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Digital transformation affects every aspect of our lives, providing new spaces and tools for us to connect, work, consume, and enjoy our rights. It offers a multitude of social and economic opportunities, but also brings new and complex risks. An empowering and safe digital environment that puts people first is therefore a core policy goal of the digital age. Through the lens of a fictional family navigating these opportunities and risks, this paper looks at how digital transformation impacts us as individuals, be it as citizens, consumers, or workers. It outlines the policy landscape, and describes the international, multi-stakeholder, and nuanced efforts needed to strike a balance between different rights, interests, and values. A background paper for the 2022 Digital Economy Ministerial meeting, this paper supports senior policy makers in designing and achieving a human-centric digital transformation.
The 2030 Agenda aims for a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality and all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed. Without gender equality and women’s empowerment, the Sustainable Development Goals will not be achieved. Yet investments into gender equality and women’s empowerment are lagging behind investments for most other goals.
Implementing commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment requires a range of tools and efforts, all underpinned by financial investments. While ODA remains an essential source of financing for gender equality and women’s empowerment, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development commits development actors to a new way of thinking about financing for sustainable development, and official flows beyond ODA are becoming an increasingly important feature. This paper sets out an overview of what we know about the financing landscape for gender equality and women’s empowerment, a way forward in order to ensure more and better financing for gender equality, and some draft principles to guide future efforts.
Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are laying the groundwork for extensive and rapid transformations in society. Understanding the relationship between AI capabilities and human skills is essential to ensure policy responsiveness to ongoing and incoming changes. The OECD has tracked how well AI systems fare on tasks from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), comparing AI performance to that of 15-year-old students in the test’s core domains of reading, mathematics and science. Tests were conducted using the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) family of large language models (LLMs), the AI behind ChatGPT, which took the world by storm after its public release in late 2022.
Results show that both GPT versions outperform average student performance in reading and science. In addition, we observe rapid advances in mathematics where AI capabilities are quickly catching up with those of students. In November 2022, GPT-3.5 could answer 35% of a set of PISA mathematics tasks, a level of performance significantly below that of humans, who answer 51% of the tasks successfully on average. However, by March 2023, GPT-4 answered 40% of the tasks successfully. Policy implications of these results are discussed in this paper.
Governments in many countries are pursuing higher environmental goals for agriculture. However, in an interconnected world, the unilateral adoption of environmental policies for agriculture can reduce the producers’ competitiveness and induce pollution leakage. This report analyses these challenges and discusses policy solutions, focusing on two examples: climate change mitigation policies and policies limiting the environmental impacts of pesticides. The extent of competitiveness and leakage effects is found to depend on market conditions, differences in pollution intensity, and the type of environmental policy adopted. Two policy routes are identified to improve agriculture’s environmental performance while maintaining the benefits of global markets. The first route relies on “direct” environmental policies, such as market-based instruments or regulations, which are rapidly effective in limiting environmental impacts but may require additional complementary policies to limit their potential competitiveness and leakage impacts. The second route involves alternative policies acting on agricultural supply, demand, or through private sector engagement, which limit competitiveness and leakage impacts but may require time to be environmentally effective.
This paper extends a previous study of profit trends to consider valuation ratios (Tobin's q) in nine countries. Tobin's q embodies market expectations and is an indicator of expected pure profit rates on the existing capital stock. Since 1982, equity markets have recovered substantially. By end-1985, values of Tobin's q were close to their 1974 levels and close to the symbolic figure of unity. The theoretical and conceptual relevance of q is considered, as well as data and measurement limitations. Real debt and equity costs of finance are considered in the light of buoyant stock markets. The implications of the strong recent recovery in q for investment are also noted ...
Conventional income distribution statistics subtract taxes from household income but do not take into account the distributional effects of the services financed through these taxes. As many of the functions of government are available to the population free of charge or at a subsidised rate, this means that income distribution figures exaggerate the degree of inequality in the distribution of resources. This article examines the extent to which this is the case, and assesses whether statements about the relative inequality prevailing in different countries are reliable. Estimates of the impact of government services on the static distribution of household income, based on two different approaches, show that publicly-provided goods and services significantly narrow the dispersion of income inequality across countries with only small changes in the ranking of individual countries, and that the effects are larger when looking at the extremes of the distributions.
This article examines the budgetary implications of public-private partnerships (PPPs) and how to strengthen budgetary review, budget treatment, accounting and assessment of PPPs.
In recent years, the cost of delivering health care in developed and developing countries has been rising exponentially. Governments around the world are searching for alternative mechanisms to reduce costs while increasing the capacity of social programmes with significant investments in infrastructure. A number of jurisdictions have begun to utilise public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a means of achieving these objectives. The use of PPPs in the Canadian health system is a relatively new phenomenon. Generally, the success of PPP projects is evaluated on the basis of the qualitative outcomes of the project, most commonly in a value-for-money analysis.
Timor Leste, the first new nation of the twenty-first century, is a young country facing many of the most challenging problems of underdevelopment: illiteracy, malnutrition, low skills base and high unemployment. It also is on the threshold of facing the potential pitfalls of being a relatively large-scale exporter of oil and gas. Finally independent after centuries of colonialism and decades of occupation, the country’s public and private managers lack experience and skills. These daunting problems are exacerbated by the nation’s decision to re-introduce Portuguese as the official language, even though only a small percentage of the population (and virtually no under-30’s) has any fluency in that language. According to the World Bank (2002), the main challenge facing Timor Leste is how to reconcile a simultaneous existence of acute poverty and severe shortage of human management skills with solid prospects of future flows from the country’s natural resource wealth ...
This paper investigates if higher public spending in education and better teacher qualifications are related to student’s performance, using data from Saber 11, a national standardized test conducted by Instituto Colombiano para la Evaluación de la Educación. The estimation exploits differences in both policy variables across regions and employs interactions to study if more investment in public education and higher teacher qualifications can help increase average performance and reduce the impact that socioeconomic factors, such as family income, have on student performance. The analysis proposes a model where student performance in Mathematics and Language are dependent not only on the variables of interest of this paper, but also on economic, social and cultural status, sex and age of students, and school characteristics. The results show that students’ characteristics and their environment, school features and departmental differences in the policy variables explain roughly 20% of the variation in education performance in Colombia, a relatively high percentage when compared to those found by other studies focusing on OECD countries and based on PISA. After controlling for students’ and school characteristics, the results show that in Colombia, public spending per student and teacher qualifications are positively related to better learning outcomes. For the first one, the results suggest that if all regions reach the level of spending per student of Bogota – the region with the highest spending – average math scores can increase by 3.8 to 4.3 points (around 8%), depending on the regions, with the highest improvement for low income students.