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This policy brief brings together key reflections from the Policy Dialogues in Focus: International Insights for Digital Education Reform in Brazil. This seminar series from the Education Policy Outlook offered federal and subnational policy makers, civil society actors and researchers in Brazil the opportunity to learn from the experiences of six peer education systems (New South Wales (Australia), Chile, Colombia, Ireland, Korea and Mexico). The seminars also provided insights into other relevant international comparative and empirical work from the OECD. The policy brief builds on the main reflections and insights shared by presenters and participants in the seminars, covering four key topics: digital education governance, infrastructure and resources, capacity building and digital learning resources. The brief proposes pointers for policy makers in Brazil to consider when pursuing the design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of digital education reforms.

As populations age and the number of people with chronic conditions increases, countries need to assess how their health systems perform with regard to the management of chronic conditions. OECD's Patient-Reported Indicator Surveys (PaRIS) initiative aims to measure outcomes and experiences of healthcare as reported by patients with chronic conditions as part of the efforts to improve quality of care. The PaRIS survey, an international survey of people living with chronic conditions who are managed in primary care, is implemented in twenty countries. Following a rigorous design and development phase, the PaRIS survey was field-tested in participating countries. This paper reports on the implementation and the results of the Field Trial. The Field Trial provided important lessons which have been used to improve the survey tools and the implementation of the Main Survey.

Die Ansichten von Patient*innen und Bürger*innen und ihr aktives Engagement sind entscheidend, um die Sicherheit und Personenzentriertheit der Gesundheitssysteme zu steigern. Auch im Hinblick auf die gemeinsame Konzeption der Gesundheitsdienstleistungen und Realisierung guter Gesundheitsergebnisse sowie den Aufbau von Vertrauen in die Gesundheitssysteme sind sie ein wesentlicher Faktor. Patient*innen, Familien, Versorgende und Bürger*innen können zur Verbesserung der Patientensicherheit auf allen Ebenen der Gesundheitssysteme beitragen: von der klinischen, lokalen, institutionellen Ebene (z. B. Krankenhaus, Pflegeheim) über die Gemeinschaftsebene (z. B. Primärversorgung, häusliche Pflege) bis zur nationalen Ebene. Der vorliegende Bericht, der sechste in der Reihe zur Ökonomie der Patientensicherheit, erfasst 1. die wirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Patienteneinbeziehung zur Förderung der Patientensicherheit, 2. die Ergebnisse einer Pilot-Datensammlung zur Messung von Sicherheitserfahrungen aus Patientensicht und 3. den Status der diesbezüglichen Initiativen in 21 Ländern, die an einer Snapshot-Umfrage teilgenommen haben. Darüber hinaus enthält er Empfehlungen zur Förderung einer stärkeren Patienteneinbeziehung in die Patientensicherheit.

Parliaments have a unique role in ensuring that adopted laws, regardless of who initiated them, are evidence-based and fit-for-purpose. For the executive branch, laws are vital instruments through which they deliver public policy. Governments therefore rely on parliaments to scrutinise and adopt legislation in a timely, well-planned and co-ordinated manner. Parliamentary scrutiny of government lawmaking and its role in ex post evaluation of law implementation helps the legislature hold the executive to account. Evidence-based lawmaking is especially critical to EU integration processes as they involve adoption of many new laws. This paper reviews how laws are planned, initiated, prepared, scrutinised and evaluated by the parliaments of six Western Balkan administrations. The report discusses the concept of lawmaking within a parliamentary system of government. It considers how parliaments and governments co-operate and co-ordinate their legislative activities throughout the lawmaking cycle, providing a comparative analysis of existing rules and procedures as well as lawmaking practices. A set of key findings and policy recommendations are provided to support the Western Balkan administrations to plan and implement future reforms.

Parental emotional support, alongside material and temporal support, is an important determinant of children's subjective well-being and academic success. However, not all children benefit from the same level of parental support, and there are major differences depending on families' socio-economic status and child gender. Using the PISA 2018 surveys, this paper examines differences in parental support reported by 15-year-olds both within countries according to social status and between girls and boys, and between countries. We show that differences in parental emotional support by parents' education level and child gender are substantial. Some of these differences are (largely) explained by other characteristics such as family wealth, country of origin, and school urbanicity and private/public status. Greater parental emotional support is also found to be associated with higher PISA test scores and greater subjective wellbeing, with little variation by parental education. On the whole, our findings suggest that a significant enhancement in parental support and related child outcomes, especially in countries with lower average levels of parental emotional support, can be attained through a combined effort on several fronts: by addressing monetary and material poverty within families, by facilitating parents in balancing work and taking care of their children, by promoting greater parental involvement in their children's school life, and by offering appropriate services to assist families with special needs and facing greater challenges.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) aim to maintain, enhance and restore ecosystems to address a variety of social, economic and environmental challenges, including climate change and biodiversity loss. This paper applies the OECD’s framework to provide recommendations for how to encourage the use of NbS by Hungarian municipalities. It illustrates some of the key challenges in the local implementation of NbS in Hungary and provides international examples of how they are tackled in diverse contexts. It also discusses the role of reforms about the enabling environment to mobilise further public and private investment in climate adaptation.

Women’s employment rates and wages are still lagging those of men across OECD countries, with average employment and wage gaps now around 15% and 12% respectively. Gaps narrowed at a relatively modest pace over the past decade, calling for further policy action. A lack of affordable high-quality childcare is often an obstacle to women’s participation in the labour market and notably to working full time. A very unequal sharing of parental leave between parents and challenges upon return to work further hampers women’s careers. Biases in the tax system may discourage women from working in some countries. Women face disadvantage in accessing management positions and entrepreneurship. A range of policies can help reduce gender gaps, including better childcare provision, incentivising parents to better share parental leave, re-skilling and upskilling on return from parental leave, encouraging gender equality within firms, integration programmes for foreign-born women, promoting women entrepreneurship and financial inclusion, and levelling taxation for second earners. Moreover, the multiple dimensions and root causes of gender inequality call for mainstreaming gender across policy domains.

Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, governments and economic actors have increasingly been setting greenhouse gas emissions reduction or net zero targets. Amidst risks of delayed action and greenwashing, there is need to understand whether climate related targets and transition plans are consistent with the Paris Agreement. Climate change mitigation scenarios can be used as inputs to design such targets and plans, and as benchmarks to assess progress towards them. In this context, this paper proposes criteria for selecting global climate change mitigation scenarios that can be considered consistent with the Paris Agreement temperature goal and emissions objectives, based on state-of-the-art literature on climate science and mitigation scenarios.

Building on strong local roots to address local development challenges, many social and solidarity economy (SSE) entities are increasingly extending their operations internationally. By responding to international social and environmental challenges, SSE entities can help make global value chains more inclusive and sustainable. With the pursuit of a social mission and participatory governance at the core of their operations, SSE entities adopt specific approaches to internationalise their presence. Some internationalise to scale their impact to reach more people and areas, while some do so to deepen their impact on existing target groups by leveraging resources internationally. This paper analyses what SSE internationalisation involves and its specific drivers (chapter 1), trends in SSE internationalisation (chapter 2), competitive advantages and barriers of the SSE for internationalisation (chapter 3), and actionable areas for policy makers to promote its internationalisation (chapter 4).

Electronic Health Records (eHR) represent a significant digital transformation in the healthcare sector. A 2021 OECD survey of 27 countries revealed a growing adoption of eHRs. However, system fragmentation remains a concern: only 15 countries have a nationally unified system. Twenty-four countries have adopted a minimum data set for standardized core health information. While patient access to eHRs has notably increased since 2016, obstacles such as provider resistance, technical barriers, and legal hurdles continue to exist. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the pivotal role of eHRs, particularly in vaccine tracking and post-market surveillance, highlighting the pressing need for international cooperation to maximize the benefits of eHRs in healthcare. Furthermore, as eHRs integrate with artificial intelligence, new governance challenges arise.

Patients’ and citizens’ perspectives and their active engagement are critical to make health systems safer and people-centred, and are key for co-designing health services and co-producing good health with healthcare professionals, and building trust in health systems. Patients, families, caregivers and citizens can contribute towards improving patient safety at all levels from clinical, local, institutional (e.g. hospital , nursing home), community (e.g. primary care, home care) and national levels of healthcare systems. This report, the sixth in the series on the Economics of Patient Safety, covers: (i) the economic impact of patient engagement for patient safety; (ii) the results of a pilot data collection to measure patient-reported experiences of safety and; (iii) the status of initiatives on patient engagement for patient safety taken in 21 countries, which responded to a snapshot survey. It also provides recommendations for countries to enhance patient engagement for patient safety.

Public procurement accounts for 13% of GDP in OECD countries. Pressures on public spending – as well as the need for greater accountability, better monitoring of public policies, and more effective risk management – have made it increasingly important to measure the performance of public procurement. However, many countries still have not established a formal performance management system with key performance indicators. This paper provides a comprehensive, ready-to-use performance measurement framework for the consistent assessment of procurement processes. The framework should also support data-based policy- and decision making in public procurement.

Post-war reconstruction in Ukraine will face challenges in public procurement, including corruption risks and lengthy procedures. Strengthening existing legal and institutional foundations, aligned with international standards, is crucial. Streamlining procurement, ensuring transparency, and promoting equality for domestic and foreign companies are vital. Central procurement institutions require support, extending to regional and local authorities. A transparent legal framework can pave the way for efficient and accountable procurement, enabling a resilient future. A unified legal framework for awarding all contracts for the reconstruction of Ukraine, regardless of the source of financing, would streamline the tendering process. It is recommendable that the framework, fully aligned with international standards, be based on the Ukrainian public procurement legislation. The multiplication of procedural rules and requirements would lead to an increase of the administrative burden and the time required of procurement officers as well as economic operators.

This paper examines the strategies and practices of Ireland’s Office of Government Procurement (OGP) and how the Irish procurement system’s effectiveness is currently measured. It then applies the OECD framework for measuring public sector productivity to some of the centralised procurement activity in Ireland to better understand effectiveness drivers within procurement processes.