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Over the next decade, a growing proportion of young adults are expected to attain tertiary education, with China and India leading the way – in particular in the fast-growing and highly relevant fields of STEM. Nonetheless, while women in OECD and G20 countries are expected to experience a greater increase in tertiary attainment than men, they may continue to lag behind in STEM, where they have been consistently under-represented. The challenge for the near future will be to ensure that educational systems are able to provide tertiary degrees that are both of high quality and relevance, in an equitable and inclusive manner.
Using micro-data from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), this paper seeks to answer how age, gender and childbirth are reflected in literacy proficiency, employment prospects and pay, and to which extent labour market outcomes are determined by these demographic profiles rather than education, skills and experience. It finds that literacy skills and tertiary education, objective measures of skills, which are highly correlated with employment and productivity in most OECD countries, do not significantly affect the likelihood of employment in Korea. Work experience and educational level are highly correlated with pay. Age, gender and parenthood are strongly correlated with both pay and employment. The weak link between objective skills and labour market outcomes points to a misallocation of human capital and likely a substantial loss of productivity.
Mark-ups can provide valuable information on competitive pressures in various sectors of the economy, reflecting pressures stemming from rules of conduct imposed by regulators as well as those arising from such factors as trade and FDI or increasing consumer demands in terms of price and quality. This study estimates mark-ups for services industries in European OECD members and its novelty is that it i) allows for non-constant returns to scale, ii) jointly estimates mark-ups for all sectors and in all countries and iii) estimates mark-ups at a detailed level of sectoral disaggregation. The estimation is done for the period 1993-2006 and uses firm level data of the Amadeus database. In general, the estimated mark-ups are higher for professional services, real estate, renting and utilities, while they tend to be substantially lower for construction, computer services, retail and wholesale trade and catering. There is also large variation across countries in terms of the sizes of the estimated mark-ups. Competitive pressures according to these mark-ups should be large in the United Kingdom and most Scandinavian countries, and relatively small in Central European countries, Sweden and Italy.
In 2020 and 2021, schooling, like many other aspects of life, has been heavily affected by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. During periods of school closure, education systems and schools have often been quick to organise remote support for home-based learning. But several observers have questioned the effectiveness of these schooling surrogates, either in general or for particular types of students. Initial data from national assessments confirm that the results of many students who experienced school closures (particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds) lag behind those of similar students in previous school years.
Learning losses and gains are often compared to the typical learning progression observed in normal times over a year of schooling. This paper shows how international data can be used to investigate learning losses and gains over a school year.
This paper quantifies the learning gain that accrues to 15‑year-old students over one year of schooling in 18 countries and economies, where the cohort eligible to sit the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)ISA test overlaps with two distinct school cohorts. School-entry regulations are used as an exogenous source of variation for grade levels in an instrumental- variables framework. The focus on the joint effect of schooling and age, together with (local) linearity assumptions, make it possible to account for differences in school-starting age across students who are expected to be in different grades. On average, students’ test scores increase by about one-fifth of a standard deviation over a school year. While estimates of the grade gain for individual countries and economies come with wide confidence intervals, this study also shows the annual learning gain of students around the age of 15 tends to be larger in high-income countries compared to middle-income countries.
OECD countries face the multiple challenges of rapidly ageing societies with the associated rise in chronic diseases and the ever-present threat from new or evolving communicable diseases. This is within the context of seeking better value for money from the health sector. While a growing body of evidence shows that many health promotion and disease prevention measures can improve health outcomes at relatively low cost, less has been documented – in an internationally comparable way – on how much countries actually invest in such activities and the drivers of prevention spending over the years. This is particularly pertinent in the context of fiscal sustainability and tight public budgets.
Using newly available data from across OECD countries, this study examines the differences in spending on prevention both at an aggregate and detailed level. This analysis brings a fresh perspective and raises questions as to the optimal resource allocations within the sector. Time series data is also scrutinised in conjunction with collated policy and public health developments from a number of countries to try to identify some of the drivers behind the observed prevention spending trends. In doing so, directions for further improvement in the underlying data as well as policy implications are discussed.
For the first time, the 2015 round of PISA collected data on students’ exposure to bullying. These data show that bullying is widespread. On average across OECD countries, around 11% of students reported that they are frequently (at least a few times per month) made fun of, 8% reported that they are frequently the object of nasty rumours in school, and 7% reported that they are frequently left out of things.
Being bullied can negatively affect academic achievement because it influences students’ capacity to focus on academic tasks. Schools where the incidence of bullying is high by international standards (more than 10% of students are frequently bullied) score 47 points lower in science, on average, than schools where bullying is less frequent (schools where less than 5% of students are frequently bullied). These relationships suggest that bullying can both stem from and may exacerbate students’ disengagement with school and underperformance.
Log files from computer-based assessment can help better understand respondents’ behaviours and cognitive strategies. Analysis of timing information from PIAAC reveals large differences in the time participants take to answer assessment items, as well as large country differences in the share of respondents that spent the minimum amount of time necessary to understand an item. These differences in the degree of effort exerted by respondents provide a useful complement to the analysis of international skills differences.
Between 2012 and 2022, the literacy proficiency of the working-age population in the countries that took part in the Survey of Adult Skills is set to improve, mainly driven by the relatively low proficiency of the cohorts who will reach 65 between now and 2022 and the much higher literacy skills among the incoming age group. The participating countries are thus reaping the distant rewards of their investment in education since the 1970s. What these data show is that high quality schooling alone will not be enough to raise the quality of the workforce nearly as quickly as skills requirements are rising. Governments therefore need to redouble their efforts to make lifelong and lifewide learning a reality for all.
Decreasing class sizes, even by as little as one student, comes with a price tag. It is possible to “pay” for this increase by compensating with one of the other factors influencing the salary cost of teachers: lower teachers’ salaries, less required instruction time for students or more teaching time for teachers. Across OECD countries there seems to be a trade-off between smaller class sizes and higher teachers’ salaries, thus prompting the question of which policy leads to the best student outcomes. The evidence points to the importance of ensuring high-quality teaching above all else. Although higher salaries can help achieve that, several other factors will also influence the quality of the teaching force and of the country’s educational system as whole.
Greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation actions will need to be accelerated and scaled up at both national and sub-national levels in order to meet the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement. National governments can play an important role in enabling GHG mitigation actions by non-Party stakeholders (NPS), and in enhancing the interaction between national policies and NPS actions. This paper explores actions national governments could take to facilitate NPS mitigation action in two sub-sectors with large mitigation potential and where NPS play a key role in the successful implementation of mitigation activities. These sectors are renewable electricity generation and procurement in cities and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in sub-national jurisdictions. This paper outlines some institutional, regulatory, financial and technical barriers faced by NPS in implementing GHG mitigation activities in these sub-sectors and highlights some examples of national policies and measures that have allowed specific NPS to overcome these barriers. The paper also showcases examples of enabling policy frameworks at the national level that could encourage the replication of such mitigation actions by NPS. An important, common element for successful replication of mitigation activities is for national governments to facilitate co-ordination with NPS; to improve consistency between national and sub-national policies; to identify and clarify responsibilities between different actors; and to regularly review and potentially revise national policies that may unintentionally create barriers to NPS mitigation actions.
Global value chains (GVCs) have changed the nature of production and specialisation around the world, including in agriculture and food sectors. This study takes an in-depth look at the landscape of agro-food GVCs and explores the factors that influence GVC participation by making use of a newly developed database on trade in value added for 20 agro-food sectors derived from the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database. The study also explores the benefits of GVC participation, viewed through the lens of domestic value added creation and employment, with a focus on the policy factors that influence these benefits. The study points to considerable variation in GVC participation across agro-food sectors, driven not only by product characteristics but also by policy factors related to trade and investment, the agricultural enabling environment and policies influencing service markets. The study shows that for agro-food sectors, trade barriers act as a tax on exports, reducing the domestic value added created from participation in agro-food GVCs.
Insights from TALIS 2018 shed light on the level of preparedness of teachers and schools to adjust to new ways of working in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. This will allow education systems to learn from the crisis and be better prepared for the challenges of teaching and learning in this new environment.
Social protection systems use a range of entitlement criteria. First-tier support typically requires contributions or past employment in many countries, while safety net benefits are granted on the basis of need. In a context of volatile and uncertain labour markets, careful and continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of income support is a key input into an evidence-based policy process. This paper proposes a novel empirical method for monitoring the accessibility and levels of safety net benefits. It focusses on minimum-income benefits (MIB) and other non-contributory transfers and relies on data on the amounts of cash support that individuals in need receive in practice. Results show that accessibility and benefit levels differ enormously across countries – for instance, in 2015/16, more than four out of five low-income workless one-person households received MIB in Australia, France and the United Kingdom, compared to only one in five in Greece, Italy and Korea, three countries that have since sought to strengthen aspects of safety-net provisions.
The trend rise of house prices in many OECD countries suggests weakness in the adjustment of supply to demand. This paper estimates long-term elasticities of housing supply to prices in OECD countries before exploring their drivers with a focus on policies. It finds a significant association between weaker supply responsiveness and a proxy measure for more restrictive land-use regulation. Besides, tighter rent controls are linked with lower supply elasticities. In turn, weak supply responsiveness implies that house prices rise more following stronger demand. The sensitivity of house prices to household income is also higher in countries that provide larger amounts of tax relief for homeowners.
Making housing more affordable ranks high on the policy agenda across the world. One way to achieve affordable housing is to ensure sufficiently elastic supply of the housing stock in response to demand shocks. This paper aims at disentangling policy from non-policy drivers in explaining cross-regional differences in housing supply elasticities. It uses GIS data to account for the presence of natural and man-made obstacles to residential construction in functional urban areas across the 12 OECD countries that provide sufficiently long time series for regional house prices. The results suggest that the presence of water, steep land, parks and high-density urban areas all restrict the supply of housing. However, there remain very large differences in supply elasticities across countries, which corroborates the finding from national analysis that policies have a strong influence.
Using PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) data for 21 countries, we study interrelationships between formal qualifications, cognitive skills, and labour market outcomes, focusing on comparisons between less and intermediate-educated adults (i.e. between adults with a degree below the upper secondary and at the upper secondary level). Less-educated adults tend to have lower cognitive skills than intermediate-educated adults, yet both groups are internally heterogeneous. In country-specific individual-level regressions, cognitive skills partly explain the lower occupational status of less-educated adults, but cross-national variation in their disadvantage remains substantial after accounting for skills.
Country-level regressions show that the remaining disadvantage increases with the aggregate skills gap and with the internal homogeneity of the two educational groups. We further show that the association between skills and occupational attainment is weaker among the less educated than among the intermediate group. These findings are consistent with the idea that employers statistically discriminate on the basis of formal qualifications.