Browse by: "2020"

This paper reviews opportunities and challenges for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from Azerbaijan’s transport sector. It provides an overview of Azerbaijan’s transport system and reviews the country’s existing policies and future plans for reducing CO2 emissions from transport. The paper also provides an overview of the data on transport activity and emissions available for Azerbaijan, and the tools used by government agencies for assessing them. Finally, it proposes options for further action in the context of ITF’s “Decarbonising Transport in Emerging Economies” (DTEE) project.

This working paper introduces the key concepts and features of anticipatory innovation governance– i.e. the structures and mechanisms to allow and promote anticipatory innovation alongside other types of innovation in the public sector. This paper draws on academic literature and OECD work on a range of areas including public sector innovation, foresight, anticipatory governance and emerging technologies. The paper starts outlining an emerging framework to guide policy making in complex and uncertain contexts and sets out some questions for further research in the area of anticipatory innovation governance.

This literature review provides an up-to-date comprehensive overview of what is known about process quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) provision for children under age 3. It builds on empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 2010 and 2019. Current views on process quality for children under age 3 highlight that process quality is a multidimensional and value-laden concept. But there is growing agreement on several core features, namely, the prominence of warm/responsive interactions, the value of both education and care and the importance of strong partnerships with parents. Recent studies show positive links between process quality and infant/toddler development. The evidence is relatively robust in terms of the influences of staff pre-service training, group size and ratios for process quality in centre-based settings, although more limited for home-based settings. Nevertheless, consideration of complex interactions among structural features is noted. Recent studies further advance knowledge on more fine-grained understandings of process quality.

Israel’s tax mix is reasonably growth- and employment-friendly. Nonetheless, tax reform is needed to foster an inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and help tackle Israel’s main economic and societal challenges of high poverty, including among those in work, and slow aggregate productivity growth. The earned income tax credit has been an effective tool to reduce poverty and increase employment among the low-skilled and could be further expanded. The business tax system provides large benefits that aim to incentivise companies to become more productive, but the existing design may create distortions. This preferential tax treatment should be reviewed with a view to better targeting the scheme to ensure net benefits to society. There is also scope to simplify the tax system by removing inefficient tax expenditures and better leverage Israel’s impressive technological capacity to further lower compliance costs and reduce tax evasion. Finally, excise taxes should be adjusted, including by taxing carbon more heavily, to improve environmental and health outcomes.

Previous OECD reports have concluded that disability policy has changed substantially in many OECD countries in recent decades. Nevertheless, large employment gaps remain between people with a disability and those without. This paper builds on earlier OECD analysis and recent extensions to OECD’s tax-benefit model (http://oe.cd/TaxBEN) for selected countries. The paper aims to assess the adequacy of income support programmes for people with reduced work capacity and their related work incentives. It describes how the system characteristics of these programs shape labour-market behaviour and employment. The paper finds evidence that the broader institutional setup of a disability programme does not necessarily have a major impact on key aspects of social-protection effectiveness. All types of scheme can achieve reasonable levels of benefit adequacy and broad benefit coverage for people with work limitations. However, design specifics matter considerably for people’s likelihood of (re-)employment.

While income inequality in Austria is relatively low compared to many other OECD countries, social mobility lags behind. Socio-economic outcomes carry over strongly from one generation to the next: more than elsewhere, fathers’ earnings are a strong predictor of the earnings of their prime-age children. This reflects strong persistence across generations in occupational and educational outcomes, particularly for women and migrants. Relative income positions also tend to strongly persist over people’s lives, in particular at the top and bottom. Meanwhile, the middle-income group is polarising, with downward risks rising for the lower middle. Longer-term earnings trajectories (over 15 years) display marked gender differences, with women facing weaker chances of moving up and greater risks of sliding down.

This paper identifies policies that promote or hamper social mobility in four domains. First, good-quality early childhood education and care can be a catalyst for upward mobility. Participation rates have significantly risen over the last decade, but still lag those in many OECD countries. Further investment is needed to improve quality and status of formal childcare. Second, tackling low educational mobility in Austria requires ensuring a successful school-to-work transition. Austria provides targeted support for those who struggle, but it could improve funding for disadvantaged schools and consider the appropriateness of "tracking" students at such a young age. Third, reducing gender inequality in the labour market would greatly improve social mobility. This requires raising incentives for a more equal sharing of family and work responsibilities in the areas of tax policy, parental leave and family and care benefits. Fourth, the Austrian tax and benefit system provides comparatively adequate protection against income shocks. The high concentration of household wealth, combined with the absence of inheritance taxation, however implies that inequalities of opportunity remain large.

Population ageing will lead to a smaller and older workforce. Looking forward, this means that growth will increasingly depend on ensuring the best use of Slovenian workers. This implies keeping older and experience workers longer in employment and better support difficult-to-employ low-skilled job-seekers. In addition, better labour allocation will enable workers to realise their productivity and wage potential. This requires a greater role for social partners in securing individual wages that better reflect efforts.

Reducing poverty remains an important challenge, and the COVID-19-crisis may further reinforce social vulnerabilities. Although it has declined lately, relative poverty remains high in international comparison and is distributed unevenly across population groups with the elderly, people with disabilities, lone parents, the low-educated and the unemployed being particularly affected. A comprehensive approach is required to ensure an effective transition out of poverty and social exclusion. Reforms should strengthen income protection by ensuring that cash benefits provide adequate and tailored support to those in need. An individual-based approach is also essential for the provision of social services to reduce deficits in important areas such as social housing and long-term care for the elderly. Equity in educational opportunity and outcomes could be strengthened further, starting at the early school years, as not all children benefit from early childhood education and care services. Progress in this domain is also crucial for striking a better work-family balance and improving work incentives. More and better quality jobs in the formal sector, especially for the low-skilled, are crucial for reducing poverty. Enlarged participation in life-long learning programmes can help re-skilling and up-skilling towards higher incomes. Increased spending on well-designed labour market activation policies is also important for tackling poverty effectively.

The volume, quality, and political economy of financing – where, how and to whom resources flow – can impact significantly on socio-economic opportunities and incentives towards stability or conflict.

Many fragile contexts have slowly been expanding their financing options and economic linkages. But these linkages can bring both opportunities and risks, as the COVID-19 pandemic makes starkly clear. This paper presents trends, lessons learned, and key data on financing in fragile contexts, including government revenues, private investment, remittances and private philanthropic giving.

Drawing on the OECD multidimensional fragility framework, this paper offers insights into the state of financing in fragile contexts, its links to the dimensions and drivers of fragility, and current risks and opportunities. This paper is part of a broader OECD work-stream on Financing for Stability and is one of ten working papers contributing to States of Fragility 2020.

This report highlights a complex situation in which some forms of data localisation are seen as useful and largely uncontroversial, while others as a significant barrier to the digital economy. Contributing to the review of the implementation of the OECD Privacy Guidelines, the report emphasises the need to recognise the effect that data localisation can have on transborder data flows, but suggests that the conditions that data privacy laws traditionally impose do not necessarily amount to data localisation measures. Focusing on data localisation in the context of data privacy and the governance of globalised data flows, the report proposes a definition for data localisation, outlines a roadmap to ensure that data localisation does not impede transborder data flows, and makes recommendations to support such work. In particular, it emphasises the relevance of the accountability principle and the proportionality test articulated in the OECD Privacy Guidelines in evaluating data localisation measures.

Social protection systems use a range of entitlement criteria. First-tier support typically requires contributions or past employment in many countries, while safety net benefits are granted on the basis of need. In a context of volatile and uncertain labour markets, careful and continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of income support is a key input into an evidence-based policy process. This paper proposes a novel empirical method for monitoring the accessibility and levels of safety net benefits. It focusses on minimum-income benefits (MIB) and other non-contributory transfers and relies on data on the amounts of cash support that individuals in need receive in practice. Results show that accessibility and benefit levels differ enormously across countries – for instance, in 2015/16, more than four out of five low-income workless one-person households received MIB in Australia, France and the United Kingdom, compared to only one in five in Greece, Italy and Korea, three countries that have since sought to strengthen aspects of safety-net provisions.

Dans le contexte de la pandémie de COVID-19, une stratégie de communication efficace sur les migrations et l’intégration a permis aux pays d’atteindre d’importants objectifs d’action. Premièrement, pour limiter la propagation du virus, les pouvoirs publics doivent fournir à toutes les catégories de la population, y compris aux immigrés, des informations actualisées et précises sur la pandémie, les mesures de santé publique qui sont prises et l’accès aux services médicaux. Deuxièmement, pour assurer la continuité des processus migratoires et d’intégration, les pouvoirs publics doivent communiquer efficacement sur les changements d’orientation stratégique qui concernent les droits et les obligations des immigrés. Troisièmement, des campagnes de communication à l’intention du grand public peuvent être utiles pour combattre les préjugés sur les immigrés en lien avec la propagation du virus. La présente synthèse examine les défis qui se posent aujourd'hui et les bonnes pratiques en vigueur concernant la communication sur les migrations et l’intégration dans le contexte de la pandémie, en s’appuyant sur des exemples de campagnes de communication mises en œuvre dans les pays membres de l’OCDE en 2020.

Job mobility is essential for a well-functioning market economy and for individual workers to boost their wages. This paper provides a re-assessment of job mobility in the United States during 2000-2018, based on a novel administrative data source covering almost all workers and job flows. First, aggregate job hire and job separation rates have declined over time, especially in the 2000s. This is mainly driven by flows into and out of nonemployment, while job-to-job hires during 2016-2018 had recovered to their peak levels prior to the global financial crisis. Examination of job mobility across different individual and firm-level characteristics shows comparatively higher job-to-job flows for youth, the less educated, non-whites and individuals working in young firms. In addition, observed job movers in these groups experience the largest earnings gain on average from job-to-job changes. Second, a spatial look at job mobility shows net job-to-job flows towards Western and Southern States. The aggregate rate of interstate job-to-job hires has been stable since 2000 and the observed job-to-job movers on average get a substantial boost to earnings by moving farther away and switching industries. Third, the paper briefly considers the influence of demographic changes on job mobility, one important driver identified in previous work. While ageing may explain around half of the downward trend in job hire and separation rates, other factors matter too.

The U.S. population has become increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas. However, there are striking differences in between the performances of big cities: some of them have been very successful and have been able to pull away from the rest, while others have stagnated or even declined. The main objective of this paper is to characterize U.S. metropolitan areas according to their labor-market performance: which metropolitan areas are struggling and falling behind? Which ones are flourishing? Which ones are staying resilient by adapting to shocks? We rely on an unsupervised machine learning technique called Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) to conduct this empirical investigation. The data comes from a number of sources including the new Job-to-Job (J2J) flows dataset from the Census Bureau, which reports the near universe of job movements in and out of employment at the metropolitan level. We characterize the fate of metropolitan areas by tracking their job mobility rate, unemployment rate, income growth, population increase, net change in job-to-job mobility and GDP growth. Our results indicate that the 372 metropolitan areas under examination can be categorized into four statistically distinct groups: booming areas (67), prosperous mega metropolitan areas (99), resilient areas (149) and distressed metropolitan areas (57). The results show that areas that are doing well are predominantly located in the south and the west. The main features of their success have revolved around embracing digital technologies, adopting local regulations friendly to job mobility and business creation, avoiding strict rules on land-use and housing market, and improving the wellbeing of the city’s population. These results highlight that cities adopting well-targeted policies can accelerate the return to growth after a shock.

The majority of forcibly displaced people worldwide are hosted by developing countries. Alternative routes to sustainable solutions for the forcibly displaced, particularly in developing countries, are drying up, and the path towards and support for local integration and longer-term development is becoming urgent. Based on a questionnaire, this report delves into the question of how donor countries are addressing forced displacement and whether the shift towards a focus incorporating the humanitarian-development-peace nexus in addressing forced displacement is tangible. It highlights lessons learned so far and proposes recommendations on broadening the current approach to addressing forced displacement in developing economies.

All children experience some level of stress in their lives. If stress is persistent and accumulative, it may have detrimental effects on the social, emotional, and physical well-being of the individual child and long-term economic and health impacts on our societies. Understanding the causes, effects, and mitigating and exacerbating factors of adversity and trauma is critical to promote practices and policies for better lives. The purpose of this working paper is to help education policymakers and education leaders and practitioners know how to better support students who have experienced adversity and/or trauma and build their resilience.

In this working paper we synthesise the best available evidence for the causes and effects of adversity and/or trauma in children, specify the factors that exacerbate poor educational experiences and outcomes as well as mitigating factors that support resilience, and draw together evidence on effective practices in education systems to improve supports and outcomes for students who have experienced trauma and/or adversity. We also feature five case studies of these effective practices. We conclude with considerations for education stakeholders. This includes, strengthening linkages between schools and services and supports in other sectors; using learner-centred pedagogies for social and emotional learning (SEL) and resilience building; prioritising teacher training and support to understand and respond to adversity and trauma of learners and to promote their own well-being; employing frameworks, such as multi-tiered approaches, to identify and meet the needs of learners; and using technical assistance centres and networks to share evidence-based practices and provide guidance to education stakeholders about how to meet the specific needs of sub-populations of students. Together, these approaches should provide better learning experiences for all learners, especially for those who have experienced adversity and/or trauma.