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Many OECD countries have undergone reforms over the past decade to introduce advanced roles for nurses in primary care to improve access to care, quality of care and/or to reduce costs. This working paper provides an analysis of these nurse role developments and reforms in 37 OECD and EU countries. Four main trends emerge: 1) the development in several countries of specific advanced practice nursing roles at the interface between the traditional nursing and medical professions; 2) the introduction of various new, supplementary nursing roles, often focused on the management of chronic conditions; 3) the rise in educational programmes to train nurses to the required skills and competencies; and 4) the adoption of new laws and regulations in a number of countries since 2010 to allow certain categories of nurses to prescribe pharmaceuticals (including in Estonia, Finland, France, Netherlands, Poland and Spain).

We assess the relationship between numeracy skills and numeracy practices among adults in everyday life and at work from the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), an international survey of about 250 000 adults aged 16-65 years old conducted by the OECD in 33 countries/economies. The level of proficiency and the intensity of engagement in numeracy practices are two embedded aspects of numeracy. Proficient adults use numeracy frequently and adults who regularly engage in numeracy practices improve their performance. Individual and contextual factors influence, in different ways across countries, the strength of these links. The intensity of the use of numeracy in everyday life decreases as the lapse of time since a person’s studies increases. Moreover, employed people engage in mathematical activities less in the private setting if they do not do so intensively in the workplace.

The German system of nuclear third party liability has always been, and arguably still is, the object of considerable interest in the international nuclear law community.

The NEA encourages governments to take advantage of the post‑COVID‑19 economic recovery to accelerate the energy transition towards meeting climate objectives. Post‑pandemic recovery plans to reconcile climate objectives with economic goals need to put system costs at the heart of energy policy. Nuclear energy projects achieve deep decarbonisation with optimal use of land and mineral resources. Moving to a carbon neutral electricity system without nuclear power would significantly increase system costs and threaten security of supply. Achieving cost‑effective decarbonisation requires structural reform of the electricity market.

Large nuclear installations can have a considerable impact on the environment, both in actual terms, due to the construction and operation of the plant and in potential terms, related to the risk of an accident. A considerable part of the multiple authorisation processes required to develop a large nuclear project is devoted to addressing the possible impact on the environment.

The third annual meeting of the Nuclear Law Association, India (NLAI) was held on 1 March 2014 in New Delhi. This year’s overarching theme was “Nuclear energy and Indian society: Public engagement, risk assessment and legal frameworks”.

At the core of the nuclear non-proliferation regime lie international agreements. These agreements include, inter alia, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, nuclear co-operation agreements and nuclear export control agreements.1 States, however, do not always comply with their obligations under these agreements. In response, commentators have proposed various enforcement mechanisms to promote compliance.2 The inconvenient truth, however, is that states are generally unwilling to consent to enforcement mechanisms concerning issues as critical to national security as nuclear non-proliferation.

The long-promised Act No. 2006-686 of 13 June 2006 on nuclear transparency and safety (hereinafter referred to as the TSN Act) is the result of a long process, begun in the 1990s, reflecting the (more or less general) desire to promulgate a comprehensive nuclear legislative framework.

Following the adoption of Law No. 99 of 23 July 2009, Italy is on the threshold of returning to nuclear power, even though there are many more challenges yet to overcome. It should be recalled that Law No. 99/2009 includes enabling provisions empowering the Government to issue one or more implementing decrees providing rules for the siting of new nuclear power plants, the licensing process for the construction, operation and dismantling of those plants, as well as rules for interim storage and the final disposal of nuclear waste. On 15 February 2010, upon the proposal of the Ministry of Economic Development, the Italian Council of Ministers issued Legislative Decree No. 31/20102 (hereinafter “decree”) implementing the enabling provisions.

This report discusses some of the basic principles and criteria that a regulatory body should consider in making decisions and describes the elements of an integrated framework for regulatory decision making. It is not, however, a handbook or guide on how to make regulatory decisions. In preparing the report, the task group reviewed and incorporated information from a wide array of documents produced by the NEA, its member countries and other international organisations, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Safety Series reports.

In April 2009, 61 states and seven international organisations with a total of 808 participants and observers convened in Beijing at an international ministerial conference, organised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in co-sponsorship with the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD/NEA), to deal with nuclear energy in the 21st century.1 In his concluding statement, the president of that conference stressed that “the conference recognizes the positive momentum towards nuclear power and the decisions by many developed and developing states to pursue the use of nuclear energy”.2 According to the Director General of the IAEA, more than 60 countries declared their interest in launching nuclear power programmes.

The way in which nuclear licensees’ organisations are structured and resourced clearly has a potential impact on nuclear safety. As experience has continually demonstrated, operating organisations with a strong training programme for personnel, adequate resourcing and overall effective leadership and management perform more effectively in times of crisis than those lacking in one or more of these areas. In parallel, the nuclear industry is developing new resource deployment strategies which are making increased use of contractors and leading to changes in organisational structure, which in turn create challenges for the continued safe operation of nuclear facilities. This technical opinion paper represents the consensus among human and organisational factor specialists in NEA member and associated countries on the methods, approaches and good practices to be followed in designing an organisation with a strong safety focus while meeting business needs. It also considers some of the attributes that an organisation which is effectively managing its resources and capabilities might demonstrate.

Trade in value added (TiVA) indicators are increasingly used to monitor countries’ integration into global supply chains. However, they are published with a significant lag - often two or three years - which reduces their relevance for monitoring recent economic developments. This paper aims to provide more timely insights into the international fragmentation of production by exploring new ways of nowcasting five TiVA indicators for the years 2021 and 2022 covering a panel of 41 economies at the economy-wide level and for 24 industry sectors. The analysis relies on a range of models, including Gradient boosted trees (GBM), and other machine-learning techniques, in a panel setting, uses a wide range of explanatory variables capturing domestic business cycles and global economic developments and corrects for publication lags to produce nowcasts in quasi-real time conditions. Resulting nowcasting algorithms significantly improve compared to the benchmark model and exhibit relatively low prediction errors at a one- and two-year horizon, although model performance varies across countries and sectors.

The OECD Income Distribution Database (IDD) plays a leading role in providing evidence, and in monitoring and analysing international income distribution statistics to inform policy debate. In most OECD countries, official income distribution statistics are usually delivered with time lags varying from two to three years. This paper examines the growing use by statistical offices of nowcasting techniques based on microsimulation models to produce more timely provisional estimates, and examines the advantages and challenges associated with these techniques. The paper also presents provisional estimates of income inequality in 2020 for a selection of OECD countries, based on a compilation carried out by the OECD Secretariat in collaboration with Eurostat and national statistical offices. Finally, it discusses potential future developments and applications of these techniques.

This paper presents a dynamic factor model that produces nowcasts and backcasts of Irish quarterly GDP using timely data from a panel dataset of 35 indicators. We apply a recently developed methodology, whereby numerous potentially useful indicator series for Irish GDP can be availed of in a parsimonious manner and the unsynchronised nature of the release calendar for a wide range of higher frequency indicators can be handled. The nowcasts in this paper are generated by using dynamic factor analysis to extract common factors from the panel dataset. Bridge equations are then used to relate these factors to quarterly GDP estimates. We conduct an out-of-sample forecasting simulation exercise, where the results of the nowcasting exercise are compared with those of a standard benchmark model.