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Mozambique is undergoing a number of major reforms in the public sector including reform of the public finance management system. This article describes the environment before the budget reforms, highlighting the weaknesses in budget planning and preparation, budget implementation and the governance framework including the weak oversight role of Parliament. A legal framework was put in place as a first step. Underlying systemic problems were addressed to allow clearer linkages between budgets and service delivery. Then budget planning reforms were introduced. The article discusses the nature of the major technical reforms, considers the governance framework and provides an assessment of the effectiveness of the reforms.
Stronger integration in global value chains would speed up economic convergence to advanced OECD economies and raise living standards. Participation in global value chains (GVCs) offers opportunities for boosting productivity through knowledge transfer and intensive use of technologically advanced inputs. It also enables Latvia to diversify exports into high value added goods and services. Latvia’s participation in GVC lags behind its Baltic and Central European peers. It also draws less value added from GVCs compared to many OECD economies. Nevertheless, GVC participation boosts the productivity of Latvian firms and enables them to increase employment and wages. Strong skills, high innovation capabilities and efficient resource allocation are essential for Latvian firms to engage in more knowledge intensive activities within GVCs. Improving access to higher education, promoting innovation cooperation between Latvian firms and foreign research institutes, reducing the large informal economy and establishing an effective judiciary and insolvency regime would unlock productivity growth through stronger integration in GVCs.
This Working Paper relates to the 2017 OECD Economic Survey of Latvia. (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-latvia.htm).
Prepared for a CERI (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation) Strategic Education Governance Learning Seminar, this working paper analyses an ongoing reform in Austria to change the traditional sector-specific “supervision” of different school types to a system of quality management of all schools in the region and to introduce a new external school evaluation body. The paper identifies four pertinent areas for lasting success of the reform: a new focus on quality management and monitoring; a restructuring of existing sector-specific school supervision bodies; creating a shared vision of quality and educational goals; and ensuring reliable and useful knowledge. Employing a complexity perspective to governance, the paper highlights that long-term sustainability of the reform requires a compelling narrative clarifying how school supervision supports education improvement and how supervision fits into wider education policy. The analysis further underlines the principle of co-creation in developing quality frameworks and establishing the methodology for the new external school evaluation body; and also for school leaders and school supervisors to drive the development of their new professional identities. Finally, to provide useful knowledge for schools and the system, the new external evaluation body should focus on the improvement of teaching and learning.
This report uses business consultations to investigate private-sector views on privacy and data protection rules for cross-border data flows. It aims to inform a more comprehensive understanding of challenges and ways forward for the policy agenda of ‘data free flow with trust’. While frameworks aimed at generating trust and facilitating data flows build on commonalities and elements of convergence, businesses identify challenges to fully operationalise them at the global level. In particular, businesses indicate the need for coherent principles and rules that are transparent and predictable, provide a practical balance between certainty and flexibility, and offer solutions that match business realities. Finally, the report highlights the need for greater international regulatory co-operation and leveraging the full range of options to uphold trust around privacy and data protection globally.
This paper aims to inform policies facilitating job-to-job transitions triggered by changes in the task content of occupations and in job demand. It assesses the distances existing between occupations in terms of cognitive skills and of skills as they emerge from the tasks performed on the job, and the training needs that moving between occupations entails. Skill “shortages” and “excesses” calculated on data for 31 countries and aggregated over 127 occupations are used to estimate the training efforts required to meet the skills requirements of the destination job. Distances in cognitive skills are found to be higher among low-skilled or from mid- to high-skilled occupations than among higher-skilled occupations. Conversely, distances in task-related skills are higher within high-skilled than low-skilled occupations. These results call for policies aimed at developing general cognitive skills complemented by task-related skills for workers in low-skilled occupations, and on-the-job training options for workers in high-skilled occupations.
We then build a simple model where both temporary and permanent contracts are available to firms. We use it to describe the demand for temporary contracts and the potential consequences of removing them and reach the following conclusions. First, employment protection has a moderate negative impact on employment, which can be mitigated when temporary contracts are available. Second, the elimination of temporary contracts decreases total employment (by 7 percentage points according to our calculations). Offsetting this effect would require an ambitious reform of employment protection laws of permanent contracts (in this specific setup, amounting to a cut in layoff costs by two thirds). Finally, the coexistence of temporary and permanent contracts may also have negative effects on social norms within the firm and workers' motivation and eliminating temporary contracts could therefore enhance productivity in this context.
We conclude that while there are costs to dualism, these are not as obvious and well established as the ones triggered by employment protection itself. Further, the single employment contract may partly be a qui pro quo (misunderstanding) Instead, more clarity on the objectives of a labour reform is needed.
Motorway crashes kill over 200 people in Korea each year. This report reviews international best practices in motorway safety across ten countries to inform ways to make Korea’s motorways safer. Matching the average safety performance observed across Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom would halve the number of motorway deaths. The report offers recommendations for an action plan to 2030, also taking into account the expected uptake of connected and automated vehicles.
The ongoing development of Slovakia’s motorway network has prompted efforts to improve project selection and infrastructure governance more generally. This report reviews Slovakia’s approach to estimating motorway construction costs in the light of international practices. The accuracy of cost estimates at different project development stages affects the selection of projects, budget planning, or the bidding for the project. This report offers a broad range of measures that can advance the accuracy of estimates.
Government decreases in funding to universities accompanied by increased accountability measures for both teaching and research have resulted in tertiary management structures consistent with these developments. Universities have historically relied upon the active and collegial participation of their academic staff to achieve the goals and aspirations that have driven the sector for generations. This paper utilises psychological motivation theory and research to examine developments designed by management to promote faculty productivity. We challenge the naive implementation of change strategies that do not appear to be based on theory and/or research. Strategies are proposed for monitoring such changes in policy and practice within well-established social science paradigms to ensure achievement of desired ends rather than undesirable negative effects upon the university’s capacity to fulfil its role in the creation and transmission of new knowledge...
There is pressure on Australian universities to adopt organisational structures, job design, remuneration and performance management systems based on corporate sector best practice. However, these systems and practices are often at least 20 years old and are based on command-control bureaucracies that dominated the manufacturing and service industries. They are not only alien to universities but are increasingly seen as inappropriate to knowledge-based professional organisations in the corporate sector because the underlying assumptions about what motivates people are at odds with what research shows motivates professional “knowledge-workers”. This research identifies sources of motivation that resonate with what has underpinned traditional university remuneration, promotion and performance schemes. However this does not mean that there is no need for change to those traditional schemes. As academic work becomes more complex and the academic labour market more differentiated, there is a need to recognise this greater diversity within extended promotional and reward schemes...
The article studies relationships between changes in institutional funding patterns and staff incentives. Although specific internal university incentives were not considered in any detail in Academic Capitalism, it is believed that the alterations in HEI funding patterns instituted by governments described therein almost certainly created organisational dynamics that resulted in more specific incentives being created or expanded within HEIs, and that these incentives had a direct impact on academic staff. This led the author and PhD students to try to establish whether there were in fact causal relationships among the changes in institutional funding patterns and the activities within HEIs. They conducted econometric analyses to study how involvement in grant and contract work impacted the time allocations and productivity of individual academic staff members. The author concludes that declining revenue shares from government block grants is having major impacts on HEIs, but that the magnitude and nature of these impacts, is enormously varied, not only across HEIs but within as well. Within institutions, effects of shifting revenue structures depend upon many factors, including the extent to which and the manner by which the institution transmits environmental pressures to internal units and individual staff members...
Bilateral and regional investment agreements have proliferated in the last decade and new ones are still being negotiated. Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) clauses link investment agreements by ensuring that the parties to one treaty provide treatment no less favourable than the treatment they provide under other treaties in areas covered by the clause. MFN clauses have thus become a significant instrument of economic liberalisation in the investment area. Moreover, by giving the investors of all the parties benefiting from a country’s MFN clause the right, in similar circumstances, to treatment no less favourable than a country’s closest or most influential partners can negotiate on the matters the clause covers, MFN avoids economic distortions that would occur through more selective country-by-country liberalisation. Such a treatment may result from the implementation of treaties, legislative or administrative acts of the country and also by mere practice ...
The landscapes of housing loan markets vary considerably across OECD countries, reflecting differences in preferences and policy settings. This paper first draws a topography of disparities in mortgage structure, documenting considerable variation across OECD countries in key features such as in use of fixed vs variable interest rates and typical maturities. The paper then discusses policies that can influence these outcomes. It highlights the scope for encouraging inclusive access to housing through tax-and-spending programmes that are neutral between renting and owning rather than through often very costly tax advantages for mortgage borrowing. The paper finally proposes a novel indicator to measure the balance between the rights of borrowers and lenders. Mortgage markets are deepest in countries where the index shows that creditor and borrower rights are balanced rather than severely tilted to one side.