level. This policy brief presents a summary of insights shared during this informal discussion, as well as background on the issues participants raised.

Greening the economy entails jobs contracting in “high-polluting” economic activities and expanding in environment-friendly activities. Minimizing the corresponding transition costs is crucial to accelerate decarbonisation and reduce displacement costs for affected workers. Using individual-level labour force data for a large sample of European countries, this paper finds that the shares of green and high-polluting jobs remained approximately stable between 2009 and 2019, hinting at a slow or yet-to-come green transition in labour markets. Green and high-polluting jobs are unequally distributed across socioeconomic groups: women are under-represented in both green and high-polluting jobs, while green jobs are associated with higher educational attainment, and high-polluting jobs with lower educational attainment. Equally important from a policy perspective, the results show that high-polluting jobs are concentrated in rural areas. These results are confirmed by analyzing labour market transitions: for instance, while women are more likely to transition from study to job, they are significantly less likely to get a green job. Overall, the results suggest that well designed and targeted policies are needed to support efficient and inclusive labour market transitions in the greening economy: to minimize scarring effects for displaced workers, help individuals’ upskilling and reskilling, and support the matching between workers and jobs in higher demand.

This paper develops a novel classification of high-polluting occupations for a large sample of European countries. Unlike previous efforts in the literature, the classification exploits country-level data on air polluting emission intensity by industry. The country-level data allows to capture important cross-country differences, due to differences in technology and in production focus. Applying the new classification to European Labour Force Survey data shows that, on average across the countries covered, about 4% of workers are employed in high-polluting jobs, ranging from 9% in Czechia and the Slovak Republic to around 2% in Austria. These shares do not exhibit any clear decreasing trend over the past decade. High-polluting jobs are unequally distributed, being over-represented among men, workers with lower and medium educational attainment and those living in rural areas.

Gender inequalities in Australia have steadily declined, but remain particularly visible in the labour market. Women in Australia have lower employment rates, hourly wages and hours worked than their male counterparts. Childbirth is particularly disruptive for their labour market experience. Reforms to the tax and benefits system, childcare and parental leave arrangements are all needed to reduce the barriers to female labour participation of mothers. At the same time, ensuring the adequacy of unemployment benefits will support the living standards of many low-income women given that they have become an increasing share of recipients. Single mothers face particularly high poverty risk and would also benefit from more robust arrangements around child support payments from non-custodial parents.

Australia has committed to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and more recently outlined a more ambitious intermediate target for emission reductions by 2030. However, achieving these targets will be challenging given a historical reliance on coal generation and the presence of significant mining and agriculture sectors. It will require a rapid transformation of the electricity grid, significant emissions reductions in highly-polluting sectors such as industry and agriculture, and sufficient offsets generated by “negative emissions” technologies and practices to counterbalance any emissions that cannot be fully eliminated. At the same time, Australia is particularly vulnerable to the physical impacts of climate change, as the driest inhabited continent on the planet with the majority of the population living on the coasts. Further significant reforms are required to meet the emission reduction goals, support the reallocation of workers and adapt to climate change.

Japan faces serious demographic headwinds. Under current fertility, employment and immigration rates, the population would fall by 45% by 2100 and employment by 52%. Given the challenges of a shrinking and ageing population, the government has pledged to “create a children-first economic society and reverse the birth rate decline”. One priority is to strengthen the weak financial position of youth, which leads many to delay or forgo marriage and children. Making it easier to combine paid work and family is also critical so that women are not forced to choose between a career and children. Policies should also cut the cost of raising children, the key obstacle to couples achieving their desired number of children. Given the challenge of reversing fertility trends, Japan needs to prepare for a low-fertility future by raising productivity and employment, particularly among women and older people. Breaking down labour market dualism, which disproportionately affects youth, women and older people, is a priority. Abolishing the right of firms to set a mandatory retirement age (usually at 60) and raising the pension eligibility age would also promote employment. Foreign workers are helping ease labour shortages, but more needs to be done to attract foreign talent. A comprehensive approach is needed to raise fertility, the employment rates of women and older persons and inflows of foreign workers.

Fertilisers are crucial components of food systems, with impacts beyond agricultural markets. This study utilises the OECD-FAO Aglink-Cosimo model to examine the intricate interplay between fertiliser markets, policies, and their repercussions on agricultural markets, food security, and environmental sustainability over the medium term. Two distinct scenario analyses reveal significant insights. The first scenario shows that while short-term disruptions in fertiliser supply can be mitigated by existing stocks, prolonged deficits will increase global food prices by up to 6%, posing long-term threats to agriculture. In the second scenario, the removal of fertiliser subsidies in India leads to reduced domestic use, resulting in decreased agricultural production and exports coupled with increased imports. Although this will cause a modest 0.8% increase in global food prices, it will substantially cut agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by 7 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, highlighting the pivotal role of domestic policies in attaining global environmental sustainability goals.

This Education Spotlight, the second in a series of three, presents key lessons and inspiring examples of policy and practice to inform how traditional higher education programmes, like bachelor’s degrees, can effectively cultivate competencies crucial for green and digital innovation. The Spotlight was prepared by the OECD Higher Education Policy Team as part of the Education and Innovation Practice Community (EIPC), an action of the European Union’s New European Innovation Agenda, flagship 4 on “Fostering, attracting and retaining deep tech talent”. EIPC seeks to bring together peers from policy and practice to advance understanding of the competencies that can trigger and shape innovation for the digital and green transitions, and the mechanisms through which higher education can contribute to their development in secondary education, higher education, and adult upskilling and reskilling.

People’s ability to access essential services is key to their labour market and social inclusion. An important dimension of accessibility is physical accessibility, but little cross-country evidence exists on how close people live to the services facilities they need. This paper helps to address this gap, focusing on three types of essential services: Public Employment Services, primary schools and Early Childhood Education and Care. It collects and maps data on the location of these services for a selection of OECD countries and links them with data on population and transport infrastructure. This allows to compute travel times to the nearest service facility and to quantify disparities in accessibility at the regional level. The results highlight substantial inequalities in accessibility of essential services across and within countries. Although large parts of the population can easily reach these services in most countries, some people are relatively underserved. This is particularly the case in non-metropolitan and low-income regions. At the same time, accessibility seems to be associated with the potential demand for these services once accounting for other regional economic and demographic characteristics.

In 2020, the Province of Zuid-Holland set up the “Strategy Circular Zuid-Holland: Accelerating Together”, with the commitment of reducing the use of primary raw materials by 50% by 2030 and to reach full circularity by 2050. New challenges in terms of value chain disruptions and increased scarcity of critical materials and opportunities led the province to develop several initiatives and collaborating platforms to advance towards a circular economy. This case study provides ways forward on how to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy through the OECD 3Ps framework: People and firms, Policies and Places.

The Eurométropole of Strasbourg (EMS) started its circular journey in 2010 with a focus on waste prevention, followed by the development of its “Circular Economy Roadmap” in 2019, which aimed to integrate circular economy principles into EMS' public procurement and operations. The EMS is currently in the process of updating the Roadmap to address challenges related to regulation, co-ordination across the 33 municipalities and financing. This case study provides ways forward on how to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy through the OECD 3Ps framework: People and firms, Policies and Places.

Die Ansichten von Patient*innen und Bürger*innen und ihr aktives Engagement sind entscheidend, um die Sicherheit und Personenzentriertheit der Gesundheitssysteme zu steigern. Auch im Hinblick auf die gemeinsame Konzeption der Gesundheitsdienstleistungen und Realisierung guter Gesundheitsergebnisse sowie den Aufbau von Vertrauen in die Gesundheitssysteme sind sie ein wesentlicher Faktor. Patient*innen, Familien, Versorgende und Bürger*innen können zur Verbesserung der Patientensicherheit auf allen Ebenen der Gesundheitssysteme beitragen: von der klinischen, lokalen, institutionellen Ebene (z. B. Krankenhaus, Pflegeheim) über die Gemeinschaftsebene (z. B. Primärversorgung, häusliche Pflege) bis zur nationalen Ebene. Der vorliegende Bericht, der sechste in der Reihe zur Ökonomie der Patientensicherheit, erfasst 1. die wirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Patienteneinbeziehung zur Förderung der Patientensicherheit, 2. die Ergebnisse einer Pilot-Datensammlung zur Messung von Sicherheitserfahrungen aus Patientensicht und 3. den Status der diesbezüglichen Initiativen in 21 Ländern, die an einer Snapshot-Umfrage teilgenommen haben. Darüber hinaus enthält er Empfehlungen zur Förderung einer stärkeren Patienteneinbeziehung in die Patientensicherheit.

Supply chain disruptions, related to natural events or geopolitical tensions, have in recent years prompted policy makers to identify potential vulnerabilities related to critical trade dependencies. These are commercial links that could potentially impose significant economic or societal harm, be a source of coercion, a risk to national security, or disrupt strategic activities. Using three complementary methodologies — detailed trade data analysis, input-output data techniques, and computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling — this paper examines the nature and evolution of trade dependencies between the OECD countries and major non-OECD economies (MNOE). It shows that global production has become increasingly concentrated at the product level, with China representing 15% of import dependencies in strategic products for OECD countries in 2020-21 compared to 4% in 1997-99. The methodologies used in this paper unanimously demonstrate a high degree of trade interdependency between OECD and MNOE countries. The current debate on “de-risking” international trade, therefore, needs to carefully consider the possible costs and benefits of different policy choices.

This report examines the work of the business ombudsman institutions of Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan in order to identify their successful practices, as well as gaps that can be addressed through mutual learning and knowledge sharing. It reviews key aspects of the work of these institutions, including the legal framework for their operations, independence and accountability safeguards, funding mechanisms and operational procedures. Based on the analysis, the report offers a number of recommendations that can help improve existing institutions and also be useful to countries that are considering establishing them.