Browse by: "2020"

This country policy profile on education in Spain is part of the Education Policy Outlook series. Building on the first country policy profile for Spain (2014), it offers a concise analysis of where the education system stands today in terms of strengths, challenges and ongoing policy efforts, and how this compares to other systems. The profile brings together over a decade's worth of policy analysis by the Education Policy Outlook, as well as the latest OECD data, relevant thematic and country-specific work and other international and national evidence.

This country policy profile on education in Denmark is part of the Education Policy Outlook series. Building on the first country policy profile for Denmark (2014), it offers a concise analysis of where the education system stands today in terms of strengths, challenges and ongoing policy efforts, and how this compares to other systems. The profile brings together over a decade's worth of policy analysis by the Education Policy Outlook, as well as the latest OECD data, relevant thematic and country-specific work and other international and national evidence. It also offers analysis of Denmark’s system's initial responses to the COVID-19 crisis and provides insight into approaches to building greater responsiveness and resilience for the future.

Digital technologies offer immense potential for transforming teacher learning and the delivery of professional development activities throughout teachers’ careers. As the COVID-19 pandemic has made face‑to­‑face professional learning challenging or impossible for teachers to attend in many contexts, online professional learning options for teachers have been receiving renewed attention. This paper puts forward research evidence on the effectiveness of various forms of online learning for teachers and adults, and examines prerequisite conditions for enhancing teacher learning through digital technologies. Teachers’ engagement in online learning activities, as captured by OECD surveys, remained limited in many OECD countries before the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper provides a basis for investigating how policies can support teachers’ engagement in professional learning using digital technologies and help strike a balance between system-level provision of online teacher professional learning opportunities and the facilitation of teacher-led initiatives.

Whether gains from trade are equally distributed within countries is the subject of a lively debate. This paper presents a novel framework to analyse the distributional effects of trade policy by linking the OECD’s CGE trade model, METRO, with consumption expenditure data from household budget surveys. Specifically, this paper describes a methodology to produce a concordance and transition matrix linking GTAP sectors to household survey classifications based on the Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP). A mapping methodology is an important pre-requisite for investigating research questions concerning the influence of household behaviour changes on trade, as well as trade developments and policy on household welfare. The paper provides an illustration of the mapping of trade policy induced price changes onto household expenditures by conducting stylized tariff simulations with METRO and translating those into household expenditures by income decile for selected EU countries.

The increase in market access that the expansion of the road network and the growth of Europe created between 1990 and 2012 raised GDP, employment and attracted population. An increase in market access by 1% increases GDP in a region, on average, by 0.2%, employment by 0.7% and population by 0.6%. The positive effect of market access appears to be the strongest over long-distances, most likely based on trade links that are aided by better access to regions in other countries. Predominantly urban, intermediate and predominantly rural regions benefit equally from improvements in access, however, the investment required to create the same degree of improvement in the three types of regions varies substantially. Northern, Western and Central Europe benefited consistently from market access improvements. Southern European regions with better market access gained population and employment but lacked clear GDP improvements. Conversely, Eastern Europe lost employment and population for market access improvements that occurred in a 3-hour travel time radius but had the highest economic gains in GDP and GDP per capita, 1.7% and 2.2% respectively.

Services trade has become increasingly important, yet its impact on employment has been understudied at present. This paper uses fine-grained data on firm- and worker-level information to shed light on the impact of services trade on employment and wages in the United Kingdom. It finds that firms can benefit from services trade, through increased employment, production and productivity. On average, workers’ wages are also positively impacted by increased services trade. The findings suggest that services imports enhance female wages more than those of males, thereby contributing to narrow the gender wage gap. They also suggest that reduction of services trade barriers in foreign markets with which the United Kingdom trades coincides with higher wages for employees of trading firms in the United Kingdom.

PISA for Development (PISA-D) aims to make the assessment more accessible and relevant to low- and middle-income countries. This report summarises findings from the out-of-school assessment results for PISA-D. By combining the out-of-school assessment with the in-school assessment, PISA-D has been able to achieve a unique perspective on the current skills level and on the challenges that the entire population of 14-16 year-olds face. Seven countries participated in the school-based implementation of PISA-D: Cambodia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Senegal and Zambia.1 Four of them, namely Guatemala, Paraguay, Honduras and Senegal, also participated in the PISA-D out-of-school assessment. Panama took part in the main PISA assessment in 2018 and the PISA-D out-of-school assessment. This report provides an overview of the main results of the out-of-school assessment for the five participating countries, comparing them, where relevant, with those for the in-school students discussed in PISA in Focus #91.

This paper introduces the OECD Weekly Tracker of economic activity for 46 OECD and G20 countries using Google Trends search data. The Tracker performs well in pseudo-real time simulations including around the COVID-19 crisis. The underlying model adds to the previous Google Trends literature in two respects: (1) the data are adjusted for common long-term bias and (2) the data include variables based on both Google Search categories and topics (the latter being a collection of related keywords), thus further exploiting the potential of Google Trends. The paper highlights the predictive power of specific topics, including "bankruptcies", "economic crisis", "investment", "luggage" and "mortgage". Calibration is performed using a neural network that captures non-linear patterns, which are shown to be consistent with economic intuition using machine learning interpretability tools ("Shapley values"). The tracker sheds light on the recent downturn and the dynamics of the rebound, and provides evidence about lasting shifts in consumption patterns.