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The need to mainstream biodiversity into economic growth and development is being increasingly recognised and is now also firmly embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals. Drawing on experiences and insights from 16 predominantly megadiverse countries, this report examines how biodiversity is being mainstreamed in four key areas: 1) at the national level, including national development plans and other strategies, institutional co-ordination and national budgets; 2) the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors; 3) in development co-operation; and 4) the monitoring and evaluation of biodiversity mainstreaming and how this could be improved.
Is ageing a threat to our societies' prosperity? How should resources be shared between the working generation and its dependent older citizens? How should pension, health and long-term care best be reformed? How can older people's contribution to society and economic prosperity be enhanced? Within the next decade, the numbers of retired people in OECD countries will start to grow much faster than those of working age. In the absence of major changes to pension systems and to the way people allocate their time between education, work and leisure, it is likely that fiscal and social strains will start to emerge. Some groups may be unfairly burdened through high taxation and others would face unexpected reductions in their material living standards. The appropriate policy response is multi-faceted, covering fiscal, social, labour market, financial market, health and education policies. An important part of the strategy for maintaining prosperity in an ageing society will involve encouraging people to work longer by making it financially more attractive for them to do so. In turn, this could entail reforms to traditional public pension systems and other social policies, as well as fostering the development of alternatives to public systems that give individuals more flexibility in deciding when to retire. Consequently, financial market infrastructures will need to be strengthened to cope with large increases in private pension fund assets. Through this multi-disciplinary study, the OECD points to the need to take action now by implementing a comprehensive and consistent set of policies.
This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the challenges confronting Chile’s centralised growth model and recommendations towards developing a more integrated territorial approach, capable of mobilising regional productivity catch-up potential in order to strengthen the role of regions and municipalities.
The Chilean government has launched an ambitious decentralisation agenda, aimed at empowering municipalities by providing them with the legitimacy, financial resources, human capacities and tools required to improve their autonomy and performance. This study seeks to assist the government by covering several dimensions, looking at municipal responsibilities, fiscal and human resources, equalisation mechanisms, local public service performance, citizen participation, and co-ordination mechanisms across levels of government.
This report looks at crucial elements of reforms to growth-friendly recurrent taxes on immovable property. Tax design practices in place in OECD and partner countries are compared and analysed through the lenses of economic theory and empirical analysis. A set of good principles and options for reforming recurrent taxes on immovable property based on the latest experience of property tax reforms around the world are presented that are particularly relevant to the Chinese context, where broader use of recurrent taxes on residential properties is needed to make local public finances more sustainable. Challenges and practices related to the administration of property taxes are explored as well as their interplay with different tax designs. In addition, the main political and administrative hurdles in approving and implementing property tax reforms are discussed, and the approaches commonly employed in successfully dealing with them are examined. Although there are major challenges in designing, reforming and managing a recurrent property tax system, it is possible to overcome these in a manner that allows society to reap benefits in terms of a better allocation of resources, more stable house prices and a fairer income distribution.
OECD countries have made significant reform progress in recent decades, in fields as diverse as competition policy, health care and the environment. How have they done it? And why have reforms advanced in some places and stalled in others? This collection of essays analyses the reform experiences of the 30 OECD countries in nine major policy domains in order to identify lessons, pitfalls and strategies that may help foster policy reform in the future. While taking full account of the tremendous differences in the political and institutional settings in which these reforms were undertaken, the authors highlight a number of common challenges and potential solutions that hold good across both countries and issue areas. They show that the scope for cross-national policy learning is enormous.
The importance of such reform lessons is all the greater in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis. As OECD governments confront the challenge of trying to restore public finances to health without undermining the recovery, they will need to pursue a careful mix of fiscal policies and growth-enhancing structural reforms. Designing, adopting and implementing such a policy mix will require the crafting of effective reforms and effective strategies for implementing them.
How to make the most of public investment? This question is critical in today’s tight fiscal environment. Given that sub-national governments in OECD countries carry out more than two thirds of total capital investment, they have played a key role in executing national stimulus packages during the global crisis. The effectiveness of recovery strategies based on public investment thus depends largely on the arrangements between levels of government to design and implement the investment mix. This report provides an overview of challenges met in the recovery and highlights good practices and lessons learned, focusing on eight country cases: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, Spain, Sweden and the United States. As stimulus packages are being phased out since 2010, many countries have moved toward fiscal consolidation and targeted public investment as an adjustment variable. Co-ordination between levels of government was essential to implement recovery measures, and it is equally important to better prioritise reduced public investment and make the most of it for sustainable growth.
The Manual on Statistics of International Trade in Services is a joint publication of six agencies:- the UN, EC, IMF, OECD, UNCTAD, and WTO. It addresses a growing demand from governments, businesses and analysts for more relevant, detailed and internationally comparable statistics on services trade. Special emphasis is given to the statistical information needs of international trade negotiations and agreements.
The Manual provides a coherent internationally-agreed conceptual framework within which countries can structure the statistics they compile and report on international services trade. It builds on and links to existing standards, in particular the fifth edition of the International Monetary Fund’s Balance of Payments Manual and the 1993 System of National Accounts. It categorises the services that are traded internationally, and how they are traded in practice, taking into account the modes of supply of services.
Intense exploitation of our oceans and seas is degrading marine biodiversity and ecosystems at an alarming rate. This report presents good practice insights for effectively managing marine protected areas (MPAs), one of the policy instruments available for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity and ecosystems. While global coverage of MPAs has been increasing over the past two decades, further efforts are required to meet the target under the Sustainable Development Goals and to ensure they are effective.
Drawing on the literature and numerous examples from developed and developing countries, this book highlights how the environmental and cost effectiveness of MPAs can be enhanced. It covers issues including the benefits and costs of MPAs, the need for more strategic siting of MPAs, monitoring and compliance, sustainable finance for MPAs, and the need to embed these in a wider policy mix so as to address the multiple pressures on marine ecosystems.
The Manual on the Measurement of Human Resources devoted to S&T (the "Canberra Manual") was issued in 1995. It was prepared in close co-operation between the OECD and the DGXII/Eurostat of the European Commission, other OECD Directorates, UNESCO and the International Labour Office (ILO), with the support of national experts. Drawing on best international and national practice and classifications, the "Canberra Manual" provides definitions of human resources devoted to science and technology in terms of qualification (levels and fields of study) and occupation and discusses a number of variables of policy interest.
Capital - in particular of the physical sort - plays several roles in economic life: it constitutes wealth and it it provides services in production processes. Capital is invested, disinvested and it depreciates and becomes obsolescent and there is a question how to measure all these dimensions of capital in industry and national accounts. This revised Capital Manual is a comprehensive guide to the approaches toward capital measurement. It gives statisticians, researchers and analysts practical advice while providing theoretical background and an overview of the relevant literature. The manual comes in three parts - a first part with a non-technical description with the main concepts and steps involved in measuring capital; a second part directed at implementation and a third part outlining theory and a more complete mathematical formulation of the measurement process.
This Manual clarifies the conceptual issues concerning stocks and flows of fixed capital and provides practical guidelines for estimation. The Manual also deals with the definition and measurement of "capital services" which measure the contribution of capital assets into the production process. The Manual thus provides a link with the OECD Manual on Productivity Measurement.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by world leaders at the United Nations on 25 September 2015, sets out an ambitious plan of action for people, planet and prosperity, with the overarching objective of leaving no one behind. At its core are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) comprising 169 targets. This Study of the distances from the SDGs of selected OECD countries is designed to help governments as they consider developing national action plans, as well as to contribute to SDG mainstreaming across different OECD Directorates. It leverages the wealth of statistical data collected by OECD members and harmonised through OECD tools and processes.
The nuclear energy sector employs a considerable workforce around the world, and with nuclear power projected to grow in countries with increasing electricity demand, corresponding jobs in the nuclear power sector will also grow. Using the most available macroeconomic model to determine total employment – the “input/output” model – the Nuclear Energy Agency and International Atomic Energy Agency collaborated to measure direct, indirect and induced employment from the nuclear power sector in a national economy. The results indicate that direct employment during site preparation and construction of a single unit 1 000 megawatt-electric advanced light water reactor at any point in time for 10 years is approximately 1 200 professional and construction staff, or about 12 000 labour years. For 50 years of operation, approximately 600 administrative, operation and maintenance, and permanently contracted staff are employed annually, or about 30 000 labour years. For up to 10 years of decommissioning, about 500 people are employed annually, or around 5 000 labour years. Finally, over an approximate period of 40 years, close to 80 employees are managing nuclear waste, totalling around 3 000 labour years. A total of about 50 000 direct labour-years per gigawatt. Direct expenditures on these employees and equipment generate approximately the same number of indirect employment, or about 50 000 labour years; and direct and indirect expenditures generate about the same number of induced employment, or 100 000 labour years. Total employment in the nuclear power sector of a given national economy is therefore roughly 200 000 labour years over the life cycle of a gigawatt of nuclear generating capacity.
Science and technology improves human health but the pressure for faster and larger improvements is building with the continued ageing of the population of many OECD countries and the associated increased demands for health care. A fundamental starting point for better understanding of the impact of innovation on health is the measurement of R&D. This publication addresses this issue by looking in detail at measurement practices across ten OECD member countries as well as the main international sources.
This manual provides guidance on how to measure and interpret measurements of globalisation's extent and intensity. The manual defines concepts and puts forward guidelines for data collection and fine-tuning of globalisation indicators. In particular, it looks at indicators related to foreign direct investment, the economic activities of multinational enterprises, the internationalisation of technology, and trade globalisation.
Knowledge management involves any activity related to the capture, use and sharing of knowledge by an organisation. Evidence shows that these practices are being used more and more frequently and that their impact on innovation and other aspects of corporate performance is far from negligible. Today, there is a recognition of the need to understand and to measure the activity of knowledge management so that organisations can be more efficient and governments can develop policies to promote these benefits. This book offers a synthetic view of the results of the first systematic international survey on knowledge management carried out by national statistical offices in Canada, Denmark, France and Germany.
The OECD Measuring Productivity Manual is the first comprehensive guide to the various productivity measures aimed at statisticians, researchers and analysts involved in constructing industry-level productivity indicators.
This Manual presents the theoretical foundations to productivity measurement, and discusses implementation and measurement issues. The text is accompanied by empirical examples from OECD countries and by numerical examples to enhance its readability. The Manual also offers a brief discussion of the interpretation and use of productivity measures.
The papers in this conference proceedings address the various conceptual, measurement and statistical policy issues that arise when applying accounting frameworks to the concept of sustainable development.
There are hundreds of empirical studies finding evidence of tax-motivated profit shifting, using different data sources and estimation strategies. While measuring the scope of BEPS is challenging given its complexity and existing data limitations, a number of recent studies suggest that BEPS is responsible for significant global corporate income tax (CIT) revenue losses. This report assesses currently available data and concludes that significant limitations severely constrain economic analyses of the scale and economic impact of BEPS and improved data and methodologies are required. Noting these data limitations, a dashboard of six BEPS indicators has been constructed, using different data sources and assessing different BEPS channels. These indicators provide evidence that BEPS exists and has been increasing over time. New empirical analysis estimates that the scale of global CIT revenue losses could be between USD 100 and 240 billion annually at 2014 levels. The report also presents a toolkit to assist countries evaluate the fiscal effects of BEPS countermeasures. The research also finds significant non-fiscal economic distortions arising from BEPS. The report concludes by making recommendations regarding data and monitoring tools to improve the analysis of BEPS in the future.