Browse by: "2023"

When it comes to high-tech innovations, the United States leads the path amongst OECD economies. However, in the context of the national record-breaking activities in high tech innovation, there lies distinct and growing geographical disparities. This report dives into strategies for better understanding innovation that occurs in rural places, and places outside major metropolitan areas, often going beyond science and technology. It provides analysis and recommendations to support regional development initiatives aimed at closing the gaps in innovation between rural and urban areas. The report includes a special topic chapter on the role of broadband and education in rural areas, exploring trends and providing policy recommendations to enhance rural innovation through these specific and critical framework conditions.

This report explores evidence-based action areas to increase and accelerate the mobilisation of private finance for climate action in developing countries, and the role of international public finance providers in doing so. It draws on best-available data to provide disaggregated analysis of the sectoral, geographic and other features of private finance mobilised by public climate finance and presents key economy-wide, sector-specific, and institutional challenges to private finance mobilisation. The analysis is anchored in the context of the USD 100 billion climate finance goal, initially set for 2020 and extended to 2025, while also providing insights related to mobilising private finance for climate action in developing countries more broadly.

This report analyses current trends of adaptation finance provided and mobilised by developed countries for developing countries. It explores potential action areas for international providers to scale up funding for climate change adaptation, including by unlocking the potential of the private sector. The analysis is anchored in the context of the USD 100 billion climate finance goal, initially set for 2020 and extended to 2025, while also providing insights to the broader and longer-term objective of supporting developing countries’ ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change.

This report presents aggregate trends of annual climate finance provided and mobilised by developed countries for developing countries for the period 2013-2021. It includes breakdowns by climate theme, sector, financial instrument and recipient country grouping for the period 2016-2021. The report also provides key recommendations for international providers to increase financing towards adaptation and more effectively mobilise private finance for climate action, which are both important policy priorities and current bottlenecks. The recommendations in this report draw from two OECD publications on scaling up private climate finance and adaptation finance.

The Climate Action Monitor is a key publication of the International Programme for Action on Climate (IPAC). It provides a synthesis of climate action and progress towards net-zero targets for 51 OECD and OECD partner countries. This year's edition presents a summary of information on greenhouse gas emissions, an assessment of climate-related hazards and recent trends in climate action. Directed towards policymakers and practitioners, the findings suggest that without increased ambition and a significant expansion in national climate action, countries will not be able to meet the net-zero challenge.

L’Observateur de l’action climatique est une des principales publications du Programme international pour l’action sur le climat (IPAC). Cette synthèse couvre les mesures relatives à la lutte contre les changements climatiques et les progrès accomplis en vue de la neutralité carbone dans 51 pays de l’OCDE et partenaires de l’OCDE. Cette année, le rapport contient un résumé des informations relatives aux émissions de gaz à effet de serre, une évaluation des aléas climatiques et les dernières tendances en matière de mesures relatives à la lutte contre les changements climatiques. Les décideurs politiques et les acteurs de terrain sont les destinataires de cette synthèse dont les résultats montrent que, à moins d’être plus ambitieux et d’accroître significativement l’envergure des actions en faveur du climat à l’échelle nationale, les pays ne relèveront pas le défi de la neutralité carbone.

Upper secondary education in Lithuania stands out internationally with one of the highest attainment rates across OECD countries. Yet the country and its young people receive relatively modest returns in terms of learning outcomes for the country's high rates of upper secondary completion. To address this issue, Lithuania is currently undertaking a series of reforms at the upper secondary education level. This report explores how Lithuania, and its young people can achieve higher returns on its investment in upper secondary education and provides Lithuania with policy recommendations to help improve it by strengthening vocational education pathways and by consolidating upper secondary certification.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on the Umbrian economy, and despite recovery of labour demand, the region faces challenges related to digitalisation, tight labour markets, and volatile demand for low-skilled jobs. To address these issues, the OECD and the Umbrian regional agency for active labour market policies (ARPAL) have collaborated to investigate the labour and skills demand of the region using big data techniques applied to online job postings. This report provides new insights into the alignment between labour and skills demand and the training options available in the training and education programmes contained in the Umbrian Regional Training Catalogue. This report builds new indicators to measure the alignment of course content with employer demands in Umbria, with results showing that alignment is relatively good for some occupations but that this can be strengthened to provide job seekers with up-to-date training options that match the demand of the labour market.

In 2024, education and training systems have a ‘unique potential’ to build the foundations of equitable, sustainable societies. In the OECD National Survey for Comparative Policy Analysis 2023: Empowering Learners to go Green, 90% of participating systems identified environmental sustainability as a key priority for 2024. There is no trade-off between addressing the biggest challenge facing people and the planet and responding to other external shocks and long-term evolutions, especially since these will only become increasingly interdependent. This implies empowering lifelong learners, institutions and education systems with the agency required to act, today. Building on the OECD’s Framework of Responsiveness and Resilience in Education Policy, survey responses from 36 education systems and international policy analysis, this report explores how education systems can: 1) translate learners’ awareness into environmental action; 2) provide learners with experiences to shape the green economy; and 3) position education as a strategic sector for the green transition. By exploring these areas, the report aims to support countries to follow up on the goals established by the 2022 OECD Declaration on Building Equitable Societies Through Education. The report is part of the Education Policy Outlook series—the OECD’s analytical observatory of education policy.

The aim of the OECD (Quantitative) Structure-Activity Relationship ((Q)SAR) Assessment Framework (QAF) is to provide a systematic and harmonised framework for the regulatory assessment of (Q)SAR models, predictions, and results based on multiple predictions. The QAF is meant to be applicable (Q)SARs, irrespective of the modelling technique used to build the model, the predicted endpoint, and the intended regulatory purpose. The primary audience of this document is regulatory authorities and their stakeholders. In addition, any other (Q)SAR user is encouraged to refer to the QAF when using (Q)SARs for regulatory purposes.

Corporate Tax Statistics 2023, a flagship publication of the OECD, provides comprehensive insights into corporate tax systems and the tax and economic activities of thousands of multinational enterprises operating around the world. It is a key outcome of Action 11 of the OECD/G20 BEPS Project which aims to improve the measurement and monitoring of tax avoidance. The report includes data on corporate tax rates, revenues, effective tax rates, as well as tax incentives for R&D and innovation. This fifth edition also includes two years of anonymised and aggregated country-by-country reporting data, and, for the first time, information on withholding tax rates under tax treaties for member jurisdictions of the OECD and the Inclusive Framework on BEPS.

Minor use is the use of chemical pesticides or non-chemical means of crop protection where the potential use is on a scale not sufficiently large to justify registration of that use from an applicant’s perspective alone. The key driver for minor uses is a lack of economic return to an applicant from registration of those uses, in particular the associated costs of generating the data required for obtaining and maintaining regulatory approval and potential liability from those uses once approved. Typically, minor uses involve crops grown on a small scale (minor crops) and often are high value speciality crops. Additionally, minor uses can involve uses within major crops in terms of controlling minor pests and diseases. This results in a situation where speciality crop industries are either without or are lacking sufficient access to pesticides to adequately protect those crops. This guidance has been developed to provide a document that centralises the variety of existing information and global approaches for facilitating the registration of minor uses. It is not intended to reproduce existing information, but rather briefly discuss and collate in a single document the sources of information utilised to address and solve minor use gaps.

OECD Member Countries are interested in increasing the use of omics technologies in regulatory toxicology to advance chemical risk assessment. In this context, the OECD has developed this Guidance Document and accompanying Excel template for reporting omics studies, which is referred to as the OECD Omics Reporting Framework (OORF). The OORF is intended to facilitate data sharing for omics toxicology experiments, increase the transparency of omics data processing approaches used, enable quality assessment of the study experiment and data, and promote reproducibility.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become, in the last two decades, a global threat that poses potentially dramatic health and economic consequences. AMR is referring to antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal resistance. Although it remains a complex issue, antibacterial resistance is, presently, of greatest concern and the main drivers of AMR are antimicrobial overuse and misuse in human, animal, agricultural and environmental sectors and the spread of resistant bacteria and resistance determinants within and between these sectors and across countries. This document aims to provide an overview of how OECD member countries assess AMR of microorganisms used as biopesticides and summarise the available approaches. The aspiration is that the document also highlights the main issues to be considered during the evaluation of the AMR potential of microorganisms used as plant protection products.