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The present paper was prepared in the context of a joint project between the OECD Investment Committee (IC) and Development Assistance Committee (DAC) on Official Development Assistance and Investment for Development. It responds to discussions at the IC-DAC Workshop on Synergies between ODA and Foreign Direct Investment on 11 March 2004, during which participants opined that development agencies lack information about the quality of the investment climate in developing countries and the likely repercussions for direct investment.

The purpose of the present paper is threefold. First, it provides an overview of a variety of scoreboards for the investment climate that have been established by a number of actors, including the World Bank, UNCTAD and several private “think tanks”. Second, it documents their similarities and discrepancies in assessing the investment climates of developing, emerging and transition economies (henceforth jointly referred to as “developing countries”) ...

This document presents the concepts underlying capital services measures, describes estimation methods and produces a first set of results. It also raises a number of outstanding conceptual issues in relation to capital services measures ...

We estimate the business-cycles of G7 countries, as defined by an ideal 2-10 year bandpass filter applied to country-specific GDP target series (GDP-BP). Since this target series cannot be observed in real-time, due to the symmetry of the bandpass filter, we analyze and compare the leading performances of the well-known HP-filter, as currently implemented in the OECD CLI’s, as well as of the Multivariate Direct Filter Approach (MDFA) relying on explanatory time series, as selected for current CLIs. The paper shows that efficiency gains by MDFA over HP are substantial along the full revision-sequence and they are consistent across countries as well as over time, when referenced against GDP-BP.

In 2010, the OECD published its Consumer Policy Toolkit, which provides insights into ways that government agencies responsible for safeguarding consumer interests could improve their policy approaches to ensure that any interventions they make are well-justified, timely and effective. To follow up, the OECD Committee on Consumer Policy is conducting a series of multi-stakeholder workshops to see how policies in key markets could be strengthened, using the framework and approaches developed in the Toolkit. Communication services were the topic of the first workshop, held in October 2011. This paper provides a summary of the proceedings, which focused on marketing practices, contract terms, and billing issues.

This document is aimed at disseminating to a wider public the data on employment by industry and occupations for ten OECD countries, that have been collected over the last few years in the context of analytical work aimed at exploring empirically the changing patterns of skills in OECD countries. The industrial coverage of the data allows them to be used in conjunction with similar disaggregated OECD databases, while the occupational detail and time coverage track the evolution of skills profiles over the last one or two decades. The data in this document have been declassified by the Statistical Working Party of the OECD Industry Committee with the understanding that they represent OECD Secretariat estimates and not official country submissions.

The country-specific data are not included in the paper version of this document, but are available on the OECD Web site at the following address: http://www.oecd.org/dsti/sti/prod/sti_wp.htm ...

The economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis, particularly for fragile countries, have renewed focus on debt transparency, prompting international organisations and national authorities to step up their efforts to improve the consistency, comparability, scope and frequency of debt statistics. The report offers guidance and recommendations to improve debt transparency and outlines sovereign debt trends of selected countries, with a focus on marketable debt.

Rapid technological developments in the field of information, computers and communications are leading to significant structural changes in the economies of Member countries. Flows of computerised data and information are an important consequence of technological advances and are playing an increasing role in national economies. With the growing economic interdependence of Member countries, these flows acquire an international dimension, known as Transborder Data Flows. It is therefore appropriate for the OECD to pay attention to policy issues connected with these transborder data flows. This Declaration was adopted by the Governments of OECD Member countries on 11th April 1985.

This paper gives an overview of the determination of non-oil commodity prices in the Economics and Statistics Department's INTERLINK world model. The practical problems which have been encountered, in particular in the context of full simulations are discussed. Based on a number of statistical tests, a new specification of the commodity price block is proposed. Indices of nominal commodity prices measured in dollars are estimated as functions of OECD economic activity and inflation, U.S. interest rates and oil prices. Compared to the previous system, the new equations are better behaved in a number of respects ...

The second OECD educationtoday Crisis Survey was carried out in 2010. Twenty-five OECD member countries completed the questionnaire. The results of the survey relies largely on the informed opinion of education officials regarding various aspects of the impact of the economic recession and fiscal crisis on education.

The main outcomes of the 2010 survey are the following:

• The survey data does not portrait an education system dramatically affected by overall budget cuts. In countries where public investment in education has diminished, the effects are still very specific and concentrated, and vary across and within sectors of education.
• In general, governments seem to be rather successful in protecting education spending. Although in some cases the impact on teachers and schools is significant, governments are trying to contain the negative impact of fiscal consolidation. Some countries even have increased funding for specific parts of the education system in order to enhance output and efficiency. Only in the few countries which have been severely hit by the crisis a more general expenditure cut has occurred.
• The demand for non-compulsory education continues to augment, especially in vocational education and training, although the recession reduces the capacity of enterprises to uphold their training investments. As a result, higher demand is not systematically transformed in all cases into more training places.
• The recession has not slowed down reforms in education; on the contrary, some countries have accelerated reforms. Alleviating unemployment, meeting increased demands, preparing future growth and fostering innovation are the most frequently mentioned policy rationales for education policies which are trying to enhance the education system’s capacity and efficiency.
• Some governments are also taking into consideration the difficult situation of private households by increasing social measures to contain education cost.

This evaluation framework sets out recommendations for evaluating Modern Apprenticeships in Scotland. It discusses the evaluation activities to carry out, the outcomes to examine, the data to use and the methods to apply. It also sets the recommendations in a broader context by introducing activities and guiding principles related to evaluating public interventions and by briefly summarising relevant literature.

The report describes a long-term evaluation strategy to be followed once required links between administrative datasets are put in place, and it also outlines the steps that should be made already in the short and medium term to facilitate the data linkage and to exploit data that are more readily available. The report emphasises the crucial role of formulating an ex-ante evaluation strategy in enabling high-quality and cost-effective evaluation.

To account for differences among rural and urban regions, the OECD s established a regional typology, classifying TL3 regions as predominantly urban (PU), intermediate (IN) or predominantly rural (PR) (OECD, 2009). This typology, based essentially on the percentage of regional population living in urban or rural communities, has proved to be meaningful to better explain regional differences in economic and labour market performance. However this typology does not take into account the presence of economic agglomerations if they happen to be in neighbouring regions. For example, a region is classified as rural or intermediate regardless its distance from a large urban centre where labour market, access to services, education opportunities and logistics for firms can be wider. Previous work reveals great heterogeneity in economic growth among rural regions and the distance from a populated centre could be a significant factor explaining these differences. For the latter, the OECD regional typology is extended to include an accessibility criterion. This criterion is based on the driving time needed for at least half of the population in a region to reach a populated centre of with 50 000 or more inhabitants. The resulting classification consists of four types of regions: Predominantly Urban (PU), Intermediate (IN), Predominantly Rural Close to a city (PRC) and Predominantly Rural Remote (PRR). For the time being, the extended typology has only been computed for regions in North America (Canada, Mexico and the United States) and Europe. The extended typology is used to compare the dynamics of population and labour markets. Remote rural regions show a stronger decline in population and a faster ageing process than rural regions close to a city. The remoteness of rural regions is in fact a significant factor explaining regional outflows of working age population, confirming that this extended typology captures the economic distance from market and services. Remote rural regions appear economically more fragile: lower employment rates (Canada and Mexico) and economic output (Europe).