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The Austrian economy has benefited substantially from the expansion of economic ties with Central and Eastern Europe, which has provided a significant boost to growth, productivity, competitiveness, profits and (more controversially) aggregate employment. Indeed, among the older EU member states, Austria has benefited the most from the transition of the Central and Eastern European countries from planned economies to market economies, and the subsequent entry into the EU of the ten new member states, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, in 2004. However, important segments of the population in Austria, and in particular low-skilled and semi-skilled workers in the manufacturing sector, appear to have been adversely affected by these developments. There is thus a need for policy measures to help those segments of the workforce that have had difficulty coping with growing competition from Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, more can be done to make Austria a more attractive location for highly skilled and well qualified expatriate workers and to maintain Vienna’s position as a central hub for multinationals operating in the region. These include, in particular, the need to strengthen eastern transportation links and to reduce to a minimum bureaucratic hurdles and red tape for foreign enterprises seeking to operate out of Vienna.

In the Australian desert, a new school has been built for an Aboriginal community, replacing their previously transient school services. The design took into account the difficult site limitations and the community's needs and traditional values.

The design and construction of nine schools has commenced in Australia using a Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) methodology. This is the first project in Australia where social infrastructure has been acquired in this way.

The Commonwealth Government of Australia introduced an accrual-based

outcomes and outputs budgeting and reporting framework in 1999-2000.

The framework seeks to focus public-sector decision-making and accountability

on three core issues:

• Outcomes: What influence the government (of the day) wishes to have on the

community;

• Outputs and administered items:1 How the government wishes to achieve that

influence; and

• Performance indicators: How the government and the community know whether

that influence is being achieved in an efficient and effective way.

SIGMA Brief 28 aims to give guidance to auditors dealing with public procurement processes. Based on audit experience, it examines the stages that are worth looking at and explains why. It highlights those aspects that are recommended to be considered in more detail. It also gives advice as to which documents the auditor is suggested to scrutinise in order to find evidence. Brief case studies, where available, and checklist questions for the auditor illustrate the main aspects. The Brief mainly concentrates on individual procurement procedures but concessions and public-private partnerships are also touched on at the end of the Brief.

Early years are a critical period for skill development. In this sense, the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) programmes have an important role in promoting children’s learning during this period. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of ECEC programmes by analysing the relationship between students’ ECEC attendance and their later academic proficiency using PISA 2015 data. PISA results show that across the OECD countries, students who had attended ECEC tend to have higher scores in academic proficiencies at the age of 15. However, these differences in academic proficiencies between those who attended ECEC versus those who did not attend are almost nil when students’ socio-economic status (SES) is considered. This relationship reflects differential access to learning opportunities for children from deprived contexts. Furthermore, results show that entering ECEC programmes earlier than the typical time is associated with lower proficiencies at the age of 15. Therefore, earlier entry to ECEC is not necessarily beneficial.

Learning benefits of ECEC provision vary considerably across PISA countries illustrating the importance of a country-specific policy context and the quality of their ECEC provision. The analyses of several quality indicators point out that the improved quality of ECEC programmes is associated with higher academic skills at later stages. These results highlight that mere attendance to ECEC programmes is not enough to ensure better academic performance. The quality of the educational provision, especially concerning those students from disadvantaged backgrounds, should be ensured.

Among 25-34 year-olds with a tertiary degree, the proportion of those who obtained at least a master’s or equivalent degree varies from 4% in Chile to 79% in the Slovak Republic. Tertiary attainment also varies across generations: while 49% of tertiary-educated 25-34 year-olds have a bachelor’s or equivalent degree as their highest educational attainment, this falls to 39% among 55-64 year-olds. Employment prospects tend to improve with tertiary attainment levels: the average employment rate of 25-34 year-olds with a doctorate is 88%, for those with a master’s or equivalent degree it is 84% and for those with at most a short-cycle or a bachelor’s degree it is around 80%. In some countries, however, increased tertiary attainment is not associated with improved employment prospects among 25-34 year-olds, except for doctorate holders. In other countries, short-cycle tertiary graduates are more likely to be employed than those with a bachelor’s degree.

• Across OECD countries, the median age students first graduated from university fell by 6 months between 2005 and 2011.
• The median age of first graduation ranges from around 22 in Belgium and the United Kingdom to over 27 in Iceland and Israel.
• The percentage of part-time students has increased from 19.8% in 2005 to 22.0% in 2011, suggesting that more flexible routes between study and work are slowly becoming more widespread.
• The percentage of older students (aged 30 and over) entering universities has remained constant at around 10%-11% on average between 2005 and 2011.

A growing number of countries in the OECD and beyond are moving toward asymmetric decentralisation, i.e. a differentiated assignment of competencies across subnational governments, for the same level of administration. While from the 1950s to the 1970s, asymmetric arrangements happened mostly at a regional level, the present trend seems to apply asymmetric decentralisation mostly in case of urban areas. Such trends may be further reinforced by the current global COVID-19 crisis, which has had highly asymmetric impact within countries. This paper aims to shed light on the various forms of asymmetric decentralisation. The study examines arguments from both economic research and policy practice angles. The paper highlights the pitfalls to avoid and good practices when implementing asymmetric decentralisation policies to reap their benefits and to minimise their costs.

A survey of the literature on asset price impacts on the real economy shows a much wider range of work on consumption and related wealth effects than on investment. The existence of wealth effects on consumption is little contested, but there remains an issue of whether different effects should hold between countries and across assets. There is less empirical work available on investment, partly reflecting poor results for Tobin?s Q, the user cost of capital and the financial accelerator. Panel investment functions for up to 23 OECD countries are estimated. Significant asset price effects from the financial accelerator and Tobin?s Q are found especially for the G7 countries as well as uncertainty effects as proxied by asset price volatility, but they only matter for the smaller OECD countries.

In this paper, the authors analyse the role of asset market prices in the formation of monetary policy with particular reference to equity markets, a concern for policy makers in the late 1990s. While asset prices have potentially valuable supplementary information for monetary policy makers, they are hard to interpret because of their inherent volatility. Dilemmas arise when asset price movements are large and there are no signs of inflation pressures. Waiting until speculative pressures run their course risks both contagion to other sectors and assets and potentially damaging fallout from a correction. Tightening monetary policy in these circumstances (perhaps to avoid potential fallout on other sectors) would be difficult to justify to the public. In the current situation of low inflation (late 1997), various valuation measures suggest that equity markets are over-valued in the United States, Canada and Italy. Other countries are either at more intermediate positions ...

This paper analyses two factors which may cause cyclically-adjusted budget balances to give a misleading picture of underlying fiscal trends. It first explores the implications of recent large asset-market related fluctuations in government revenues for the measurement of structural budget balances. And second, it reviews the impact of the increased recourse to stopgap “one-off” measures to control deficits. The results confirm that since the late 1990s revenues have been more buoyant than would have been warranted by the registered rate of nominal output growth and the impact of tax measures. The study suggests that from 1995 to 2000 the average contribution of “unwarranted” revenues to year-to-year changes in cyclically-adjusted budget positions ranged from negligible to around ½ per cent of GDP, the main countries affected being the United States, the United Kingdom, France and some Nordic countries. Conversely, the subsequent decline in tax receipts has been sharper than could ...

This paper lays out a framework for managing complex asset systems, such as road networks, with a view to optimising life-cycle value of the asset base. It is based on discussions at the International transport Forum Roundtable on Sustainable Road Funding held in Paris 25-26 October 20121 and includes inputs from the ITF working Group on Infrastructure Adaptation to Extreme Weather and Climate Change.

This paper assesses the design of the air pollution tax in conjunction with a stringency analysis of the emission concentration limits in the Czech Republic. The analysis draws upon a detailed database containing environmental reporting by industrial stationary sources. The assessment of the emission concentration limits focuses on analysing the shift of the statutory limits between 2013 and 2017 and the corresponding real-life measured concentration on individual source basis. It provides an assessment of stringency of the air protection instrument and also of the vintage differentiation applied in the form of transitional schemes. The stringency analysis of the emission concentration limits stringency is related to the air pollution tax relief provision.