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More than 1.3 million people die each year in road crashes, with millions more suffering life-altering injuries. The Safe System approach aims to eliminate deadly crashes through a comprehensive, shared-responsibility framework. This report offers guidelines for establishing Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs) to assess the effectiveness of Safe System policies in reducing road fatalities and serious injuries. It identifies international best practices for constructing and deploying SPIs, focusing on the case of Korea.

The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), used computers as the main assessment deliver platform. This enabled the Programme to collect data not only on whether respondents were able to solve specific tasks, but also on how they approached the problems at hand and how much time they spent on them. This paper draws on this information to characterise individuals’ problem-solving strategies using the longest common subsequence (LCS) method, a sequence-mining technique commonly used in natural language processing and biostatistics. The LCS is used to compare the action sequences followed by PIAAC respondents to a set of “optimal” predefined sequences identified by test developers and subject matter experts. This approach allows studying problem-solving behaviours across multiple assessment items.

Macroeconomic forecasters typically forecast fewer recessions than the number experienced, which means economic growth tends to be over-predicted on average. Consequently, forecast errors are not normally distributed, making it difficult to convey the uncertainty and risks based on the historical forecast track record. To characterise this risk, recent OECD work constructed fan charts parameterised on historical forecast errors and the probability of a future downturn estimated from a probit model comprising a range of potential macroeconomic and financial early warning indicators. As the probability of a downturn increases the associated fan chart is wider, reflecting increased uncertainty, and more skewed to the downside, reflecting greater downside risks. This paper applies this methodology to New Zealand; although one important difference compared to other OECD economies is that the time span of macroeconomic data without major structural change is significantly shorter. Forecast errors for GDP by the OECD, Reserve Bank of New Zealand and New Zealand Treasury all appear to be non-normally distributed. Fan charts for GDP forecasts from the mid-year 2018 OECD Economic Outlook are symmetric due to the low probability of a downturn. Fan charts estimated for the period preceding the global financial crisis using currently-available data have a downwards skew. However, those estimated using data only available in the lead up to the crisis have many insignificant coefficients, likely due to the structural changes that have occurred in the New Zealand economy since the 1980s.

Over the last decade, a large variety of geospatial data sources, such as GPS trajectories, geotagged photos, and social media have become available for research and statistical applications. These new data sources are often generated, voluntarily or non-voluntarily, by private sector organisations and can provide highly granular and timely information to policymakers. Drawing on experiences of several OECD countries, this paper highlights the potential of combining traditional and unconventional data from both public and private sources, and makes the case for facilitating co-operation between data providers and organisations responsible for public policy. In addition, the paper provides a series of best practices on leveraging private data for the public good and identifies opportunities, challenges, and ways forward for public and private sector partnerships on data sharing.

The right for shareholders to vote and participate in corporate decisions is one of the fundamental building blocks of a well-functioning corporate governance framework. Digital technologies offer important opportunities to strengthen corporate governance by facilitating greater shareholder participation. This Going Digital Toolkit note takes stock of recent developments and lessons learned from efforts to allow shareholders to participate in corporate decision making via virtual meetings, including in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The note also highlights the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and its potential to address the main challenges raised by the current corporate voting processes, in particular by facilitating the identification of shareholders by issuers and end-to-end confirmation of their votes. Despite these benefits, however, challenges remain that might discourage or slow down the pace of DLT adoption.

Digitalisation is having a profound impact on social and economic activity. While often benefiting from a very long history of public investment in R&D, digitalisation has been largely driven by the private sector. However, the combined adoption of new digital technologies, increased reliance upon new data sources, and use of advanced analytic methods hold significant potential to: i) improve the effectiveness and enforcement of public policies; ii) enable innovative policy design and impact evaluation, and; iii) expand citizen and stakeholder engagement in policy making and implementation. These benefits are likely to be greatest in policy domains where outcomes are only observable at significant cost and/or where there is significant heteroregeneity in responses across different agents. In this paper we provide a review of initiatives across a number of fields including: competition, education, environment, innovation, and taxation.

This article summarises the Israeli experience with utilising behavioural insights in the work of budget officials and aims to assist budget officials in other OECD countries with integrating behavioural economics tools and evidence-based policy-making methods in their work. Behavioural economics has grown in recent years to become increasingly integrated in the work of public institutions, particularly those in the forefront of policy making. In the context of public budgeting, behavioural insights tools had initially focused on improving tax compliance. In this article we widen the scope of budget officials’ perspective, and responsibility, to develop behaviourally informed policies that are primarily citizen-focused. This approach harmonises and aligns the work of ministries of finance with public policy objectives more generally, and provides actionable “know how” based on the experience of the budget department in the Israeli Ministry of Finance.

Today, AI technologies and tools play a key role in every aspect of the COVID-19 crisis response. To help facilitate the use of AI throughout the crisis, policy makers should encourage the sharing of medical, molecular, and scientific datasets and models on collaborative platforms to help AI researchers build effective tools for the medical community, and should ensure that researchers have access to the necessary computing capacity. To realise the full promise of AI to combat COVID-19, policy makers must ensure that AI systems are trustworthy and aligned with the OECD AI Principles.

This report provides guidance to members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) on using ODA more effectively to mobilise private investment for development (investment-enhancing ODA). It focuses on how development agencies can help influence the conditions that lead to increased levels of private investment and on how investment can better contribute to the achievement of broader societal goals, including poverty reduction. A fundamental objective is to help staff in development agencies, both in headquarters and the field, to pursue a more strategic and co-ordinated approach when they design and deliver investment-enhancing ODA.

This paper studies the potential drivers of governments’ approval rates in 18 Latin American countries using Internet search query data from Google Trends and traditional data sources. It employs monthly panel data between January 2006 and December 2015. The analysis tests several specifications including traditional explanatory variables of governments’ approval rates – i.e. inflation, unemployment rate, GDP growth, output gap – and subjective explanatory variables – e.g. perception of corruption and insecurity. For the latter, it uses Internet search query data to proxy citizens’ main social concerns, which are expected to drive governments’ approval rates. The results show that the perception of corruption and insecurity, and complaints about public services have a statistically significant association with governments’ approval rates. This paper also discusses the potential of Internet search query data as a tool for policy makers to understand better citizens’ perceptions, since it provides highly anonymous and high-frequency series in real-time.

This note describes a new database on innovative start-ups and companies, called Crunchbase, with a focus on its potential for economic and managerial research. Crunchbase is rapidly being discovered by scholars from different fields. It has notably already informed studies on specific sectors as well as studies of networks in the start-up ecosystem. This note first describes the contents of Crunchbase and then reviews academic research that has used it. We further suggest that many more valuable avenues for economic and managerial research can be opened through the combination of Crunchbase with selected supplementary data sources and provide two such examples.