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23rd Nuclear Inter Jura Congress, November 2018
International Nuclear Law Association United Kingdom Conference
The European Commission organised on 29 October 2013 a meeting in Luxembourg with participation of EU neighbouring countries that had not been fully involved in the European stress tests (Armenia, Belarus and Turkey), as well as from the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group. The Russian Federation was also invited but declined participation. The meeting provided a good opportunity to present and discuss the status of the stress tests already performed or planned in these countries with existing nuclear power plants such as Armenia or for those like Belarus and Turkey that are planning new nuclear projects.
This paper provides a synthesis of the literature on and recent trends in new technologies and its effect on 21st century children (0-18 years old). It begins by providing an overview of recent trends in the access and use of new technologies as well as a summary of online opportunities and risks. It then explores a variety of factors, including economic, social and cultural status which underlie these trends and lead to online and offline inequalities. Building digital resilience is an important skill for 21st century children. Effective strategies to accomplish this include encouragement of active rather than passive Internet use, e-safety in the school curriculum, and teacher and parental Information and Communication Technology (ICT) support. A focus on younger children (primary school or younger) and the effects of new emerging technologies would be helpful for future research.
Alongside the member countries of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), many other countries provide assistance to developing nations. These can be grouped into three categories: emerging donors, providers of South-South co-operation and Arab donors. Together, they accounted for USD 11.8 billion of global development co-operation in 2009, which is roughly 8% of total aid flows. Their own development achievements and different approaches to development co-operation make them an important force in the global effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. The DAC is seizing on its new opportunities for international partnerships for development. In opening its doors, it embraces diverse approaches and experiences in development co-operation. It also welcomes global dialogue on how to make international development co-operation as effective as possible.
TALIS has been conducted every five years since 2008, with TALIS 2018 being the third cycle. The study has given teachers and school leaders the opportunity to voice their opinions on their working conditions, learning environments and practices. The perspective of teachers and school leaders is vital for education systems to understand what is taking place in their schools and classrooms, and to guide the development of policy. This Teaching in Focus brief introduces the research scope and design of TALIS 2018. It also describes the content covered in Volume I of the results and the main research questions that the study attempts to answer.
We develop monthly indicators for tracking short-run trends in real GDP growth in 32 advanced and emerging-market economies. We test the historical performance of our indicators and find that they do a good job at describing the business cycle. In a recursive out-of-sample forecasting exercise, we find that the indicators generally produce good real GDP growth forecasts relative to a range of time series models.
Rising self-employment rates in U.S. tax data that are absent in survey data have led to speculation that tax records capture a rise in new “gig” work that surveys miss. Drawing on the universe of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax returns, we show that trends in firm-reported payments to “gig” and other contract workers do not explain the rise in self-employment reported to the IRS; rather, that increase is driven by self-reported earnings of individuals in the EITC phase-in range. We isolate pure reporting responses from real labor supply responses by examining births of workers’ first children around an end-of-year cutoff for credit eligibility that creates exogenous variation in tax rates at the end of the tax year after labor supply decisions are already sunk. We find that exposing workers with sunk labor supply to negative marginal tax rates results in large increases in their propensity to self-report self-employment—only a small minority of which leads to bunching at kink-points. Consistent with pure strategic reporting behavior, we find no impact on reporting among taxpayers with no incentive to report additional income and no effects on firm-reported payments of any kind. Moreover, we find these reporting responses have grown over time as knowledge of tax incentives has become widespread. Quantitatively, our results suggest that as much as 59 percent of the growth in self-employment rates, and all counter-cyclicality, can be attributed to changes in reporting behavior that are independent of changes in the nature of work. Our findings suggest caution is warranted before deferring to administrative data over survey data when measuring labor market trends.
This paper presents new evidence on the impact of intangible capital on productivity dispersion within industries. It first shows that rise in productivity dispersion after 2000 is more pronounced in intangible-intensive industries; then analyses the link between intangible capital intensity and productivity dispersion both at the top and at the bottom of the productivity distribution, and in different industries. The findings suggest that industries that have experienced a stronger increase in intangible investment have also seen a steeper rise in productivity dispersion both at the top and at the bottom of the productivity distribution. While the results at the top seem to be associated with the scalability of intangible capital – which is likely to disproportionally benefit high-productivity firms and incumbents – dispersion at the bottom appears to be linked to complementarities between intangible investment and factors like digital intensity, trade openness and venture capital.
Global trade in illegal pesticides has been steadily growing in recent years, posing serious threats to agriculture, the environment, human health, and the economy. Evidence of this trend can be found in the increasing number of seizures of counterfeit, fake, and unauthorised pesticides, as well as their growing share in the global pesticide market. This paper identifies the main drivers and enablers of this illicit trade, and explores the potential of digital technologies, such as blockchain, to support policies to tackle this criminal activity. It also outlines the challenges in the adoption of these digital-based policy responses and discusses other available policy options.
This paper analyses results on social insurance pension liabilities and entitlements across OECD countries, on the basis of a new data collection. In addition to information on employment-related schemes (covered in the central framework of the national accounts), this new data collection also includes information related to social security pension schemes. As the latter make up a large part of pension liabilities and entitlements, this new data collection provides important new insights into the role of social insurance pensions across OECD countries and on how countries may be affected by ageing populations. The results show that pension liabilities and entitlements are, on average, more significant in European countries than in non-European OECD countries. Furthermore, the results show an increasing preference for defined contribution schemes over defined benefit schemes for private pension schemes, possibly in order to address some of the challenges brought about by an ageing society.
Government debt issuance procedures and policies differ across OECD jurisdictions, in particular in terms of technical standards for selling techniques, primary dealer systems and other primary market arrangements.
However, the increased integration of global financial markets (including the jump in the integration of European government debt markets since the introduction of the Euro) has been an important catalyst in the standardisation of the structure and types of instruments as well as the convergence of general procedures and policies for the issuance government debt. In many countries, the ongoing credit and economic crises have prompted a review of existing issuance procedures and policies.
This article provide (a) a survey of the general characteristics of government debt issuance procedures and related primary dealer (PD) arrangements in the OECD area; and (b) an evaluation of the challenges and changes generated by the impact of the turmoil in global financial markets on issuance procedures and policies.
This article presents the results of a study of the principal issues involved in the governance of public universities in Catalonia. It was based on four stylised dilemmas that were drawn up to facilitate an understanding of the challenges facing university governance reforms. This paper discusses each of these dilemmas in the Catalan context and highlights a number of challenges facing managers of higher education institutions.