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Based on the OECD standard methodology, the study presents quantitative estimates of government support to consumers and producers of coal, oil and related petroleum products and natural gas, and electricity and heat generated from these fossil fuels. This report summarises the main findings of the analysis of fossil-fuel subsidy schemes in the six European Union's Eastern Partner (EaP) countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. The study updates the 2018 Inventory of Energy Subsidies in the EU’s Eastern Partnership Countries by providing data and estimates for 2016‑19. The analysis focuses on measuring two major types of fossil-fuel subsidies: direct transfers of funds to producers and consumers; and tax expenditure. This report also briefly discusses the taxation and energy pricing policies that have had direct or indirect impact on the evolution of fossil-fuel subsidies in the region. Detailed estimates of all individual support measures for each of the six countries are provided in Annexes to the report.
Fostering SME development and digital transformation helps increase productivity, in turn fostering stronger, more diversified and dynamic economies. The Government of Georgia has made significant policy efforts in recent years to build an environment conducive to private-sector development and entrepreneurship, and to support small and medium-sized enterprises in particular. The OECD has supported this reform impetus, working closely with the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development to help identify gaps and develop relevant measures to create a conducive policy environment for Georgian SMEs.
As climate change increases exposure to natural disasters, countries need new solutions to mitigate risks of natural hazards. For many in Asia and the Pacific, mobilising existing resources is not enough: they need to consider a grand design of disaster risk financing strategies. Catastrophe bonds (CAT bonds) can be an effective, market-based financing tool for the region. While the global CAT bond market has grown steadily since the 1990s, it remains weakly developed in Asia and the Pacific. Its successful development there requires robust purpose-built legal frameworks; developed general bond markets, especially in local currency; appropriate capacity building; and data-driven pricing models. This report explores each of these conditions along with policy suggestions for fostering them, and discusses the development of multi-country CAT bonds in Asia and the Pacific.
What does policy coherence for development mean? Increasing global integration through trade, capital and labour mobility brings increasing mutual responsibilities and mutual policy repercussions. These realities call for greater coherence between the various OECD country policies that shape and impact today’s rapidly evolving global economy.
The essays in this volume address controversial policy issues affecting development today, ranging from increasing capital flows, financial regulation and socially responsible investment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. This collection represents an important contribution to the knowledge of the effects of interdependence and policy coherence on the relationship between OECD countries and the developing world.
What is "entrepreneurship"? It is much more than the competition and risk taking of starting your own business. Enterprises create jobs and wealth. Without the dynamism they bring to the economy, the challenges of globalisation and structural change would be all but insurmountable. Fostering entrepreneurship means channelling entrepreneurial drive into a dynamic process which takes advantage of all the opportunities the economy can provide. This book analyses the factors that favour entrepreneurship and the obstacles that hinder it. It is the first to provide an international synthesis of entrepreneurship policies undertaken in countries as diverse as Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United States. Despite varying degrees of entrepreneurship from one country to another, international comparisons show that success comes from a synergy between a conducive institutional environment, well-designed government programmes and supportive cultural factors. To flourish, entrepreneurship requires efficient financial markets, a flexible labour market, a simpler and more transparent corporate taxation system and bankruptcy rules better adapted to the realities of the business world. This book examines experiences in all of these fields, as well as addressing the increasingly important roles played by local and regional authorities, the contribution of entrepreneurship in the non-profit sector, and the emergence of entrepreneurship in transition economies. Clearly, the right balance between these factors is not easy to strike. But strike it we must, because fostering entrepreneurship is not only a major economic imperative but also an urgent challenge that must be met to reconcile the goals of economic growth and social cohesion. This book is the most recent in a series on the OECD Jobs Strategy and an integral part of this international organisation’s broader mission to develop public policies to help OECD economies adapt to structural change and globalisation. This publication was prepared under the supervision of the OECD’s Territorial Development Service.
Knowledge investment supporting the adoption of environmentally friendly farm practices is a key driver behind innovation processes in agriculture, yet impact evaluations and financial assessments of existing initiatives remain scarce despite dramatic changes in orientation, organisation and intervention. This report examines the role, performance and impact of farm advisory services, training and extension initiatives in the OECD area to foster green growth in agriculture. Based on a series of case studies, the report discusses a range of methodological issues and the merits of the different types of providers, and identifies best practices in sustainable agricultural management.
Innovation is key to green growth. It helps decouple growth from natural capital depletion and contributes to economic growth and job creation. Business is the driver of innovation, but governments need to provide clear and stable market signals, e.g. through carbon pricing. This book explores policy actions for the deployment of new technologies and innovations as they emerge: investment in research and development, support for commercialisation, strengthening markets and fostering technology diffusion. Competition will be essential to bring out the best solutions.
Public sector innovation does not happen by itself: problems need to be identified, and ideas translated into projects that can be tested, implemented and shared. To do so, public sector organisations must identify the processes and structures that can support and accelerate innovation. This report looks at how governments can create an environment that fosters innovation. It discusses the role of government management in inhibiting or enabling innovation, and the role that specific functions such as human resources management and budgeting can play. It suggests ways to support innovation – including by managing information, data and knowledge – as well as strategies for managing risk. Drawing on country approaches compiled and analysed by the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, the report presents a framework for collecting and examining data on the ability of central government to foster public sector innovation.
This report reviews economic concepts of innovation, research and development (R&D), productivity and competitiveness, and their linkages. It then discusses evidence on developments in productivity and competitiveness in the agricultural and food processing sectors and on the relationship between agricultural productivity and farm size, factor intensity, farm specialisation, human capital, consumer demand, the natural environment, investments in general infrastructures and R&D, regulations, and agricultural policies. It describes developments in public and private investments in agricultural R&D and outlines their positive impact on productivity growth. Finally, it suggests an “innovation systems” approach would help understand better how innovation translates into productivity growth.
The engines of economic growth in Russia remain concentrated in industries dependent on exports of raw commodities. To achieve sustainable long-term growth, Russia needs to diversify its economic activities, and boosting innovation needs to be a central objective of the diversification. This book assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the Russian innovation system and formulates concrete policy recommendations with a focus on public-private partnerships.
Creativity and critical thinking are key skills for complex, globalised and increasingly digitalised economies and societies. While teachers and education policy makers consider creativity and critical thinking as important learning goals, it is still unclear to many what it means to develop these skills in a school setting. To make it more visible and tangible to practitioners, the OECD worked with networks of schools and teachers in 11 countries to develop and trial a set of pedagogical resources that exemplify what it means to teach, learn and make progress in creativity and critical thinking in primary and secondary education. Through a portfolio of rubrics and examples of lesson plans, teachers in the field gave feedback, implemented the proposed teaching strategies and documented their work. Instruments to monitor the effectiveness of the intervention in a validation study were also developed and tested, supplementing the insights on the effects of the intervention in the field provided by the team co-ordinators.
What are the key elements of creativity and critical thinking? What pedagogical strategies and approaches can teachers adopt to foster them? How can school leaders support teachers' professional learning? To what extent did teachers participating in the project change their teaching methods? How can we know whether it works and for whom? These are some of the questions addressed in this book, which reports on the outputs and lessons of this international project.
Brazil made significant progress in managing water resources since the adoption of the National Water Law in 1997 and the creation of the National Water and Sanitation Agency (ANA) in 2000. Nevertheless, water security challenges persist and will be aggravated by megatrends such as climate change, population growth, urbanisation, and the economic, social and environmental consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report calls for a modern approach to water security, balancing supply and demand management, grey and green infrastructure, and risk management and resilience while embracing a holistic view that connects water to other strategic areas such as environment, land use and territorial development. The report builds on a decade of policy dialogue between the OECD and the National Water and Sanitation Agency (ANA) of Brazil. It provides an action plan to support the country to: (1) shift from a risk-based approach to a resilience approach to understand vulnerabilities and minimise the duration and magnitude of failures; (2) make river basin organisations deliver and use economic instruments to tackle water risks; and (3) accompany infrastructure development with regulatory oversight and monitoring.
In the field of long-term radioactive waste management, projects to construct repositories normally last from decades to centuries. Such projects will inevitably have an effect on the host community from the planning stage to the end of construction and beyond. The key to a long-lasting and positive relationship between a site and its host community is ensuring that solutions are reached together throughout the entire process. The sustainability of radioactive waste management solutions can potentially be achieved through design and implementation of a facility that provides added cultural and amenity value, as well as economic opportunities, to the local community.
This second edition of Fostering a Durable Relationship Between a Waste Management Facility and its Host Community: Adding Value Through Design and Process highlights new innovations in siting processes and in facility design – functional, cultural and physical – from different countries, which could be of added value to host communities and their sites in the short to long term. These new features are examined from the perspective of sustainability, with a focus on increasing the likelihood that people will both understand the facility and its functions, and remember what is located at the site.
This 2015 update by the NEA Forum on Stakeholder Confidence will be beneficial in designing paths forward for local or regional communities, as well as for national radioactive waste management programmes.
This proceedings of the first topic covered during the Fourth International Symposium on theory and practice in transport economics covers choice between private and public transport, with papers covering the psychological factors, organization of transport facilties, and the role of cost.
This proceedings of the first topic covered during the Fourth International Symposium on theory and practice in transport economics covers choice between private and public transport, with papers covering the psychological factors, organization of transport facilties, and the role of cost.
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 1957.
By 2015, half of the world’s people living on less than USD 1.25 a day will be in fragile states. While poverty has decreased globally, progress on Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1 is slower in fragile states than in other developing countries. Fragile states are also off-track to meet the rest of the MDGs by 2015.
Fragile situations became a central concern of the international development and security agenda in the 1990s. Since then, powerful forces have been influencing the causes and manifestations of fragility, including the combination of democratic aspirations, new technologies, demographic shifts and climate change. The last five years have been especially tumultuous, encompassing the 2008 food, fuel and financial crisis and the Arab Spring, which began in 2011.
These events have influenced the international debate on the nature, relevance and implications of fragility. While situations of fragility clearly have common elements – including poverty, inequality and vulnerability – how can we make sense of the great diversity in their national income, endowment in natural resources or historical trajectories? How do we move towards a more substantive concept of fragility that goes beyond a primary focus on the quality of government policies and institutions to include a broader picture of the economy and society? This publication takes stock of i) the evolution of fragility as a concept, ii) analyses of financial flows to and within fragile states between 2000 and 2010, and iii) trends and issues that are likely to shape fragility in the years to come.Evaluation is the foundation of evidence-based policy. Yet there is a dearth of reliable impact evaluation in the area of SME and entrepreneurship policy. This publication issues OECD guidance on how governments can promote reliable SME and entrepreneurship policy evaluation. It emphasises practices including using control groups, setting clear policy objectives and targets and accounting for business survival and non-survival. It shows that reliable evaluation of SME and entrepreneurship policy is increasingly accessible given improvements in data and techniques in recent years and illustrates this with examples of 50 reliable evaluations across many SME and entrepreneurship policy areas and 28 OECD countries. Overall, the publication issues a call for more systematic and reliable evaluation of SME and entrepreneurship policies following the guidance offered.
The publication also examines the findings of reliable evaluations internationally, including meta evaluations. The evidence is mixed but generally more robust and consistent for policies to improve access to finance than in the provision of training and advisory services. Some policies have positive impacts on key measures whereas others do not. The reasons are explored, including variations in the targeting of policies and in policy delivery approaches.
On the surface there is agreement, sustainable development refers to a broad set of issues, going beyond the relationship between the economy and the environment to encompass human and social concerns. Scratch the surface and you open a Pandora's box of differing notions of sustainability and means of achieving it. How can progress towards sustainable development be measured then? The major difficulty in developing indicators to track progress towards sustainable development is not the lack of data but rather the lack of frameworks to organise and synthesize existing information. This volume brings together a number of approaches to this question pursued in academia, national administrations and international organisations, as presented at an expert workshop held at the OECD headquarters in September 1999. These approaches include developments of the traditional national accounts system, construction of synthetic measures of sustainability such as "genuine savings", physical measures of material flows, and selections of indicators based on variants of the "pressure, state, response" model. This volume also reviews a number of initiatives undertaken within the OECD to monitor trends in the sustainability of specific sectors and sub-national areas.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) regularly conducts in-depth peer reviews of the energy policies of its member countries. This process supports energy policy development and encourages the exchange of international best practices and experiences.
In 2019, France put its target to reach net zero emissions by 2050 into law and updated its energy transition framework the following year with a new National Low-Carbon Strategy and 10-year energy plan. However, France’s energy transition has experienced significant delays, and implementation remains challenging despite the many reforms underway. Moreover, new European Union climate goals will compel the French government to upgrade its 2030 targets and track progress more stringently.
For decades, French power generation has produced a relatively low level of carbon dioxide emissions compared with similar economies, owing to the significant share of nuclear energy. However, the country’s nuclear fleet is ageing, and overall emissions are rising because energy consumption across the economy as a whole remains dominated by fossil fuels, notably in transport. Maintaining low-carbon power generation as a base for further decarbonisation and electrification requires timely decisions on the future electricity mix and accelerated investments.
France’s economic recovery plan from the Covid-19 crisis and its 2030 investment plan will help accelerate its energy transition by driving progress in sustainable mobility, building retrofits and hydrogen.
This report includes a series of recommendations to support France’s efforts to tackle these challenges and to meet its energy and climate goals.