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Investing in higher (tertiary) education is one of the more significant decisions a person can take. In some countries, the direct costs of higher education can be large, often requiring a significant investment of an individual’s personal funds, either in up-front payments or loan repayments later on. Even in countries where the direct costs of higher education to an individual are much lower, such as Finland, Norway, and Turkey, the time invested in pursuing a degree – and the opportunity cost of foregone earnings while an individual is in school – can be a major factor. In light of the personal costs associated with pursuing a tertiary degree, how do the benefits compare? OECD analyses based on the most recent year of available data (2007 for most countries), suggest that as far as the long-term economic benefits of higher education are concerned, the return on investment is very good.

• On average across 15 OECD countries, a 30-year-old male tertiary graduate can expect to live another 51 years, while a 30 year-old man who has not completed upper secondary education can expect to live an additional 43 years. A similar comparison between women in the two educational groups reveals less of a difference than that among men.
• In 27 OECD countries, on average, 80% of young tertiary graduates say they vote, while only 54% of young adults who have not completed upper secondary education do so. The difference in voting rates by level of education is much smaller among older age groups.
• Education can bring significant benefits to society, not only through higher employment opportunities and income but also via enhanced skills, improved social status and access to networks. By fully recognising the power of education, policy makers could better address diverse societal challenges.

• Schools are providing support for new teachers in the form of mentoring and induction programmes, but nearly one third of new teachers report a high level of need for professional development around student discipline and behaviour problems.
• Contrary to what is often reported, the schools in which new teachers teach are no different than those of their more experienced colleagues.
• According to the countries surveyed in the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), new teachers1 spend less time on teaching and learning and more time on classroom management and report lower levels of self-efficacy than experienced teachers.

Many OECD Member countries and a large number of the developing countries are suffering from extensive unemployment, both in short and long-term forms. Based on a five-part schema of labour market problems, this paper summarises and evaluates the effectiveness of labour market policies and programmes in the OECD countries and assesses the relevance of the experience to economies in transition, dynamic non-Member economies and developing countries in general. The overall conclusion is that such policies have not proven very effective in dealing with the most pressing problems in most types of economy (the dynamic non- Member economies being the main exception), that is, high and persistent unemployment, both short term and long term. Nevertheless, there are a variety of active labour market policies which are of help with some other types of problem. In general, the developing countries would be well advised not to invest too heavily in socalled passive measures; thus, a social ...

Most parents know, instinctively, that spending more time with their children and being actively involved in their education will give their children a good head-start in life. But as many parents have to juggle competing demands at work and at home, there never seems to be enough time. Often, too, parents are reluctant to offer to help their children with school work because they feel they lack some of the skills that would make a difference to their children’s success in school...

• Immigrant students who share a common country of origin, and therefore many cultural similarities, perform very differently across school systems.
• The difference in performance between immigrant students and non-immigrant students of similar socio-economic status is smaller in school systems with large immigrant populations and where immigrant students are as diverse in socio-economic status as other students.

• The percentage of students who expect to complete university is highest in Korea (80%) and lowest in Latvia (25%).
• Many high-performing students do not expect to go to university, representing potentially lost talent to an economy and society while many low-performing students think they will make it to university, even if their current performance suggests they are not likely to succeed.
• Around one in four students expects to end his or her formal schooling at the upper secondary level and thus needs the skills to make a smooth transition into work and adulthood.

• Most students think that what they learned in school is useful for them or their future.
• Students’ attitudes towards school are associated with their reading skills.
• Students who report that the climate at their school is conducive to learning tend to have more positive attitudes towards school.

The issue of a “level playing field” has re-emerged as a major issue in international aviation. This issue has been around for decades but has been raised in recent policy debates. One policy forum in which this has been raised is the European Commission’s proposed revision to Regulation 868/2004, which some view as a response to allegations by some legacy carriers to the rapid growth of the Middle East carriers such as Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways. Another dimension to the concern over the level playing field is the evolution in foreign ownership rules, such as the type of treaty clauses being negotiated by the European Union. Could broader acceptance of service by carriers owned by third-party nationals create conditions for a flag of convenience regime of the kind that characterises parts of maritime liner shipping? The flag of convenience issue has been discussed in the U.S. media with regard to Norwegian Air Shuttle. Norwegian’s long haul services are operated by subsidiaries Norwegian Long Haul AS and Norwegian International Ltd. The former is registered in Norway while the latter is registered in Ireland and operates flights for its parent. Some long haul flights have operated with contract flight attendant labour based in Thailand.

“Green growth” is an emerging paradigm that integrates several policy aspirations, including the durability of economic activity, reduced environmental impacts, and sustained growth in high-quality employment in such a way as to foster coherent, cross-sectoral policy design. Focusing on “green growth” highlights the need for governments to assess policies on their long-term economic, environmental and social impacts, recognizing that there can be synergies but also tradeoffs among the broad policy aims. As we hope to show in this paper, an examination of “green growth” policies in the transport sector provides an interesting case in point. Reducing emissions comes at a cost to consumers and taxpayers and if fuel tax revenues decline strongly it may be necessary to review the way the transport sector is taxed and contributes to aggregate tax revenue.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the determinants of inflation in the United States, Japan, the euro area and the United Kingdom, focusing on the role of resource utilisation, inflation expectations, inflation persistence and imported inflation. It also includes a cross-sectional analysis that focuses on inflation dynamics over episodes of persistent large slack and low inflation. The main findings of this analysis are as follows: i) During the crisis, the stability of inflation expectations has held up actual inflation, so far preventing the huge slack in resource utilisation from leading to a disinflationary spiral; ii) Disinflationary pressures also seem to have been moderated by the flattening of the Phillips curve in an environment of persistent large economic slack and low inflation; iii) The link between long-term inflation expectations and past inflation outcomes has become weaker over time and appears to have almost disappeared recently; iv) The estimated Phillips curves coupled with the November 2010 projection of explanatory variables presented in the OECD Economic Outlook No. 88 and excluding the recent period of strong commodity prices point to inflation remaining low but positive, except in Japan where deflation is expected to continue past end-2012; v) The inflation outlook and associated risks argue for withdrawing monetary policy accommodation gradually in the short term, while being vigilant about the build up of broad-based inflationary pressures over the medium term.

This paper investigates the dynamic effects of health shocks on labour market transitions to disability, employment and other non-employment pathways. It uses longitudinal data to estimate time discrete duration models for three countries: Australia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Both current and lagged health status are important predictors of exit to disability benefits and the effect of health problems varies by age group, education and income across countries. The results are robust to the inclusion of different socio-demographic variables and to instrumenting health status.

This paper analyses recent large movements in the yield spread for sovereign bonds as between Germany and other euro area countries. While the general increase in risk aversion that has characterised the financial crisis is an important factor on its own, it is found that this has also magnified the importance of fiscal performance, in particular as measured by the ratio of debt service to tax receipts and expected fiscal deficits. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that such effects are non-linear, so that incremental deteriorations in fiscal performance lead to ever larger increases in the spread. These findings imply that financial market reaction could become an increasingly important constraint on fiscal policy for some countries, a feature which was much less apparent in the years prior to the financial crisis when general risk aversion was abnormally low.

This paper reviews the literature and contributes with some evidence based on the World Values Survey on the drivers of tax morale around the world, with an emphasis on developing countries. It shows that socio-economic factors such as age, religion, gender, employment status and educational attainment have a significant impact on people’s levels of tax morale. In terms of institutional determinants, it finds that the satisfaction with democracy, trust in government and the satisfaction with the quality of public services plays an important role in increasing tax morale. The paper also discusses future directions for research and policy action in this area.

Differences in the dynamisms of economies are persistent. Notwithstanding the growing body of evidence documenting these large cross-country differences, our understanding of what drives them is still rather limited. This paper seeks to help close this gap. Using unique data for ten countries the analysis sheds light on the factors that shape the distribution of firm growth and on what role policies play in driving cross-country differences. The paper provides new evidence on the link of labour market regulation, bankruptcy legislation, financial market development and R&D support policies with growth dynamics. The study goes beyond looking at differences in average growth rates as it analyses changes in the whole distribution of firms.

This paper analyses the determinants of structural unemployment rates in a two-stage approach. First, time-varying NAIRUs are estimated for a panel of OECD economies on the basis of Phillips curve equations using Kalman filter techniques. In a second stage, the estimated NAIRUs are regressed on selected policy and institutional variables. As predicted by theoretical wage-setting/price-setting models, the level of the tax wedge and the user cost of capital are found to be important drivers of structural unemployment. Consistent with earlier studies, the level of product market regulation, union density and the unemployment benefit replacement rate also play an important role in explaining changes in the NAIRU although there is considerable variation in estimates across countries. Nonetheless, the set of structural variables provides a reasonable explanation of NAIRU dynamics over the period 1978-2003, even though recent decreases are better explained than the earlier surge.

In response to on-going discussions on the relationship between international climate finance and development finance, this paper explores what enables effective international climate finance in the context of development co-operation. Through interviews, views were elicited from selected international climate finance stakeholders representing climate finance recipient and provider countries, as well as experts from international organisations and research institutions. Identified enabling conditions reveal common grounds and differences across stakeholder groups. This offers a possible starting point for further dialogue aiming to advance the international climate and development finance agendas in a harmonised manner.

This paper quantifies the importance of different determinants of trade at the industry level using a sample of 54 OECD and non-OECD economies. The empirical methodology extends the approach of previous empirical studies to explicitly quantify the impact that trading partners’ factor endowments and policies have on bilateral trade, and to analyse the effect of tariffs on the volume and composition of trade. We find that distance, common language, common border and regional trade agreements are important determinants of overall trade, and that factor endowments, policies and institutions, of both the exporter and its trading partners, are main determinants of what and where a country exports. By contrast, we find that trade policies based on tariffs on imported goods not only generate negative spillovers to trading partners by reducing their exports, but they are also likely to reduce exports of countries that impose the tariffs, in particular in industries that rely more on intermediate goods.

Long-term projections suggest that without policy changes, the continuation of business-as-usual economic growth and development will have serious impacts on natural resources and the ecosystem services on which human well-being depends. This highlights the necessity for both developed and developing countries to move to a new growth path that is consistent with the protection of the environment and a sustainable use of scarce natural resources, while still achieving sizeable gains in living standards and reducing poverty...

• Less than one in three teachers across countries participating in the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013 believes that the teaching profession is valued by society.
• Nevertheless, the great majority of teachers in all surveyed countries are happy with their jobs.
• Challenging classrooms with large proportions of students with behavioural problems and the perception that appraisals and feedback are done simply as administrative tasks are among factors that tend to lower job satisfaction.
• Collaboration between teachers and positive teacher-student relationships, on the other hand, are among factors that can boost teacher job satisfaction.