Browse by: "W"

Water-related risks are intrinsically linked to both climate and nature challenges and can be closely tied to socio-economic challenges, such as poverty, food security, and domestic and international conflicts. There is increasing evidence that water-related risks are financially material across actors in the financial system, and further still, that there may be important implications for financial stability. However, a review of current practices indicates that these risks are not fully captured by current approaches to assessing risk.

This working paper explores how the financial sector understands the concept of financial materiality as a lever for decision making on water-related climate and nature risks. The paper also looks at how regulatory and supervisory guidance considers water in the context of climate and nature risks, and finally how sustainable finance tools and initiatives can support market participants in gaining an improved understanding of water-related risks.

This paper investigates the determinants of money demand (M3) in the euro area. It specifically examines the potential impact of financial and housing wealth on money demand. It tests the hypothesis, whether wealth associated with increases in asset prices is used to finance liquidity holdings in a standard portfolio context. Regressing velocity on interest rates and a wealth variable (a composite of residential property and stocks) within an error-correction framework provides evidence of positive wealth effects from financial and housing assets on money demand in the long run, but no significant impact in the short run. Tests suggests that the long-run and dynamic money demand equations are stable and have not been disrupted by the adoption of the euro on 1 January 1999, while the impact of wealth on money demand may have increased ...

This paper examines some alternative specifications of the aggregate consumption function for eight OECD countries. Wealth effects are potentially important as determinants of consumption and as a transmission channel from monetary influences to real variables. However, measurement difficulties prevent direct incorporation of wealth in empirical work on consumption in many countries. Here, wealth effects are incorporated implicitly into estimated functions in a way that differentiates between indexed and non-indexed assets. Results indicate that, while inflation appears to affect measured consumption ratios in all countries examined, an interaction between inflation and interest rates that would be implied by wealth effects is not always present. The implications of different consumption functions are tested within a macroeconomic model, the OECD INTERLINK system. The response of output and consumption to standard fiscal policy shocks generally becomes smaller when inflation ...

Convergence between different telecommunication and broadcasting infrastructures and services is increasingly raising challenges for regulatory frameworks and may require adjustment in view of emerging services.

Despite the rising importance and economy-wide effects of online platforms, the paucity of cross-country comparable data still hampers understanding of the structural and policy determinants of their diffusion. This study contributes to the understanding of multi-sided online platforms in three main ways. First, we build a harmonised international dataset of online platforms and their use across 43 OECD and G20 countries, covering the 2013-19 period and nine areas of activity. Second, we describe main trends in the use of platforms in the past years, and third, we investigate the structural and policy determinants of online platforms diffusion across countries and over time.

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform distributes the additional tax revenue uniformly to everybody (traditional welfare) while the second reform distributes tax proceeds uniformly to workers only (in-work benefit). We build a simple model of labour supply encompassing responses to taxes and transfers along both the intensive and extensive margin. We then use EUROMOD to describe current welfare and tax systems in European Union countries and use calibrated labour supply elasticities along the intensive and extensive margins to analyze the effects of the two welfare reforms. We quantify the equity-efficiency trade-off for a range of elasticity parameters. In most countries, because of large existing welfare programmes with high phase-out rates, the uniform redistribution policy is undesirable unless the redistributive tastes of the government are extreme. The inwork benefit reform, on the other hand, is desirable in a very wide set of cases. We discuss the practical policy implications for European welfare policy.

What is the impact of school infrastructure on the well-being of students in Flemish secondary schools? A study, commissioned by AGIOn (the Flemish agency that subsidises school buildings), investigated the impact of educational spaces on their users and set out to identify empirical evidence supporting the importance of school infrastructure on the well-being of students in secondary schools.

COP27 will return to Africa for the first time since 2016 to follow up on promises made in Glasgow in 2021 to limit global temperatures to well below 2°C by the end of the century as committed under the Paris Agreement. Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) enable each country to pursue a tailored approach under the Paris Agreement, with countries setting their own mitigation and adaptation targets with the aim of increasing ambition with each subsequent submission. This report analyses the NDCs of 17 countries in West Africa on some of the pressing issues to be discussed at COP27, namely the ambition of targets in NDCs, the financing needs related to NDCs and their implementation. The objective of this report is two-fold: to inform COP participants where the region stands on these matters, and to identify opportunities for the region in updating NDCs.

• The social sciences are the most popular field for non-vocational tertiary education programmes. One in three new students choose a programme in social sciences, business and law.
• Gender equality has been virtually achieved in many fields of study, especially in social sciences and services but significant gender differences persist in computing and engineering (maledominated) and in health and welfare and education (female-dominated).
• Almost one in four international students in OECD countries follow programmes in the field of business and administration (23%). The proportion of international students from fields oriented to the public function such as education (3%) or health and welfare (9%) is lower on average.

• Rising levels of tertiary attainment seem not to have led to an “inflation” eroding the labour-market value of qualifications. However, tertiary graduates have the highest relative earnings advantage when they live in a country with low tertiary attainment rates.
• On average, compared to those with an upper secondary education, tertiary-educated adults earn about 1.6 times more than their peers, while individuals without an upper secondary education earn 24% less.
• Higher educational attainment and literacy skills increase earnings, but the advantages are more pronounced for men than for women and seem to increase as adults get older.
• The crisis has widened the wage gap between less educated and highly educated individuals: across OECD countries, the average difference in earnings from employment between these two groups increased from 75 percentage points in 2008 to 79 percentage points in 2012.
• Qualifications are more rewarded than skills: attaining a higher level of education has a stronger positive impact on earnings than better literacy proficiency.