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Developing an allocation scheme for distributing rights amongst fishing nations is a key issue in the development of stable cooperative arrangements to exploit international fish resources. Allocation within regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) is generally based on the historical catches of parties to the RFMOs. However, as membership of RFMOs increases and pressure to allow additional countries, particularly coastal developing countries, to participate meaningfully in international fisheries intensifies, there is increasing policy attention being paid to the issue of allocation of rights in RFMOs. This paper explores issues relating to the process of allocating participatory rights in RFMOs, especially in those cases in which one or more fisheries remain unallocated, and is intended to stimulate discussion among policy makers on possible policy directions in such situations without directly or indirectly evaluating existing allocation schemes. The paper reviews the international legal framework governing international fisheries, the economic issues underlying allocations, and the current state of play in the allocation regimes in RFMOs. A broader perspective on the allocation issue is provided by examining the experiences of other resource sectors that have wrestled policy challenges similar to those confronting international fisheries in allocating participatory rights amongst current and potential participants - water resources; and greenhouse gases – to see if they offer any transferable insights on the issue.
  • Au lendemain de la crise financière de 2008, un nombre significatif de pays ont réduit leurs dépenses publiques d’éducation. Malgré l’augmentation du PIB dans la plupart des pays de l’OCDE entre 2009 et 2010, les dépenses publiques au titre des établissements d’enseignement ont chuté dans un tiers d’entre eux.
  • Entre 2009 et 2011, les salaires des enseignants ont été soit gelés, soit réduits dans 12 des 25 pays de l’OCDE qui disposent de données, ce qui pourrait avoir pour effet de décourager les étudiants très performants qui souhaitaient embrasser cette carrière.
  • La demande d’enseignement et de formation est en constante augmentation alors même que les mesures d’austérité font pression sur les ressources allouées à l’éducation. Dans les années à venir, les établissements d’enseignement devront obtenir davantage de résultats, mais avec des moyens plus restreints.
English
The new campus of Queen Margaret University College in the United Kingdom is designed to be a sustainable educational and community resource. Early consultation with students and staff on the campus design revealed a strong desire for a sustainable environment, with plenty of green space for all to enjoy. In response to this, the design focuses on maximising biodiversity, encouraging green transport, and making the most of natural daylight and ventilation in interior spaces. The Queen Margaret RE:LOCATE project will transform 35 acres of low grade farmland into diverse wildlife habitats to provide the parkland setting. The campus will be open to the public for leisure, education and recreation.
French
This article takes a brief look at the new rules covering energy performance contracts for Quebec school boards. It discusses the following questions: the school boards’ educational buildings; the school boards’ energy performance; regulations with regard to the awarding of contracts in the public and quasi-public sectors; the new rules for awarding energy performance contracts in education.
French

This paper describes the key characteristics of high-risk/high-reward research (HRHR), which has gained considerable interest from policy makers as a way to promote the development of new, ‘out-of-the-box’ ideas. It identifies three dimensions that are accentuated in HRHR research: higher levels of basicness, generality and novelty. These knowledge characteristics are commonly associated with market failure and research that requires public investment because it has large spill-overs, long time horizons and high levels of uncertainty. This is illustrated with examples of specific discoveries embedding each knowledge characteristic and the application of appropriate quantitative measures. The paper concludes with the computation and demonstration of an indicator of novelty that may be particularly well suited for the monitoring and evaluation of HRHR research policies.

What influences the adoption of transparency obligations in trade agreements, and what are its effects? This paper uses a new dataset on transparency provisions in over a hundred regional trade agreements (RTAs) to provide empirical evidence of the political economy determinants of international transparency commitments, as well as the trade impact of negotiating such transparency provisions in RTAs. The study finds that RTAs with deeper mechanisms for enhancing transparency appear to be more strongly trade-promoting than those with shallower commitments on transparency. Concretely, each additional transparency commitment negotiated in an RTA is associated with an increase in bilateral trade flows of more than one percent. Considering that comprehensive RTAs typically contain a dozen of such commitments, countries that opt for a comprehensive transparency agenda can expect to gain substantial increases in intra-regional trade. Moreover, the findings suggest that the readiness of trading partners to adhere to transparency norms is influenced by the quality of home institutions, which is consistent with a view that strengthening governance and regulatory capacities can contribute to a broader diffusion of transparency practices in international trade. Overall, the results of the analysis suggest that transparency should remain an important element of the trade agenda, both at the regional and multilateral levels.

This paper uses a new measure of human capital, which distinguishes both quality and quantity components, to estimate the long-term effect of the COVID-19-related school closures on aggregate productivity through the human capital channel. Productivity losses build up over time and are estimated to range between 0.4% and 2.1% after 45 years, for 12 weeks and 2 years of school closure, respectively. These results appear to be broadly consistent with earlier findings in the literature. Two opposing effects might influence these estimates. Online teaching would lower economic costs while learning losses in tertiary education (not considered here) would inflate them. Policies aimed at improving the quality of education and adult training will be needed to offset or, at least, alleviate the impact of the pandemic on human capital.

This paper evaluates the link between educational policies and i) student performance and ii) macroeconomic measures of productivity. The analysis has two stages. First, using the 2015 and 2018 PISA databases, it quantifies the relationship between student test scores and the characteristics of students taking the tests, their school environment and national educational systems. Second, assuming that these relationships reflect the effect of different characteristics/policies on student test performance, the second stage converts the latter into an estimated effect on macroeconomic measures of productivity using a new measure of human capital as an intermediary variable. This new measure of human capital, devised in previous OECD work, combines student test scores and mean years of schooling with estimated elasticities that suggest the former is more important. The analysis shows a positive association between spending on education and student test scores, but only for levels of student expenditure below the OECD median, suggesting scope for currently low-spending countries to raise student performance with potential gains to long-run productivity. Boosting participation in early childhood education as well as improving teacher quality is found to generate large aggregate productivity gains. There are significant, but smaller, macroeconomic gains for many countries from limiting grade repetition and ability grouping across all subjects as well as increasing the accountability of schools. Finally, the results provide evidence for income inequality having a major influence on productivity through a human capital channel.

Significant progress has been made in quantifying the effects of non-tariff measures since OECD commissioned its last major review of this topic in 1997. This paper reviews the literature of NTMs and assesses the different methods available. Additionally, the paper develops a series of questions to help determine which method of analysis is best given the interests of the researchers or policy makers. Of the possible avenues of future research, the trade costs approach is offered. This approach has the potential of shedding new light on the interactions among various policies and practices by assessing which areas offer the greatest potential for gains, and improving the precision of available estimates.

Socio-economic cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a powerful framework that can be very useful to governments making investment decisions. However the standard application of transport CBA has room for improvement. This paper describes efforts to improve the quality of transport CBA and its applicability to decision making. Three areas are addressed in detail: strategies for making the most of CBA, valuing and forecasting reliability benefits, and capturing wider economic impacts. The report is based on the papers and discussions at a Roundtable meeting of 30 experts held in Paris in November 2015. Roundtable participants took the view that a multi-faceted approach is needed to address the shortfalls; CBA theory and practice need to be gradually expanded to incorporate more impacts in the rigorous valuation and forecasting framework; and CBA results need to be more effectively linked to other criteria in the broader decision-making framework, including by bringing in a more diverse evidence base.

Brazil remains a fairly closed economy, with small trade flows relative to its share of world income. This paper explores the effects of three possible policy reforms to strengthen Brazil’s integration into global trade: a reduction in import tariffs, less local content requirements and a full zero-rating of exports in indirect taxes. A simulation analysis using the OECD Multi-Region Trade CGE model suggests that current policies are holding back exports, production and investment in Brazil. The model simulations suggest significant scope for trade policy reforms to strengthen industrial development and export competitiveness. Results also show that the expansion of investment and production would be accompanied by significant employment gains. Moreover, employment growth is higher for low-skilled occupations, implying that a major trade and tax policy reform aiming at liberalising trade flows would particularly help those at the lower end of the income distribution.
This paper constructs a broad measure of financial conditions for the United States which suggests that since the onset of the credit crisis there has been a marked tightening in financial conditions, despite a substantial easing of policy rates and a depreciation of the dollar. This measure of overall financial conditions includes interest rate spreads for riskier borrowers and a survey measure of the tightness of bank lending standards, which have been the main drivers behind the tightening in financial conditions. Indeed, recent data suggest that the trend deterioration in overall financial conditions has continued into the second half of 2008. The effect of the tightening in overall financial conditions already experienced may subtract 1¾ per cent from GDP over the next four to six quarters. Not only have financial conditions continued to worsen, but much of the impact on the real economy has yet to be felt.
This paper constructs a broad measure of financial conditions for the United States, Japan, the Euro Area and the United Kingdom, by extending monetary condition indices which are traditionally used to gauge the impact of monetary policy on the economy. In addition to changes in the exchange rate and short and long interest rates, the change in credit availability, corporate bond spreads and household wealth are taken into account to gauge the evolution of financial conditions. Since the onset of the financial crisis, financial conditions have tightened by an unprecedented degree in the four countries/regions and this is evaluated to exert a major drag on activity.

This paper presents a progress report on the Economics and Statistics Department's applied general equilibrium model -- the WALRAS model. This model has been developed with the explicit objective of quantifying the economy-wide effects of agricultural policies in OECD countries. The common specification of the model for the major OECD agricultural trading countries/regions (Australia, Canada, EEC, Japan, New Zealand and the United States) is described in detail. Results are presented for some preliminary simulations of the effects of removing the 1979-81 levels of agricultural assistance in these countries/regions. The initial results relate only to unilateral liberalisation experiments with the unlinked country/region models, with no account being taken of feedback effects through changes in world agricultural prices and trade volumes ...

Industrial policy has resurfaced prominently in academic and policy discussions in the wake of major shocks and long-term trends. However, quantifying industrial strategies across countries remains difficult. The ‘Quantifying Industrial Strategies’ (QuIS) project measures industrial policy expenditures by gathering and harmonising publicly available data, based on a new methodology. This report summarises the composition of industrial strategies in the first nine participating countries in terms of expenditures, priorities, and policy instruments for the period 2019-21. The report finds that industrial policies are sizeable, with 1.5% of GDP in grants and tax expenditures, and with an important heterogeneity across countries in terms of strategic priorities; industrial strategies mainly rely on sectoral instruments, representing on average 29% of grants and tax expenditures; and green instruments are important and rose significantly in six out of nine countries between 2019 and 2021.

Industrial policy is sparking renewed interest across OECD member countries and partner economies. However, amidst an increasing number of objectives for industrial policy, and despite the availability of information on countries’ strategies and plans, it remains difficult to properly measure and compare resources spent on industrial policies and identify countries’ strategic priorities. The lack of a cross-country comparable source of information on resources dedicated to industrial policy partly results from the absence of a common methodology to account for industrial policy expenditures.

This paper provides a new methodology for reporting industrial policy expenditure in a comparable way across countries.

It is the first deliverable of the “Quantifying Industrial Strategies” project, which aims at measuring industrial policy expenditures across OECD countries and will gather harmonised data on industrial policy expenditures, their composition, and their mode of delivery.

Innovation is key to reducing the environmental impacts of plastics. However, literature is generally lacking in the field of environmentally relevant plastics innovation. This paper develops an innovative conceptual framework to document and map environmentally relevant plastics innovation. Using this framework, it develops plastics innovation metrics using patents and trademarks to quantify trends over time, across countries, and to establish preliminary empirical links between policies and innovation outcomes.

Plastic waste prevention and recycling innovation has increased slightly more rapidly than overall plastics innovation. In contrast, innovation in bioplastics have witnessed a significant slowdown in recent years. Another key finding of this analysis is that environmentally relevant plastics innovation is concentrated in OECD countries and China and that top inventor countries are not specialized in the same technologies. Finally, the patent analysis shows some empirical evidence that recycling regulations may have triggered innovative activity in plastic recycling.

This study analyses how domestic regulation affects trade in services through commercial presence and to what extent regulation, level and heterogeneity, has an impact on the choice of mode of servicing a foreign market for total services, financial services, transport, communication, computer, and other business services. Regulatory heterogeneity is found to have a relatively large impact on trade through commercial presence. If all countries in the sample harmonized or recognized each other’s regulation, total services trade through commercial presence could increase by between 13 and 30% depending on the country. The study also assesses what determines services suppliers’ choice of mode. Modes of supply are found to be complementary to various degrees. Commercial presence is more dominant the more similar a country pair is as far as regulation and business environment are concerned and countries sharing a common language are more likely to trade through commercial presence. For some sectors it is found that the disadvantage of remoteness is amplified by strict regulation. In most services sectors trade liberalisation generates meaningful market access only if commercial presence is allowed. Furthermore, absence of explicit barriers to trade and investment is not necessarily sufficient to attract foreign investors.

This paper presents a new methodology for the quantification of qualitative survey data. Traditional conversion methods, such as the probability approach of Carlson and Parkin (1975) or the time-varying parameters model of Seitz (1988), require very restrictive assumptions concerning the expectations formation process of survey respondents. Above all, the unbiasedness of expectations, which is a necessary condition for rationality, is imposed. Our approach avoids this assumptions. The novelty lies in the way the boundaries inside of which survey respondents expect the variable under consideration to remain unchanged are determined. Instead of deriving these boundaries from the statistical properties of the reference time-series (which necessitates the unbiasedness assumption), we directly queried them from survey respondents by a special question in the Ifo World Economic Survey. The new methodology is then applied to expectations about the future development of inflation obtained from the Ifo World Economic Survey.

In this paper, we develop a likelihood approach for quantification of qualitative survey data on expectations and perceptions and we propose a new test for expectation consistency (unbiasedness). Our quantification scheme differs from existing methods primarily by using prior information (perhaps derived from economic theory or well established empirical relations) on the underlying process driving the variable of interest. To investigate the properties of our novel quantification scheme and to analyze the size and power properties of the new expectation consistency test, we perform Monte Carlo simulation studies. Overall, the simulation results are very encouraging and show that efficiency gains from including prior information can be substantial relative to existing quantification schemes. Finally, we provide an empirical illustration...

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