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Ageing involves not one but several transitions. People move from working to not working, from relying upon labour income to relying on transfers. They also tend to live in smaller households, not only because any children will have moved away but also because, at some stage, a spouse dies. People move homes and sometimes they move back to live with their now grown-up children.
This paper examines the wellbeing of people as they pass through the later stages of their life and through different labour market statuses and domestic statuses. It examines and compares nine countries – Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. It draws particularly from a special analysis of micro-data sets that report on incomes, but it complements this with an analysis of data on wealth, on consumption, on housing and on the use of in-kind services provided by the state.
The paper is original in more than one way. First, its analysis is based upon the ...
While young people are leaving education more qualified than ever before, in many countries they are struggling to compete for jobs in the labour market. Compared to older workers, young people tend to have less work experience, fewer useful contacts and less know-how about how to get a job. Young people face additional challenges in preparing for online recruitment processes. There are however, things that secondary schools can do to help students get a job and ongoing analysis of national longitudinal surveys in four countries reveal associations with better employment outcomes. This paper looks at how school can:
- Demystify the recruitment process
- Teach students how to apply for jobs
- Help them prepare to succeed in job interviews.
After three decades of public financial management reforms, around three quarters of OECD countries are using accrual accounting with some adopting accrual budgeting as well (OECD Accruals 2016 Survey). This is however a sensitive time: questions are increasingly being raised on the cost and usefulness of accrual reforms, whose impacts on public management and performance are not obvious to many stakeholders. Against this background, this study brings together the experience of eleven countries that have introduced accrual accounting and/or accrual budgeting into their public sector. It aims at summarizing initial objectives of accrual reforms, countries’ own assessment of how well these objectives have been achieved and propose recommendations on how finance ministries should go about achieving maximum outcomes from their transition to accrual accounting.
JEL code : H50, H60, H83
Keywords : accrual accounting, accrual reform, budgeting, transparency, performance
This note updates Trade facilitation and the COVID-19 pandemic from April 2020 with insights into the evolution of new border protocols and trade facilitation measures impacting traders since COVID-19 and exploring what more can be done to prepare for the next stages of the pandemic as uncertainty persists. It highlights the importance of transparency and availability of timely trade-related information in mapping bottlenecks and risks, as well as the importance of trade facilitation measures in supporting business recovery and resilience across different goods sectors. Finally, it provides some preliminary insights for trade facilitation with respect to the distribution of vaccines.
This paper delivers new evidence for European countries on the role of a wide range of policies for workers’ mobility in terms of hiring transitions into jobs, with an emphasis on differences across socio-economic groups. Labour market transitions are relevant in the current context where the ongoing recovery from the COVID-19 crisis is characterised by labour shortages and at the same time still low employment in a number of countries. The analysis focuses on the probability to transition from unemployment and selected forms of inactivity (e.g. fulfilling domestic tasks, studying) to jobs and from one job to another. Results of this work show the strong association between hiring flows and the business cycle with specific patterns during recoveries, recessions and expansions. The analysis further reveals that a broad range of policies influence hiring transitions, such as labour market policies, taxes and social support programmes but also product market regulations and regulations affecting certain professions. Country-specific priorities will vary depending on context, challenges and social preferences. Yet common policy objectives at the current recovery context are likely to improve the job prospects of the non-employed, especially youth, low-skilled and women, to help the recovery, foster reallocation and to address labour shortages.
Revamping fiscal relations across levels of government is of paramount importance in supporting fiscal consolidation and public sector effectiveness. This paper analyses a number of problems, including regulations that limit local governments’ ability to innovate and respond to local citizens’ preferences, the inefficient system of intergovernmental grants, the complex structure of local taxes and fiscal rules which are too lenient to secure fiscal discipline. The paper concludes that the grant system should be reformed to promote local governments’ incentives to introduce innovations so as to better respond to needs at lower cost. Barriers to the effective use of sub-national governments’ taxing powers should be removed while efforts should be made to keep the tax system as simple and neutral as possible. Existing fiscal rules and market instruments should be hardened. This would require that the central government state clearly that it will not intervene as a lender of last ...
Employer engagement is fundamental to career guidance. Research studies shows that school activities like career talks and workplace visits that involve people from workplaces are often linked with better employment outcomes. Many young people though have limited opportunity to engage with employers and people in work while still in school. This policy brief draws on international practice and evidence, including new analysis exploring the impact of employer engagement on student transitions into work, to ask:
- Why engage employers in career guidance?
- What does good employer engagement looks like?
- How to deliver employer engagement effectively, efficiently and equitably?
The paper also highlights ways in which schools are using online technologies to enhance student access to employers within career guidance.
Estonia is highly integrated into the global trade system: it exports approximately 80% of GDP and around half of domestic employment is sustained by foreign demand. Given that international trade and foreign direct investment are considered as major channels of technology diffusion and productivity growth, this bodes well for reviving income convergence. To capitalize on the country’s high trade intensity, policymakers need to remove remaining trade barriers and improve policies fostering knowledge diffusion as well as talent retention and attraction. At the same time, to ensure that benefits of more trade are shared across the population, the social safety net should be bolstered, and participation in upskilling programmes and their labour-market relevance increased.
This Working Paper relates to the 2017 OECD Economic Survey of New Zealand (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-estonia.htm).
Ghana’s agricultural sector has two faces. On the one hand, Ghana continues to face food security problems due to stagnating productivity in the food crop sector and undeveloped internal food markets. On the other hand, horticultural exports have been increasing and recent investments in cocoa and pineapple processing can been seen as signs of an emerging modern agricultural sector. The horticultural sector currently receives a lot of attention from donors and the Ghanaian government. The examination of several large donor projects in this sector reveals that donors are increasingly taking a value chain approach and trying to link smallholder farmers to exporters via outgrower schemes. Donors are also making an effort to connect their projects with other ongoing interventions. However, donor approaches vary according to donor preferences, and multi-donor programmes would probably be a better solution. While the current focus of donors and the Ghanaian government in the horticultural sector is welcome, it bears the risk of leaving the north of Ghana, where food crop production and poverty are concentrated, further behind. Food crops should receive more attention not only to resolve Ghana’s food security problem but also to take advantage of growing demand from Ghana’s middle-income class, which provides the opportunity for developing a local food industry.
The rapid emergence of gig economy platforms that use digital technologies to intermediate labour on a per-task basis has triggered an intense policy debate about the economic and social implications. This paper takes stock of the emerging evidence. The results suggest that gig economy platforms’ size remains modest (1-3 per cent of overall employment). Their growth has been most pronounced in a small number of services industries with high shares of own-account workers, suggesting that thus far they have been a substitute for traditional self-employment rather than dependent employment. New evidence provided in this paper is consistent with positive effects of platform growth on overall employment and small negative or insignificant effects on dependent employment and wages. While most empirical studies suggest that platforms are more efficient in matching workers to clients, reductions in barriers to work could offset such productivity-enhancing effects by creating employment opportunities for low-productivity workers. Fully reaping the potential benefits from gig economy platforms while protecting workers and consumers requires adapting existing policy settings in product and labour markets and applying them to traditional businesses and platforms on an equal footing.
Throughout the world, teachers and schools are responding to one of the greatest disruptions to education systems in living memory. Routines and practices they have followed for decades have been changed, overhauled or suppressed to reduce the risk of contagion for students, teachers and parents, while ensuring continuity of teaching and learning. This puts the role and importance of teachers in the spotlight, while adding new demands and pressures to an already delicate job. When the COVID-19 crisis struck, teachers in many education systems had to teach in a new context of online contact and uncertainty over the reopening of schools. When schools opened again, they did so amidst varying safety measures and the constant threat of school closures. All this is likely to have substantially affected teachers’ job satisfaction and stress.
This paper forms part of an OECD project which addresses the issue of the cost of reducing CO2 emissions by comparing the results from six global models of a set of standardised reduction scenarios. The project provides evidence on: i)projected carbon dioxide emissions through the next century, and ii) the carbon taxes and output costs entailed in reducing these emissions ...
Both the magnitude and the composition of capital flows from rich to poor countries have changed markedly over the past decade. While official flows have stagnated, private flows have mushroomed and portfolio investment and bank lending have grown more rapidly than foreign direct investment (FDI), though with much higher volatility. Given the impact of investment decisions on patterns of resource use (including the environment), what are the implications of these trends?
A bricks–and–mortar investment by a multinational corporation (MNC) requires consideration of environmental impacts in a way that neither a bank loan nor portfolio investment does. The evidence suggests that foreign direct investment (FDI), especially by large MNCs, is not concentrated in “dirty” industries, and where it does go into such sectors environmental performance of MNCs is usually above local standards. For smaller OECD investors, reliance on public–sector investment guarantee and insurance agencies can ...
The aim of this paper is to analyse the implications of the European Commission proposal of a mixed energy cum carbon tax to curb CO2 emissions from a global perspective. The paper deals with the effects of this proposal on emissions and welfare in both the EC and the rest of the world by concentrating on three main issues: i) the effectiveness of the proposed tax measures in terms of curbing EC and global CO2 emissions; ii) the implied costs for the EC and the other countries/regions of the world; and iii) the implications of the EC proposal for the world distribution of emissions and the competitiveness of the EC economy. In this connection, the relevance of the so-called "carbon leakages" -- i.e. the displacement of polluting activities from countries participating in an emission reduction agreement to countries not concerned by the agreement -- is examined. The paper provides quantitative answers to these issues using simulations with GREEN, the global dynamic applied general ...