Browse by: "A"

The use of tax incentives that provide preferential tax treatment to the incomes arising from research and development (R&D) and innovation activities, such as intellectual property regimes, has accelerated over the last two decades. The globalisation of R&D together with the greater mobility of intangible income may have contributed to the rise in such incentives to attract and retain R&D and innovation activity while preventing the transfer of taxable base to other countries. This paper documents the changes to the availability and design of income-based tax incentives from 2000 onwards for 48 countries, including all OECD countries and EU countries. Building on this, the paper analyses trends in the generosity of income-based tax support over time by building indicators of effective tax rates that can provide insights into the impact of Action 5 of the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project.

The global spread of COVID-19 has led to unprecedented disruptions in schooling around the world that have animated increased interest among policymakers, educators, researchers and the general public in knowing about how education systems have responded to the pandemic and how students’ learning experiences have changed. The PISA Global Crises Module was developed to address this need. 62 student questionnaire items (grouped into 11 questions) and 68 school questionnaire items (grouped into 14 questions) were developed following a process that involved input from leading questionnaire development experts, PISA National Centres, as well as small-scale cognitive interview studies in three countries. While all countries were affected by the pandemic in some way, the module seeks to illuminate differential effects on student learning and well-being, and the degree of interruption or changes to education across different education systems. Governing bodies, organisations and researchers can use the instruments and the descriptions of the underlying constructs for adaptation and broader implementation.

2010 was a landmark year for the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in many ways. It marked 50 years since the DAC was founded, it was the year Eckhard Deutscher handed over the Chair to Brian Atwood, and it marked the coming of age of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. In this article, the out-going DAC Chair reflects on the lessons of the past and concludes that despite the many changes and new challenges, development co-operation is as relevant today as ever. He sets three key priorities for the DAC and its members as they embark on the next 50 years. These are to stay true to the commitments made to increase aid volumes, continue to be guided by the principles of effective aid in an increasingly complex context, and reach out to all providers of development co-operation in the effort to create an effective global development partnership.

Developing countries are already suffering from the health, social and economic consequences of the coronavirus. A looming debt crisis would be catastrophic. On 15 April 2020, G20 finance ministers agreed to a debt “standstill” for 2020. This policy paper aims to illustrate the impact of this decision on donors and developing countries, including an assessment of the countries that will bear the burden of immediate debt service suspension. While successful at alleviating immediate liquidity pressures, this policy should be followed by country-by-country analyses of sustainability.

This report reflects discussions at the OECD conference “AI: Intelligent Machines, Smart Policies” held in Paris on 26-27 October, 2017. After discussing the state of Artificial intelligence (AI) research – in particular ‘machine learning’ –, speakers illustrated the opportunities that AI provides to improve economies and societies, in areas ranging from scientific discovery and satellite data analysis to music creation. There was broad agreement that the rapid development of AI calls for national and international policy frameworks that engage all stakeholders. Discussions focused on the need for policy to facilitate the adoption of AI systems to promote innovation and growth, help address global challenges, and boost jobs and skills development, while at the same time establishing appropriate safeguards to ensure that AI systems are human-centric and benefit people broadly. Transparency and oversight, algorithmic discrimination and privacy abuses were key concerns, as were new liability, responsibility, security and safety questions.

This study explores feasibility of regional rice market integration by examining the impacts on production and trade, with a specific focus on the adjustment impacts for rice producers. It seeks to set out policy measures required to better integrate the rice markets of Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN) countries and the role that trade policy can play to help the agricultural sector adjust to pressures created from freer trade in rice within this region. While regional rice market integration can deliver more rice at lower prices to the regions consumers, this study finds significant adjustments to the rice sectors will be required in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. However, opportunities through lowering tariff barriers with existing key trading partners of free trade agreements has the scope to create more employment and value adding opportunities in all agricultural sectors to offset the losses from regional rice market integration. The study suggests a number of measures are necessary to build trust in regional markets to allow rice market integration to take place. This includes an agreement to ban export restrictions. Furthermore, while broader trade reforms will help create new opportunities for agricultural sectors across the ASEAN region, flanking policies and investments in the enabling environment are still required for the sectors to take full advantage of these opportunities.

The main purpose of this workshop was to take the first steps in considering whether the general approaches which have been used in the past by the Working Group, primarily to address the safety/ risk assessment of transgenic plants, could be applicable to similar work on the safety/ risk assessment of transgenic fish.The objective of the workshop was to identify and review the kinds of (and availability of) baseline information of (non-transgenic) from traditional fish farming or breeding, and to determine what information might be relevant to risk/ safety assessment; and what information might be needed for the development of a biology document. The overall approach used by the Workshop was similar to that done to first identify and circumscribe the issues about crop species that would inform a risk/safety assessment of the same species after it had been transformed.

In most countries, current human rights monitoring mechanisms are primarily based on reporting of individual cases, by victims or NGOs, to Human Rights Institutions or tribunals, as well as on judicial decisions.As it has been mentioned in Chapter 1, this form of monitoring can certainly be very effective and useful for purposes of advocacy on individual cases, but it cannot provide information on the dimension and trends of specific forms of human rights violations.

This paper draws on two empirical studies to consider the impacts of policy change on academic identities in the United Kingdom. It thus offers a limited examination of claims that social, political and economic transformations at the end of the 20th century have undermined the structures and relationships, within which academic identities have been sustained, particularly those of the discipline and the higher education institution. Its main conclusions are that academic identities remained surprisingly stable in the period under study, although the longer-term outlook remains uncertain.

This article explores the changing roles and personal characteristics of deans of faculties and heads of academic departments in Australian higher education institutions over a twenty-year period from 1977 to 1997. While deans and heads continued to be academics with superior qualifications and impressive research achievements, the gap between the research records of deans/heads and other academics narrowed between 1977 and 1997 but the gap between deans/heads and professors widened. Deans/heads in 1997 were somewhat less likely than in 1977 to have been professors or associate professors. Work patterns of deans/heads and other academics remained remarkably stable between 1977 and 1997, except that for both works hours per week increased. However, interest by both deans/heads and other academics in administration and committee work declined sharply between 1977 and 1997.

The impacts of market-related policies and revenues on higher education are not uniform but globalisation has opened most institutions to new pressures. The public funding models developed 50 years ago underestimated the full cost of mass higher education as an entitlement while the sheer scale of resources needed to sustain a comprehensive research university demand a more nuanced balance of research and teaching for most institutions. These same pressures threaten equitable access if rising tuition fees are not fully matched by adequate need-based financial aid while in the absence of tuition pressures, unfunded increases in student participation undermines the quality of higher education. In this environment, justifications of increased funding are often based on utilitarian goals affecting the motives of research and scholarship and distorting the balance of curricular developments. In contrast, the increased range of revenue streams has created opportunities for more creative and less regulated institutional priorities. The potential impacts of private interests on higher education are well recognised but a politically vulnerable and often singular dependency on state funding is also capable of deflecting academic values. As institutions of higher education clarify their values to cope with global pressures to provide mass higher education and to meet the needs of the knowledge economy, they must also serve as places of imagination, innovation, disputation, scepticism and questioning. Those values are also critical as leaders in higher education attempt to confront themselves with the changes that they themselves need to make to their institutions.