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The COVID-19 crisis caused profound disruptions in the global economy, with SMEs and entrepreneurs, particularly hard hit. Swift measures implemented by governments and public financial institutions provided a crucial lifeline for liquidity-strapped SMEs.
The 10th edition of Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs 2022: An OECD Scoreboard sheds light on the impacts of the crisis on SME finance, tracking the latest developments in debt, equity, asset-based finance, and framework conditions, along with recent policy developments for 48 countries around the world. It shows that lending continued to flow to SMEs during the pandemic, with unprecedented growth in outstanding SME loans. What is more, credit conditions relaxed significantly: interest rates registered record lows, interest rate spreads narrowed considerably, and collateral requirements declined in most Scoreboard countries. In contrast, alternative sources of finance such as leasing and factoring declined significantly, in part because of the large uptake of credit. Evidence on equity finance shows a resilient venture capital sector, with some fragility in early-stage finance.
The thematic chapter of this report assesses the evolution of SME financing support during the crisis, from the rescue to recovery phases. It documents a fall in the level of SME-related support in national recovery packages compared to earlier rescue measures.
Since 2020, a series of shocks to the global economy has had significant impacts on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs and their access to finance. Most recently, significant inflationary pressures have led to tighter lending conditions, limiting the flow of finance to SMEs and acting as a barrier to investment. Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs 2024: An OECD Scoreboard monitors SME and entrepreneurship financing trends, conditions and policy developments in close to 50 countries. It documents a strong increase in the cost of SME financing in 2022, alongside a significant decline in SME lending. Equity finance also fell sharply in 2022, after a year of historically high growth in 2021. Women-led and minority-owned businesses, which typically find it more difficult to access venture capital financing, were affected disproportionately. Against this backdrop, the Scoreboard highlights the recent measures governments have taken to support SME access to finance, including finance for the green transition. A continued focus on diversifying financial sources and instruments will be important to meet the different needs of all types of SMEs and entrepreneurs, and enable them to act as an engine of resilient, sustainable and inclusive growth.
This book sheds light on how financing decisions are made regarding state-owned enterprises and synthesises national policies and practices. It also examines a broad range of financial transactions and conditions which might make the cost of operating SOEs materially different than for private competitors, and identifies whether any mechanisms are in place to neutralise such differences.
This book presents a method to develop financing strategies for investment-heavy environmental infrastructure, such as urban water supply, wastewater collection and treatment, and municipal solid waste. The strategies, supported by the FEASIBLE computer model, were developed in several countries of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA), in EU accession countries and China. This approach focuses on the importance of realism, affordability and the cost-effective use of resources in achieving infrastructure development and environmental goals.
The scale of Uzbekistan’s green transition requires a marked increase in private financing to fill the existing spending gap. The outsized role of the state in Uzbekistan’s economy and its underdeveloped domestic capital market act as significant constraints and call for a diversification of sources to finance the green transition. Since 2021, Uzbekistan has made green bonds a central part of its strategy to fill the financing gap and mobilise new sources of capital for its domestic green infrastructure projects. This publication explores the current market and institutional set-up in Uzbekistan, the reforms that have led to recent issuances of both sovereign and corporate thematic bonds, and the remaining barriers to further uptake of the instrument. The report also provides policy recommendations related to the market's institutional set up, Uzbekistan's regulatory framework for debt capital markets and emerging opportunities for further green bond use aimed at key stakeholders, including policy makers and market participants.
The OECD and the Directorate-General for Environment, the European Commission department responsible for EU policy on the environment, joined forces to examine current and future water-related financing challenges faced by EU member states. These include investments needed to comply with EU regulation for water supply, wastewater collection and treatment, and flood protection.
As part of the research, new data was produced on current levels of expenditure for water supply, sanitation and flood protection, as well as on projected needs. It supported a comparison across member states and substantiated tailored policy discussions in selected countries and at European level. This report captures the rationale for the research, the main quantitative outcomes and the policy issues and recommendations that derived from this two-year co-operation. Lessons from Europe outlined in this report can inspire similar research and policy discussions in other parts of the world.
The current environmental situation of the countries of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA) is dire and challenges are mounting, but there are also new opportunities. This report explains the environmental challenges that these transition economies face, and assesses the financial tools and resources, both domestic and foreign, available to tackle them.
This report presents a summary of the key challenges and opportunities related to financing that contributes to water security and sustainable growth distilling insights from the Roundtable on Financing Water and related analyses. It covers a broad range of water-related investments, including water and sanitation services, water resources management, agricultural water and managing water-related risks (“too much”, “too little” and “too polluted”). It summarises findings from analysis of investments needs and financing capacities, trends in development finance for water and explores how water risks generate financial impacts for corporates. The report highlights options to address the financing challenge by strengthening the enabling environment for investment, making the best use of existing sources of finance, strategic investment planning and mobilising additional finance via a range of financing approaches. Finally, the report sets out a vision for future OECD work on financing water and for the Roundtable on Financing Water.
Decommissioning of both commercial and R&D nuclear facilities is expected to increase significantly in the coming years, and the largest of such industrial decommissioning projects could command considerable budgets. It is important to understand the costs of decommissioning projects in order to develop realistic cost estimates as early as possible based on preliminary decommissioning plans, but also to develop funding mechanisms to ensure that future decommissioning expenses can be adequately covered. Sound financial provisions need to be accumulated early on to reduce the potential risk for residual, unfunded liabilities and the burden on future generations, while ensuring environmental protection.
Decommissioning planning can be subject to considerable uncertainties, particularly in relation to potential changes in financial markets, in energy policies or in the conditions and requirements for decommissioning individual nuclear installations, and such uncertainties need to be reflected in regularly updated cost estimates.
This booklet offers a useful overview of the relevant aspects of financing the decommissioning of nuclear facilities. It provides information on cost estimation for decommissioning, as well as details about funding mechanisms and the management of funds based on current practice in NEA member countries.
International development cooperation is in crisis. Questions abound: is it effective? Is it even useful? After ten years of "aid fatigue", here is a lucid, constructive book that sheds new light on the problems, and makes proposals for reform that are both thoughtful and innovative. Jean-David Naudet's analysis is a genuine contribution to the literature on aid. He combines the insight of the sociologist and the experience of the practitioner, with a few enlightening incursions into organization theory.
The book is both pragmatic and concrete, and is based on papers and workshops organized by the Club du Sahel as part of a detailed study of international development cooperation. It is direct in style and easy to read, with a wealth of quotations and examples.
Although it mainly covers the Sahel region, the analysis and proposals for reform are relevant to all of Africa and even other parts of the world. Similarly, the vivid picture it draws of the cooperation and aid relationship is reminiscent of the situation in many countries. "Mr. Naudet is to be congratulated for producing this provocative and hard-hitting book". Elliot Berg. Jean-David Naudet is at present working as an economist at DIAL (Développement et insertion internationale), a scientific interest grouping.
Finland has set one of the most ambitious climate targets in the world, a legal obligation to reach carbon neutrality by 2035. It has made notable progress towards this target, deploying the first new nuclear reactor in Europe in over 15 years and strongly expanding wind generation. Thanks to the progress Finland has made on its clean energy transition, the country has the second lowest share of fossil fuels in its energy supply among IEA members. It is also reducing its reliance on Russian energy imports and ensuring energy security by increasing imports from other countries, raising domestic renewable energy production and improving energy efficiency.
Despite these notable successes in clean energy and energy security, significant challenges remain. Imported fossil fuels still account for over a third of the energy supply while some areas of the Finnish economy, such as transport and key industrial activities, remain dependant on fossil fuels. Also, land use change and forestry in Finland, which have historically offset a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions, became a net source of emissions for the first time in 2021.
In this report, the IEA provides a range of energy policy recommendations to help Finland smoothly manage the transition to a secure, efficient and flexible carbon neutral energy system.
This profile provides a concise and policy-relevant overview of health and the health system in Finland as part of the broader series of the State of Health in the EU country profiles. It provides a short synthesis of: the health status in the country; the determinants of health, focussing on behavioural risk factors; the organisation of the health system; and the effectiveness, accessibility and resilience of the health system.
This profile is the joint work of the OECD and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, in co-operation with the European Commission.
This profile provides a concise and policy-relevant overview of health and the health system in Finland as part of the broader series of the State of Health in the EU country profiles. It provides a short synthesis of: the health status in the country; the determinants of health, focussing on behavioural risk factors; the organisation of the health system; and the effectiveness, accessibility and resilience of the health system. This edition has a special focus on the impact of COVID‑19.
This profile is the joint work of the OECD and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, in co-operation with the European Commission.
This profile provides a concise and policy-focused overview of the state of health and the healthcare system in Finland, as a part of the broader series of Country Health Profiles from the State of Health in the EU initiative. It presents a succinct analysis encompassing the following key aspects: the current health status in Finland; the determinants of health, focusing on behavioural risk factors; the organisation of the Finnish healthcare system; and an evaluation of the health system's effectiveness, accessibility, and resilience. Moreover, the 2023 edition presents a thematic section on the state of mental health and associated services in Finland.
This profile is the collaborative effort of the OECD and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, carried out in cooperation with the European Commission.
Finland’s traditional Nordic model is under pressure: A rapidly ageing society, the global economic crisis and growing societal disillusionment require the public administration to be strategically agile in order to maintain fiscal sustainability and to respond to a complex and rapidly changing environment.
The government’s capacity to act in these difficult times will depend on the public administration’s ability to work together – across all of the public administration at the state and local level, and with society as a whole – in order to sustain success and maintain its global position in the future.
This report is the second in a series of OECD country reviews that look at governance and public management issues from a comprehensive perspective. These reviews help countries to identify how reforms can better reinforce each other in support of overall government objectives. They also examine reform strategies that have worked in other countries and provide advice as to which reforms can be appropriately adapted to a given country.
This report presents a general review of the working of the European Conference of Ministers of Transport and its relations with other international organisations. As well as detailing the sectoral studies undertaken by the Conference the report contains a general review of the transport situation in the ECMT area during the year 1954.
Intergovernmental fiscal frameworks, as considered by the OECD Network on Fiscal Relations Across Levels of Government, are a core driver of inclusive growth. Certain institutions and policies can contribute to a more equitable distribution of economic gains across jurisdictions and income groups, such as equalisation systems. In particular, the quality of public sector outcomes depends on how responsibilities and functions such as education or health care are shared across government levels. This implies that intergovernmental fiscal frameworks, which drive the division of roles of the central and sub-national governments, critically influence growth and the inclusiveness of an economy. This book brings together academics and practitioners to address key aspects of intergovernmental fiscal relations and country experience, as they relate to inclusive growth.
This report looks at the challenges faced by Asian countries in addressing inclusive growth and fiscal decentralisation. A series of studies examines how policies in the region have evolved in accordance with changes in demography and the economic environment, reflecting country characteristics, history and political economy forces.
This collection of experiences of fiscal decentralisation across a wide range of OECD-Member and non-member economies reveals lessons which are equally of relevance to both groups of countries. A major finding is that fiscal decentralisation is often confused in the latter group of countries with the removal of central-government control over subnational finances. This is a mistake; it may lead to fiscal irresponsibility on the part of local authorities, deteriorating fiscal positions at both levels, and high costs due to duplication of fiscal institutions. The book also finds that insufficient attention has been given to local revenue generation, as opposed to intergovernmental transfers.
The issue of fiscal decentralisation in emerging economies is particularly important, because it arises, in part, from a desire to enhance democracy and local accountability. However, the devolution of responsibilities must take place in an atmosphere of transparency, where the local expertise exists to manage budgeting. Serious consideration must be given to revenue sourcing and effective expenditure control. Finally, local spending must match available revenues without becoming an additional strain on central government resources.