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Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) provisions and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) generally raise trade costs, but by providing a positive signal to consumers that enhances confidence in imported products they can also expand trade. This paper seeks to identify which specific elements of SPS and TBT measures are particularly trade enhancing. It investigates the trade cost and trade enhancing effects of SPS and TBT measures along with other types of NTMs in agricultural trade. It provides estimations on the quantity and price effects on 34 SPS and 24 TBT measures.
The econometric results show that technical measures can increase import prices of agricultural products by nearly 15%, most of which comes from restriction or special authorisation for TBT or SPS reasons, such as registration requirements. Conformity assessment also tends to significantly increase the cost of trade. Trade enhancing effects are identified for labelling and packaging requirements, which are also the measures with relatively low associated trade costs
A large majority of summary indicators derived from the individual responses to qualitative Business Tendency Surveys (which are mostly three-modality questions) result from standard aggregation and quantification methods. This is typically the case for the indicators called balances of opinion, which are currently used in short term analysis and considered by forecasters as explanatory variables in many models. In the present paper, we discuss a new statistical approach to forecast the manufacturing growth from firm-survey responses. We base our predictions on a forecasting algorithm inspired by the random forest regression method, which is known to enjoy good prediction properties. Our algorithm exploits the heterogeneity of the survey responses, works fast, is robust to noise and allows for the treatment of missing values. Starting from a real application on a French dataset related to the manufacturing sector, this procedure appears as a competitive method compared with traditional algorithms.
One of the most serious challenges facing any international legal institution in the present era of globalisation is the adoption of adequate written laws that address the issues faced by the international community. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is the principal forum to develop international legal norms to regulate the worldwide peaceful and safe use of nuclear energy – as well as to ensure the uniformity of standards and compliance with such norms. This study is an attempt to look, in particular, at one aspect of this diversified normative spectrum, created to shape an adequate legal and regulatory framework for peaceful nuclear activities.
The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid post-war industrialisation was not sustained beyond the mid-1960s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during the next three decades, during which trend growth declined and turned negative as Soviet support ended and the terms of trade with China became less friendly. Today, GDP in North Korea is reportedly lower than in 1990, notwithstanding a larger population, and gross national income per capita is probably down to only a tiny fraction of South Korea’s.
This paper examines explicit northern and Arctic connectivity policies in Canada, recognising the vital importance of air services in economic and social life. It comments on existing legislation, regulations, policies and programmes of the federal government as well as of Canada’s three northern territories. It also looks at recommendations from past transport policy reviews.
Norway’s success in maintaining high living standards, low inequality and good progress in gender balance owes much to its business sector. High-productivity business-sector jobs support high wages and profits, providing capacity to fund comprehensive public services and inclusive employment practices. Ensuring that the business sector thrives as globalisation and technologies evolve further and as the oil and gas sector enters long-term decline requires maintaining business-friendly conditions. This paper examines framework conditions, notably competition legislation and policy affecting firm entry and exit (“firm dynamics”). It evaluates how best to encourage new business models, as well the growing issue of labour supply among older cohorts. Education policy’s role in providing skills conducive to good lifetime earnings is also discussed.
Teachers’ time is a critical resource for education systems and a key input for student learning. Like any type of resource, teachers’ time can be used more or less effectively to promote a range of outcomes such as student learning, equity and well-being. Whether teachers are given an additional hour in the classroom, an hour to prepare their lessons or an hour to engage in professional learning can affect both the cost and the quality of education. Based on OECD survey data and indicators, this paper provides a systematic overview of how teachers across the OECD report using their time and how their time use is regulated in national policy frameworks. Building on the findings from the OECD School Resources Review series, the paper then explores human resource policies that can support education stakeholders in rethinking priorities, roles and responsibilities in school education and promote an effective use of teachers’ time.
The paper discusses the implications of recent advances in artificial intelligence for knowledge workers, focusing on possible complementarities and substitution between machine translation tools and language professionals. The emergence of machine translation tools could enhance social welfare through enhanced opportunities for inter-language communication but also create new threats because of persisting low levels of accuracy and quality in the translation output. The paper uses data on online job vacancies to map the evolution of the demand for language professionals between 2015 and 2019 in 10 countries and illustrates the set of skills that are considered important by employers seeking to hire language professionals through job vacancies posted on line.
This paper presents a dynamic factor model that produces nowcasts and backcasts of Irish quarterly GDP using timely data from a panel dataset of 35 indicators. We apply a recently developed methodology, whereby numerous potentially useful indicator series for Irish GDP can be availed of in a parsimonious manner and the unsynchronised nature of the release calendar for a wide range of higher frequency indicators can be handled. The nowcasts in this paper are generated by using dynamic factor analysis to extract common factors from the panel dataset. Bridge equations are then used to relate these factors to quarterly GDP estimates. We conduct an out-of-sample forecasting simulation exercise, where the results of the nowcasting exercise are compared with those of a standard benchmark model.
The increasing importance of services trade in the global economy contrasts with the lack of timely data to monitor recent developments. The nowcasting models developed in this paper are aimed at providing insights into current changes in total services trade, as recorded in monthly statistics of the G7 countries. Combining machine-learning techniques and dynamic factor models, the methodology exploits traditional data and Google Trends search data. No single model outperforms the others, but a weighted average of the best models combining machine-learning with dynamic factor models seems to be a promising avenue. The best models improve one-step ahead predictive performance relative to a simple benchmark by 30-35% on average across G7 countries and trade flows. Nowcasting models are estimated to have captured about 67% of the fall in services exports due to the COVID-19 shock and 60% of the fall in imports on average across G7 economies.
The OECD Income Distribution Database (IDD) plays a leading role in providing evidence, and in monitoring and analysing international income distribution statistics to inform policy debate. In most OECD countries, official income distribution statistics are usually delivered with time lags varying from two to three years. This paper examines the growing use by statistical offices of nowcasting techniques based on microsimulation models to produce more timely provisional estimates, and examines the advantages and challenges associated with these techniques. The paper also presents provisional estimates of income inequality in 2020 for a selection of OECD countries, based on a compilation carried out by the OECD Secretariat in collaboration with Eurostat and national statistical offices. Finally, it discusses potential future developments and applications of these techniques.
Trade in value added (TiVA) indicators are increasingly used to monitor countries’ integration into global supply chains. However, they are published with a significant lag - often two or three years - which reduces their relevance for monitoring recent economic developments. This paper aims to provide more timely insights into the international fragmentation of production by exploring new ways of nowcasting five TiVA indicators for the years 2021 and 2022 covering a panel of 41 economies at the economy-wide level and for 24 industry sectors. The analysis relies on a range of models, including Gradient boosted trees (GBM), and other machine-learning techniques, in a panel setting, uses a wide range of explanatory variables capturing domestic business cycles and global economic developments and corrects for publication lags to produce nowcasts in quasi-real time conditions. Resulting nowcasting algorithms significantly improve compared to the benchmark model and exhibit relatively low prediction errors at a one- and two-year horizon, although model performance varies across countries and sectors.
The way in which nuclear licensees’ organisations are structured and resourced clearly has a potential impact on nuclear safety. As experience has continually demonstrated, operating organisations with a strong training programme for personnel, adequate resourcing and overall effective leadership and management perform more effectively in times of crisis than those lacking in one or more of these areas. In parallel, the nuclear industry is developing new resource deployment strategies which are making increased use of contractors and leading to changes in organisational structure, which in turn create challenges for the continued safe operation of nuclear facilities. This technical opinion paper represents the consensus among human and organisational factor specialists in NEA member and associated countries on the methods, approaches and good practices to be followed in designing an organisation with a strong safety focus while meeting business needs. It also considers some of the attributes that an organisation which is effectively managing its resources and capabilities might demonstrate.
In April 2009, 61 states and seven international organisations with a total of 808 participants and observers convened in Beijing at an international ministerial conference, organised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in co-sponsorship with the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD/NEA), to deal with nuclear energy in the 21st century.1 In his concluding statement, the president of that conference stressed that “the conference recognizes the positive momentum towards nuclear power and the decisions by many developed and developing states to pursue the use of nuclear energy”.2 According to the Director General of the IAEA, more than 60 countries declared their interest in launching nuclear power programmes.
This report discusses some of the basic principles and criteria that a regulatory body should consider in making decisions and describes the elements of an integrated framework for regulatory decision making. It is not, however, a handbook or guide on how to make regulatory decisions. In preparing the report, the task group reviewed and incorporated information from a wide array of documents produced by the NEA, its member countries and other international organisations, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Safety Series reports.
Following the adoption of Law No. 99 of 23 July 2009, Italy is on the threshold of returning to nuclear power, even though there are many more challenges yet to overcome. It should be recalled that Law No. 99/2009 includes enabling provisions empowering the Government to issue one or more implementing decrees providing rules for the siting of new nuclear power plants, the licensing process for the construction, operation and dismantling of those plants, as well as rules for interim storage and the final disposal of nuclear waste. On 15 February 2010, upon the proposal of the Ministry of Economic Development, the Italian Council of Ministers issued Legislative Decree No. 31/20102 (hereinafter “decree”) implementing the enabling provisions.