Better Policies for Development
Recommendations for Policy Coherence

This report examines the ways in which wider policies can be use to support our common development objectives. It focuses on areas requiring collective action by the entire international community, and complements the OECD’s continuing work on aid effectiveness and monitoring aid flows.
It starts from two premises. First, policies ranging from trade and investment to tax and fiscal transparency, corporate governance, climate change, resource security and social policy have a profound impact on the prospects for achieving sustainable development. Second, whilst these require action by national governments and regional organisations in both developed and developing countries, in today’s interconnected world they also require collective action by the entire international community.
The report covers 18 development policy topics divided into four broad categories: sustainable economic growth, economic governance, the environment and natural resource security, and society. Together these reflect the OECD’s mission to promote better policies for better lives.
Also available in: French
- Click to access:
-
Click to download PDF - 2.80MBPDF
-
Click to Read online and shareREAD
Conflict and fragility
While many countries are making progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a group of countries affected by weak capacity, problematic state-society relations, deep social divides and/or the legacy of violent conflict is lagging 40 to 60% behind other low and middle-income countries in MDG achievement. It is in these countries that one billion of the world’s six billion people live, where half of the world’s children die before the age of five, and one third of all people live on less than USD 1 a day. About 35 of the countries considered fragile in 1979 were still fragile in 2009, and the gap with other developing countries has been widening since the 1970s.
Also available in: French
- Click to access:
-
Click to download PDF - 324.98KBPDF
-
Click to Read online and shareREAD