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This working paper was prepared as part of the OECD thematic review Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work, www.oecd.org/edu/equity. The project provides evidence on the policies that are effective to reduce school failure by improving low attainment and reducing dropout, and proactively supports countries in promoting reform. The project builds on the conceptual framework developed in the OECD’s No More Failures: Ten Steps to Equity in Education (2007). Austria, Canada (Manitoba, Ontario, Québec and Yukon), Czech Republic, France, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden took part in this project. This working paper is part of a series of papers prepared for the thematic review Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work covering the topics of policies to reduce dropout and in-school practices to reduce school failure. These report have been used as background material for the final comparative report Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Schools and Students (OECD, 2012), which gives evidence on the policy levers that can help overcome school failure and reduce inequities in OECD education systems. It focuses on the reasons why investing in overcoming school failure -early and up to upper secondary- pays off, on alternatives to specific system level policies that are currently hindering equity, and on the actions to be taken at school level, in particular in low performing disadvantaged schools.

This report provides a summary of the literature on the relationship between trade and informality in developing countries, with an emphasis on the BRIICS. While main conclusions of the ILO and WTO (2009) literature review are highlighted, the report focuses on additional and more recent literature. The report investigates four key issues in the literature on trade and informal labour markets: (1) theoretical predictions for trade and informality; (2) how trade liberalisation affects informal labour markets; (3) how trade flows affect the informal economy; and (4) what implications informality has for trade and growth. The main conclusion from this review is that empirical evidence on the relationship between trade and informality is complex and context-specific. Several of the empirical analyses reviewed in this report suggest that this variation is due to country-specific characteristics (in particular, labour market rigidity, capital mobility, level of economic development and heterogeneity of the informal workforce). Variation can also be partly explained by the fact that different methodologies are used and different measures of informality are employed across studies.

1. During the 1980s, following the Mexican payments crisis of August 1982, a number of debt "plans" and "strategies" have been introduced, but overall progress in resolving the situation has been slow. This paper results from a project to investigate the relationship between macroeconomic developments in OECD countries and those in debtor countries. The aim is to develop tools that can help to throw light on the importance of international linkages, including those between OECD and debtor countries, in order to understand better why many of the hopes and expectations of the various debt plans have not been realised.
2. This paper presents a set of models for Latin America (DEMOD) that can be used to analyze the impact of the world macroeconomy on the economies of Latin America; these have been designed to focus in particular on growth and debt servicing capacity and to trace the development of creditworthiness indicators. In addition, debt accounting models for the highly indebted ...

“On the day we heard that there was agreement to establish an upper secondary school in the region, every house in Snaefellsnes flew the Icelandic flag,” explained one parent in the first workshop to develop the Snaefellsnes Upper Secondary School. The new school in this rural Icelandic region will be a “meeting place to learn” for students aged 16 to 20.

The Kyoto Protocol covers emissions of a range of greenhouse gases. Yet, most attempts to quantify the economic impact of implementing the Protocol’s emission targets for the period 2008-12 have focused exclusively on CO2 emissions. This paper extends previous OECD analysis confined to CO2 alone so as to cover also emissions of methane and nitrous oxide. The paper concludes that the economic costs of implementing the targets in the Kyoto Protocol are lower than suggested by an analysis confined to CO2 alone. However, over the longer term, when larger cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are required in order to have any material effect on climate, most abatement will likely have to come from CO2 and the inclusion of other gases in the analysis may not substantially alter estimates of economic costs ...

This technical paper presents the complete technical specification of the current version of the RE-GEM (Regional and Environmental General Equilibrium Model) for India. The document lists all the key structural and behavioural equations, providing a justification for the chosen model specification. In addition, a complete description is provided of the estimation methods and the sources of the Indian data used in the model; an aggregated version of the Indian regional Social Accounting Matrix we constructed is appended to this document. The object is to inform in the most detailed way possible researchers interested in building on the OECD’s modelling effort, and to provide a useful tool for informing the debate on the economics of environmental policy in developing countries ...

Masking methods for the safe dissemination of microdata consist of distorting the original data while preserving a pre-defined set of statistical properties in the microdata. For continuous variables, available methodologies rely essentially on matrix masking and in particular on adding noise to the original values, using more or less refined procedures depending on the extent of information that one seeks to preserve. Almost all of these methods make use of the critical assumption that the original datasets follow a normal distribution and/or that the noise has such a distribution. This assumption is, however, restrictive in the sense that few variables follow empirically a Gaussian pattern: the distribution of household income, for example, is positively skewed, and this skewness is essential information that has to be considered and preserved. This paper addresses these issues by presenting a simple multiplicative masking method that preserves skewness of the original data while offering a sufficient level of disclosure risk control. Numerical examples are provided, leading to the suggestion that this method could be well-suited for the dissemination of a broad range of microdata, including those based on administrative and business records.

Brisbane Girls Grammar School’s new Creative Learning Centre was conceived to group arts studies which were previously scattered across the campus and to serve all students as a meeting place and technology hub. The building is specifically designed to provide the most flexible and innovative environment for teenaged girls, having special regard for the way girls learn and interact socially. The unique design also helps ensure protection from Brisbane’s hot and humid environment.

The Port of Koper is the single national port of Slovenia and has been growing fast in recent years. It is expected that the existing rail link to and from the port will reach capacity in a few years. A new additional track, involving a tunnel on a separate alignment, has been proposed as a solution. The ITF was asked to perform a broad risk analysis of the project and investigate options for the delivery of the project through a PPP. Within this broad scope the ITF addressed several questions: would the potential for growing traffic at the port justify added capacity; what are the options for increasing capacity on the existing track to buy time; is the cost of the new rail link adequately estimated; what would be the best way to enable private participation in the project?

The newly-built library at Ireland’s Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) is innovative in design, responds to environmental conditions and identifies the campus with its location.

This paper proposes a new measure of skills mismatch that combines information about skill proficiency, self-reported mismatch and skill use. The theoretical foundations underling this measure allow identifying minimum and maximum skill requirements for each occupation and to classify workers into three groups, the well-matched, the under-skilled and the over-skilled. The availability of skill use data further permit the computation of the degree of under and overusage of skills in the economy. The empirical analysis is carried out using the first wave of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) and the findings are compared across skill domains, labour market status and countries.

Growing international migration and diverse characteristics of migrant populations make internationally comparable high-quality data on migrants essential. Regular update of these data is crucial to capture the changes in size and composition of migrant populations. This document presents the first results of the update of the Database on Immigrants in OECD Countries (DIOC) for 2010/11. It describes immigrant and emigrant populations by socio-demographic characteristics and labour market outcomes in the OECD, and shows their evolution in the past decade. It also provides updated emigration rates and brain drain figures...

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) began to use a band-pass filter, based on the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HPband-pass filter), to calculate the composite leading indicators (CLIs) in December2008. Other than the filter adopted by the OECD, there is an alternative HPband-pass filter. This note examines whether the application of these two alternative HPband-pass filters in the calculations of the OECD’s CLIs lead to negligible differences.
JEL Classification: E32; C22
Keywords: Hodrick-Prescott band-pass filter; Composite leading indicators.© beawolf - Fotolia.com

International NGOs want official donors to co-ordinate and harmonise their activities and to become more accountable to recipients. International NGOs are donors in their own right, and their own adherence to aid effectiveness principles leaves much to be desired. International NGOs need a Paris-like Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The Western Development Plan has aimed at narrowing the income gap between the sparsely populated and under-developed West and the more prosperous and faster-growing East. The bulk of the expenditure, however, has been on large capital-intensive projects rather than on education and other social spending. More emphasis on education would help reduce the income gap, since human capital is a key determinant of income. Government policies to improve conditions in rural areas nationwide have involved a substantial reduction in the burden of regressive taxes and fees. Welfare assistance has also evolved: a minimum living allowance has been introduced in urban and more recently in rural areas, but it has not reduced poverty that much, not least because of how it is administered. Moreover, the financing of this allowance ought to rely more on national solidarity and its delivery needs to be better co-ordinated with that of other social benefits. A set of new indicators of nationwide inequality, based on household survey data, suggests that overall inequality has ceased to increase in recent years, and may even have inched down. Alternative measures of income inequality across provinces show that, if migration is taken into account, disparities are markedly less, and have tended to decline somewhat in recent years. Even so, geographical inequality remains very high by international standards. It reflects intra- more than inter-provincial differences, pointing to persistent, if diminishing, labour market segmentation.

This paper discusses two variants of the accessibility paradigm for transport planning. The extensive paradigm aims to radically overhaul transport planning to incorporate issues of environmental quality, urban sprawl, safety and health. Its adoption is unlikely in the medium term and raises questions about the role of the transport planner. The limited paradigm calls for transport planning to adopt accessibility indicators in place of mobility indicators. However this will not meet the underlying goals of the accessibility critique. A change in the focus of transport planning is needed from the functioning of transport networks to the service that differently placed people receive from the transport system.

Successful deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is critically dependent on comprehensive policy support. While policy plays an important role in the deployment of many low-carbon technologies, it is especially crucial for CCS. This is because, in contrast to renewable energy or applications of energy efficiency, CCS generates no revenue, nor other market benefits, so long as there is no price on CO2 emissions. It is both costly to install and, once in place, has increased operating costs. Effective, well-designed policy support is essential in overcoming these barriers and the subsequent deployment of CCS technology. This guide for policy makers aims to assist those involved in designing national and international policies around CCS. It covers development of CCS from its early stages through to wide-scale deployment of the technology. The focus is both on incentives for conventional fossil-fuel CCS and for bioenergy with CCS (BECCS).

This paper reviews the accuracy of OECD projections over the 1982-1987 period. It is shown that, although the evolution of the economic climate was correctly projected, projection errors for economic activity and inflation varied significantly both through the period under consideration and between countries. But the average absolute error in GNP over the entire 1982/87 period was less than 1 percentage point. The biggest errors were made in the first half of the period and were more important for the smaller countries. An attempt is made to assess the likely impact of differences between assumed and realised economic policies, energy prices and exchange rates on the size and direction of the projection errors ...