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Understanding people’s beliefs of social mobility is key to designing and implementing policy mixes that address structural disparities and garner broad public support. Beliefs in social mobility may help strengthen the social contract; however, strongly held views on the role of individual effort in determining success in life can also contribute to diminishing support for policies designed to promote greater opportunity for vulnerable populations and reduce inequality. Drawing on data from the Opportunities module of the 2022 wave of the OECD Risks that Matter survey, this policy insights investigates people’s views of the main determinants of social mobility in 27 OECD countries. On average, 60% of respondents believe that hard work is essential or very important in determining one’s social position. However, of this majority, only one-fifth believe that working hard is the only key factor to success.

Recent discussions have identified gaps in the existing nuclear liability regimes in a more focused fashion. The so-called nuclear renaissance or nuclear new build1 cannot be limited to the mere multiplication of nuclear power plants. It must take place together with the creation and strengthening of legal frameworks for nuclear safety and radiation protection, security and safeguards. As the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD/NEA) highlights in its Nuclear Energy Outlook 2008...

Spatial intelligence concerns the locations of objects, their shapes, their relations, and the paths they take as they move. Recognition of spatial skills enriches the traditional educational focus on developing literacy and numerical skills to include a cognitive domain particularly relevant to achievement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). This report reviews research showing that (a) spatial thinking and STEM learning are related, and (b) spatial thinking is malleable. It evaluates two strategies for exploiting these findings in education. Strategy 1 involves direct training of spatial skills. Strategy 2 involves spatialising the curriculum, using tools suited to spatial thinking including spatial language, maps, diagrams, graphs, analogical comparison, physical activity that instantiates scientific or mathematical principles, gesture and sketching. Existing data support including spatial thinking and tools in designing curricula, training teachers and developing assessments. At the same time research continues to evaluate the effectiveness of the efforts and explore mechanisms.

Mexico has large potential to boost its productivity and attract investment from companies looking to relocate their operations to North America. It also has an historic opportunity to spread the benefits of trade throughout the country, integrate SMEs more forcefully into value chains and to create more and better value chain linkages. Nearshoring is also an opportunity to step up efforts to address and mitigate climate change. Fully realising these opportunities will require addressing long standing challenges related to transport and digital connectivity, regulations, the rule of law, renewable energy and water scarcity.

This report makes a call for why the digital economy matters for developing countries and what they need to consider when developing a national digital strategy. The world is undergoing a digital revolution with significant implications for global economies and livelihoods. This revolution is predicated on the ever-increasing pace of technological innovation and diffusion. Digital technologies and their attendant applications are reshaping whole domains of human activity, and are spreading across the world faster than previous waves of technological innovation. The digital revolution is thus too important for any country to overlook. As outlined in Section II, the digital economy can be harnessed for inclusive and sustainable growth: digital technologies make life easier for citizens and consumers, raise the productivity of workers and firms, and help governments extend key services to those who need them most. However, this does not just happen randomly: governments must engage in strategic planning to maximise the development impact of digitalisation and ensure that its benefits are evenly distributed. Using the experience of leading economies in the digital space, Section III looks at some of the broad and generic enabling factors that developing countries can develop and use as foundations for their digital economies. The concluding section, Section IV, examines three key lessons developing countries can learn from other countries’ digital experiences. It provides some guiding principles around thinking about how to craft a national digital strategy that builds on top of the enablers of the digital economy.

Gender inequalities persist as a global challenge amidst the transition towards a green and digital future. These shifts towards environmental sustainability and digital societies mark a pivotal moment, offering significant opportunities to advance gender equality through new economic prospects and more diverse participation in decision-making processes. However, these transitions also highlight existing gender disparities, such as wage gaps and limited participation in leadership roles in both private and public spheres. In addition, the digital transformation exposes women to technology-facilitated gender-based violence and can increase young individuals' exposure to harmful content, reinforcing negative gender norms and stereotypes. To fully harness the opportunities presented by these global transitions, it is crucial to address labour market inequalities and ensure access to emerging job opportunities. Promoting the skills needed for success in the green, energy, and digital sectors, and integrating gender equality into policies and strategies, are essential steps. This paper, supporting the inaugural OECD Forum on Gender Equality, provides valuable insights into these transitions, highlighting both challenges and opportunities.

We revisit the issue of how best to measure the labour and capital shares in OECD economies, distinguishing between production- and income-based perspectives. The former adopts a producer perspective with gross income as a reference: it uses a production function in a market setting. The latter adopts a consumer perspective with net income as a reference, taking account of depreciation and including taxes and subsidies as perceived by final consumers. We confirm a statistically significant but small decline in the labour share across OECD countries over the past two decades under a production perspective. But this appears to result mainly from a rise in the gross capital share caused by rising depreciation rates. Accordingly, we find little or no decline in the labour share under an income perspective, where income is measured net and after depreciation. Using a novel dataset from Korea, we further dissect the capital share and suggest that in periods of price bubbles of land, rising asset values are a key element behind rising capital shares. We also show how introducing land prices can explain how both labour shares and real prices of investment goods can decline without assuming a large elasticity of substitution between labour and capital.

Many (bad) things have happened to our planet since PISA asked students about the environment more than a decade ago. The global temperature increased, glaciers continued to melt, coral reefs became increasingly endangered, sea levels rose about 3 centimeters, garbage continued piling up in oceans and man-made disasters, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, have added more strains on our fragile planet’s health. Through national and international initiatives, such as the Paris Climate Conference and agreement – also known as COP21 – governments are trying to co-ordinate efforts to protect the environment; but until society is fully aware of the consequences of inaction, the cost of action may appear too high. So, are students increasingly aware of environmental problems? Have 15-year-olds became more optimistic about the future of Earth? And who are the environmentally aware students?