Browse by: "2021"

This report assesses the potential of zero carbon supply chains via a case study of the freight transport chain linked to the port of Hamburg. It analyses the initiatives taken by selected main stakeholders to decarbonise freight transport. In addition, it offers recommendations on how the move towards zero carbon supply chains could be accelerated.

The gap between youth aspirations and the reality of the labour markets in Africa is large. Career aspirations of young Africans have little in common with current and projected labour demand in the region, making it unlikely that they will go through a smooth school to work transition. Evidence from ten African countries shows that what youth in these countries value most is job security, such as work in the public sector. Agriculture-related work or medium-skilled jobs in manufacturing are the least attractive for young Africans. Policies can help address the misalignment between youth employment preferences and employment opportunities. A two-pronged approach is recommended: i) helping young people shape career aspirations that are realistic and that can fit with the world they will be entering, and ii) improving the quality of jobs with due regard to the job conditions that matter for young people.

Infrastructure can have a major impact on women’s access to resources and agency over their well-being, and thus on women’s empowerment. Infrastructure itself is not gender-neutral: women and men have different needs and use infrastructure differently given their specific social roles, economic status or preferences. Poor infrastructure quality also poses differentiated threats to women’s safety and well-being. Moreover, infrastructure has traditionally been a heavily male-dominated sector, leaving women little or no voice in investment decisions that affect their economic opportunities, day-to-day lives and well-being. Increasing women’s participation in infrastructure policy and decision making is thus crucial.

This report explores the challenges policy makers face when mainstreaming gender into infrastructure and proposes a framework for incorporating gender considerations at each stage of the public investment process. The report also provides guidance on how to involve more women in infrastructure leadership and decision making.

The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a major shift towards telework and virtual interactions. This paper uses information on job postings from the online job site Indeed to analyse developments in the adoption of telework across 20 countries. It finds, first, that the incidence of advertised telework almost tripled during the pandemic, albeit with large differences both across sectors and across countries. Second, cross-country differences are to a notable extent explained by differences in the extent to which governments restricted mobility during the pandemic. However, while the tightening of restrictions substantially raises advertised telework, their easing only modestly reverses the increase. Third, digital preparedness plays an important role in mediating the response of advertised telework to changes in restrictions. The tightening of restrictions has particularly large effects in sectors that are better prepared to adopt digital business models, while their easing has almost no effect in countries with high-quality digital infrastructure. Overall, these results suggest that telework is here to stay, especially in countries with high levels of digital preparedness. Public policies will need to adapt to reap the potential benefits for productivity and worker well-being.

Understanding the gender dynamics in educational transitions can help target policies to support equitable access to education as well as its quality and labour-market outcomes. In almost all OECD countries, the gender gap in favour of women is wider in tertiary education than at upper secondary level. Differences in programme orientation and girls’ educational performance at school may give them greater access to tertiary education than boys. Changes in the courses on offer in higher education, and the social value of a university education for young women may also influence their choices. In addition, young women tend to gain more from a tertiary degree in the labour market than their male peers, both in terms of employment and earnings, which may make pursuing higher education more attractive.

This study proposes an exploratory analysis of the characteristics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) “actors”. It focuses on entities that deploy AI-related technologies or introduce AI-related goods and services on large international markets. It builds on the OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Micro-data Lab infrastructure, and, in particular, on Intellectual Property (IP) rights data (patents and trademarks) combined with company-level data. Statistics on AI-related patents and trademarks show that AI-related activities are strongly concentrated in some countries, sectors, and actors. Development of AI technologies and/or goods and services is mainly due to start-ups or large incumbents, located in the United States, Japan, Korea, or the People’s Republic of China, and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. A majority of these actors operate in ICT-related sectors. The composition of the IP portfolio of the AI actors indicates that AI is frequently combined with a variety of sector-specific technologies, goods, or services.

This paper analyses the uneven geography of the COVID-19 health impact in OECD and European countries. It first describes the increase in all-cause mortality – i.e. excess mortality – across subnational regions between January and December 2020. Subsequently, it investigates the regional factors associated with higher excess mortality, looking at demographic, socio-economic, institutional and environmental features of regions. Results show that excess mortality has a significant spatial dimension, with the hardest hit regions having excess mortality rates that were, on average, 17 percentage points higher than the least affected regions in the same country. During the first year of the pandemic, lower health system capacity, followed by population density, air pollution, share of elderly population and lower institutional quality were associated with higher excess mortality. While health system capacity and population density have been strongly associated to excess mortality throughout the COVID-19 crisis, trust in government and air pollution showed stronger correlations with excess mortality in the later phases of the pandemic. Finally, prolonged remote working, particularly after two-months, is also associated with lower excess mortality.

Governments around the world have adopted unprecedented policies to deal with COVID-19. This paper zooms in on business shutdowns and investigates their effectiveness in reducing mortality. We leverage highly granular death registry data for almost 5,000 Italian municipalities in a diff-in-diff approach that allows us to mitigate endogeneity concerns credibly. Our results, which are robust to controlling for a host of co-factors, offer strong evidence that business shutdowns are very effective in reducing mortality. We calculate that the death toll from the first wave of COVID-19 in Italy may have been about twice as high in their absence. Our findings also highlight that timeliness is key – by acting one week earlier, the death toll may have been reduced by up to an additional 25%. Finally, shutdowns should be targeted. Closing service activities with a high degree of interpersonal contact saves the most lives. Shutting down production activities – while substantially reducing mobility – only has mild effects on mortality.

Young people have been hard hit by the wide-reaching labour market and social impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. Youth unemployment has increased considerably; education and work‑based learning have been heavily disrupted; and many young people are suffering from financial insecurity, housing instability and mental distress. OECD governments have responded to this situation by taking comprehensive policy measures for young people, ranging from labour market and income support measures, to housing responses and mental health support. This policy brief provides an overview of the measures that countries have put in place to avoid a long-lasting negative impact on the employment prospects and aspirations of young people.

This study looks at what happened to jobs at risk of automation over the past decade and across 21 countries.There is no support for net job destruction at the broad country level. All countries experienced employment growth over the past decade. Within countries, however, employment growth has been much lower in jobs at high risk of automation (6%) than in jobs at low risk (18%).

Low-educated workers were more concentrated in high-risk occupations in 2012 and have become even more concentrated in these occupations since then. In spite of this, the low growth in jobs in high-risk occupations has not led to a drop in the employment rate of low-educated workers relative to that of other education groups. This is largely because the number of low-educated workers has fallen in line with the demand for these workers.Going forward, however, the risk of automation is increasingly falling on low-educated workers and the COVID-19 crisis may have accelerated automation, as companies reduce reliance on human labour and contact between workers, or re-shore some production.

One of the goals of education systems is to equip all students, irrespective of their individual characteristics, with market-relevant skills. Poor or inadequate skills limit access to better-paying and more rewarding jobs and, ultimately, to better living and health conditions, and higher social and political participation. Yet, inequalities in education abound. Family background, disabilities and gender all influence students’ trajectory toward fulfilling their potential. Boys, for instance, tend to lack the basic reading proficiency needed for today’s knowledge societies. The latest TALIS-PISA link report, Positive, High-achieving Students? What Schools and Teachers Can Do, explores some of the teacher and school factors that could play a role in bridging the gap in reading performances at school between girls and boys.

With most students around the world having experienced remote learning over the past year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of teachers and schools has become all the more evident. Temporary school closures underline how richly students benefit from being in school with their teachers and classmates. Positive, High-achieving Students? What Schools and Teachers Can Do pinpoints some of the factors that make an effective teacher and school.

Despite the rising importance and economy-wide effects of online platforms, the paucity of cross-country comparable data still hampers understanding of the structural and policy determinants of their diffusion. This study contributes to the understanding of multi-sided online platforms in three main ways. First, we build a harmonised international dataset of online platforms and their use across 43 OECD and G20 countries, covering the 2013-19 period and nine areas of activity. Second, we describe main trends in the use of platforms in the past years, and third, we investigate the structural and policy determinants of online platforms diffusion across countries and over time.

The Asia-Pacific region has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 250 000 deaths as of March 2021 and a decrease in GDP by 4.3% in ASEAN and by 2.0% in Emerging Asia in 2020. The pandemic acted as a magnifying glass on pressing water and sanitation challenges in Asia-Pacific countries, stressing and widening inequalities for 30 to 40% of households that do not have a dedicated place for washing hands with soap and water on premises. This report uses the OECD Principles on Water Governance as an assessment framework to provide a regional analysis of the state of play of water governance in 48 countries of the Asia – Pacific region. It maps the existence and level of implementation of key governance frameworks, institutions and mechanisms, and dives into select governance gaps before drawing preliminary observations on the extent to which effective water governance correlates with tangible water security outcomes in surveyed countries.

The COVID-19 crisis has provided an opportunity to rethink the Veneto Region’s economic strategy. This paper examines the links between cultural and creative sectors and the regional manufacturing economy of the Veneto Region in the North of Italy, highlighting the important role that cultural production, and in particular Venice, can play in the region’s post-pandemic recovery strategies.

Marine data play a crucial role for many scientific disciplines, as well as for very diverse operational services such as fisheries management, environmental planning, marine conservation, weather forecasting, or port management. The information derived from marine data is also increasingly finding its way into a wide and varied range of public policy arenas and private industries. Collecting, distributing and archiving public marine data provide benefits to society at large, however as with all public investments, assessments are needed to provide evidence to decision makers. Based on an original survey of UK marine data users, this paper explores pathways through which marine data are used and transformed into actionable information, creating systematised value chains for the first time. The analysis unveils trends in current marine data uses in the UK and key benefits of data uses. The paper lays the foundations for further OECD work with the marine data community.