Browse by: "2015"

This working paper sums up the main findings of an OECD project aiming to provide an evidence basis for focusing efforts to improve the measurement of technological and non-technological forms of business innovation, with particular focus on the role of design. It reviews a broad range of novel design-related measures, indicating their advantages and limitations in terms of policy relevance and insights. The analysis of design provides a valuable test-case for assessing the robustness of the overall framework for measuring innovation as proposed in the OECD/Eurostat Oslo Manual. It identifies a number of areas for potential development in a future revision, focused on the role of users and the implementation of the definition of innovation and innovation activities. It also identifies a range of design concepts based on an informal consultation with the design expert community.

The paper also illustrates a number of findings arising from the first-time use of a set of experimental and optional questions on design implementing a “ladder-type” model of design which describes levels of sophistication and integration of the design function within the firm. Cognitive testing and analysis of the microdata from a large and representative sample of Danish firms shows a high degree of respondent acceptance of the experimental questions and supports their predictive validity vis-à-vis a number of hypotheses on the use of design and a series of innovation and economic outcomes potentially associated to it.

Kosovo is facing crucial challenges in developing a competitive economy, providing a decent level of public service and moving closer to the EU. Developing national policies to meet these objectives will require a functional policy co-ordination, planning and development system. This review is the second in a series of SIGMA policy making reviews, looking into the required legal framework, the policy making arrangements and the capacities of Kosovo. Covering the Government, including the centre of the government and ministries, and also the Assembly, the review provides an in-depth analysis of the key aspects of Kosovo’s public governance capacities in policy making and co-ordination. Kosovo has made remarkable progress in the last decade, however many challenges still remain. The review also includes proposals to further enhance the policy making system.

This paper presents the scoring and weighting methodology for calculation of the services trade restrictiveness indices (STRIs) for 18 sectors. The STRIs are composite indices taking values between zero and one, zero representing an open market and one a market completely closed to foreign services providers. The scoring system is based on binary scoring. To reconcile the complexity of services trade restrictions with binary scoring, non-binary measures are broken down to multiple thresholds; complementary measures are grouped and scored as zero only if all measures in the bundle are not restrictive. Finally in cases where one restriction renders others irrelevant, those measures that are rendered irrelevant are automatically scored one. The paper presents the general methodology that applies to the core measures found in all sectors as well as sector-specific scoring where relevant.

Growing international migration and diverse characteristics of migrant populations make internationally comparable high-quality data on migrants essential. Regular update of these data is crucial to capture the changes in size and composition of migrant populations. This document presents the first results of the update of the Database on Immigrants in OECD Countries (DIOC) for 2010/11. It describes immigrant and emigrant populations by socio-demographic characteristics and labour market outcomes in the OECD, and shows their evolution in the past decade. It also provides updated emigration rates and brain drain figures...

The manufacturing sector has contributed little to income growth and its share in total merchandise exports has been declining. Manufacturing has not brought much new employment, and most of the recent rise in manufacturing employment has been in the informal sector, where workers are not covered by social security arrangements.

Productivity of the manufacturing sector is low, partly because the relatively small size of manufacturing firms makes it difficult to exploit economies of scale. Despite abundant, low-skilled and relatively cheap labour, Indian manufacturing is surprisingly capital and skill intensive. Furthermore, firms have little incentive to grow, since by staying small they can avoid taxes and complex labour regulations. Land acquisition is slow, companies face frequent power outages and transport infrastructure is below par. This is especially harmful as manufacturing is highly reliant on well-functioning infrastructure.

Stronger manufacturing would increase productivity and make growth more inclusive, while contributing to improved current account balance. In particular, India should aim for more formal jobs, as these tend to be the most secure and of highest productivity.

Teachers in Brazil, Chile and Mexico report having high percentages of students with behavioural problems in their classes. Especially in Brazil, teachers report spending large amounts of time keeping order in the classroom. Besides potentially significantly reducing instructional time and students’ opportunities to lean, student misbehaviour can also influence attracting and retaining teachers. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate factors associated with time that lower secondary teachers report spending keeping order in the classroom and factors associated with these teachers’ reports of student behavioural problems in their class. It is based on in-depth analyses from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS 2013) data from Brazil, Chile and Mexico. Some of the major findings show that aspects of initial teacher education, professional development and teacher professional collaboration are associated with the time that lower secondary teachers report spending keeping order in the classroom, while participation among stakeholders in schools is negatively associated with student behavioural problems in the classroom.

Economic participation of women in the labour force or as entrepreneurs is low compared to peers and has declined over the past decades despite strong growth. The gap with men is over 50%--the largest among key emerging markets. Participation declines with higher education achievements and family incomes. The reasons are complex: socioeconomic and cultural factors are important - family status increases if women stay home, house work has become more attractive than poorly paid market work as husband’s incomes have risen; and safety concerns and poor infrastructure keep women from market work. Nevertheless, high unemployment among educated women and revealed preference for work in surveys indicate that many women would work if conditions improved. Availability of jobs is also an issue as the high growth has not created enough jobs for men and especially for women.

Specific gender policies will be needed to enlarge economic opportunities for women and to overcome socioeconomic and cultural barriers. This paper analyses the determinants of low female economic participation and recommends policies for raising it. The paper also estimates long-term growth effects of raising participation with selected policies. More and better jobs for women in India could raise growth by about 2 percentage points a year over time. This Working Paper relates to the 2014 OECD Economic Survey of India (http://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-india.htm).

The issue of a “level playing field” has re-emerged as a major issue in international aviation. This issue has been around for decades but has been raised in recent policy debates. One policy forum in which this has been raised is the European Commission’s proposed revision to Regulation 868/2004, which some view as a response to allegations by some legacy carriers to the rapid growth of the Middle East carriers such as Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways. Another dimension to the concern over the level playing field is the evolution in foreign ownership rules, such as the type of treaty clauses being negotiated by the European Union. Could broader acceptance of service by carriers owned by third-party nationals create conditions for a flag of convenience regime of the kind that characterises parts of maritime liner shipping? The flag of convenience issue has been discussed in the U.S. media with regard to Norwegian Air Shuttle. Norwegian’s long haul services are operated by subsidiaries Norwegian Long Haul AS and Norwegian International Ltd. The former is registered in Norway while the latter is registered in Ireland and operates flights for its parent. Some long haul flights have operated with contract flight attendant labour based in Thailand.

• The annual number of teaching hours of teachers differs greatly from one country to another and tends to decrease as the level of education increases.
• On average across countries, teachers spend half of their working time in non-teaching activities including planning lessons, marking and collaborating with other teachers.
• Keeping order in the classroom, generally the biggest concern for new teachers, occupies an average of 13% of all teachers’ time across countries.
• Schools could further benefit from developing ways to use teachers’ time more efficiently so that they could devote more time to professional development, teaching-related work and learning.

• Une plus grande anxiété vis-à-vis des mathématiques est associée à de moins bons résultats dans cette matière, que ce soit entre les pays ou au sein de ces derniers.
• Plus les camarades de classe d’un élève sont bons en mathématiques, plus son anxiété vis-à-vis de cette matière est grande.
• L’utilisation de pratiques d’évaluation formative par les enseignants est associée à une anxiété moindre vis-à-vis des mathématiques dans 39 pays et économies.

• Greater anxiety towards mathematics is associated with lower scores in mathematics, both between and within countries.
• The better a student’s schoolmates perform in mathematics, the greater the student’s anxiety towards mathematics.
• Teachers’ use of formative assessment practices is associated with lower levels of mathematics anxiety in 39 countries and economies.

This study uses a unique dataset of investment flows to analyse the role of two categories of public interventions (finance and policies) in mobilising flows of private climate finance worldwide and in the more specific context of flows to and in developing countries. The objectives are threefold. First, the paper presents ‘observed’ ratios of total private to public finance in selected climate-related sectors. Second, it seeks to understand the determinants of private climate finance flows by analysing the role of key public finance (bilateral, domestic and multilateral) and public policy instruments (feed-in tariffs, renewable energy quotas, the Clean Development Mechanism), while taking into account a number of market and country conditions. For reasons of data availability, the focus of this econometric analysis is on a subset of six renewable energy sectors (wind, solar, biomass, small hydro, marine and geothermal). Finally, the paper assesses the likely mobilisation impact of past public interventions in these six sectors, and draws a comparison with approaches that ignore the role of policy as well as country and market conditions.

Results suggest that both public finance and public policies have played an important role in private finance mobilisation globally. In the context of finance to and in developing countries, the results highlight the currently untapped potential of domestic public policies to increase mobilisation. The methodology proposed in this report is an initial attempt to estimate private climate finance mobilisation empirically. It should be seen as a first step towards developing more comprehensive methodologies for analysing and estimating private finance mobilisation in the global climate policy context.

This paper provides insights into what partner country governments anticipate will be their main development challenges within five to ten years, and into how they expect their relationships with DAC development assistance providers to evolve in order to meet these challenges. Based on results from an OECD-commissioned survey of 40 developing country governments, it finds that demand for development co-operation will remain strong given the economic and environmental challenges that lie ahead. However, the countries surveyed expect DAC providers to shift to a more enabling role in the coming years: providing vital finance, but in support of government-led sector programmes; delivering more and better technical and policy support; and leveraging more private finance. This paper will inform the OECD Development Co-operation Directorate’s ‘Agency of the Future’ project, which seeks to identify how DAC members’ development administrations will need to adapt in order to be fit for purpose in a rapidly changing world.

This paper uses newly released OECD data on services trade restrictions (STRI) to analyse the relationship between services trade restrictions, cross-border trade in services and trade in downstream manufactured goods. A standard gravity model is enhanced by the STRI indices in a cross-section regression analysis. Services trade restrictions are negatively associated with both imports and exports of services. The surprisingly strong effect on services exports is probably explained by a negative relationship between the STRIs and sector performance indices. Consequently, services suppliers are less competitive abroad. A negative relationship is also found between the STRI indices and exports, imports and intra-industry trade in manufactured goods. The statistical significance and the elasticities vary across services and goods sectors in ways that intuitively make sense.

This paper investigates farmers’ incentives to participate voluntarily in carbon offset markets when environmental credit stacking is allowed, that is, farmers can stack water quality credits with carbon credits. The implications of stacking on additionality of environmental services in interlinked markets, market participation rates, and market equilibrium prices are analysed by developing a conceptual framework of environmental credit stacking, which is applied with data estimates for the US Corn Belt. Analysis shows that credit stacking increases farmers’ participation in carbon offset markets, and that such increased participation provides additionality in environmental service provision. It is further shown that ecosystem markets are interlinked so that credit price changes in one market will shift credit supply in another market, thus affecting equilibrium prices. Empirical application of the framework shows that provision of CO2-eq offsets through reductions of nitrogen application or through the establishment of green set-asides is not profitable without water quality credits. A conversion from conventional tillage and reduced tillage to no-till is profitable in some cases, although current low carbon offset prices and transaction costs have a significant negative impact on the number of participating parcels. When farmers are allowed to stack water quality credits the profitability of carbon sequestration practices increases. Reduced nitrogen application levels becomes a profitable option and 21% of field parcels - representing 4.6 million acres- participate in the market with water quality credit prices at base levels of USD 3/lb for N and USD 4/lb for P. The establishment of green set-aside and streamside buffer strips becomes profitable in the lower productivity and highly erodible lands with base prices of nutrient credits. If water quality trading markets are small then high participation rates among farmers may result in an oversupply of nutrient credits and as a consequence equilibrium credit prices and farmers’ credit revenue would decrease.

This report is an assessment of the programme “Lernen vor Ort” [LvO – “Learning Locally”] initiated by the German federal government in order to support the development of local governance structures in education. LvO ran between 2009 and 2014 in about 40 participating local governments, which were chosen in a competitive process. It aimed at promoting cooperation between local governments and civil society stakeholders, creating sustainable structures in educational monitoring, management and consulting as well as improving local capacities in knowledge management. Besides providing important background information on the German education system and the design of the LvO programme, this study engages in five detailed case studies of the implementation of the LvO programme in different local authorities. These studies are mainly based on approximately 90 interviews with local and national experts, and stakeholders. The main findings are that LvO can be regarded as a success due to the fact that it had a lasting and probably sustainable impact in the cases studied in this report, in particular with regard to those structures that produce concrete and visible outputs, such as educational monitoring. The case studies also reveal a number of local factors that influence the relative effectiveness of the implementation of the programme. Political leadership and support from the head of the local government are crucial, in particular during critical situations during the implementation. Furthermore, the impact of the programme was particularly positive, when the process of local implementation was characterised by clear communication strategies, broad stakeholder involvement in governing bodies and the implementation of concrete goals and projects. However, relative success also depended on important background factors such as local socio-economic conditions as well as financial and administrative capacities, which could not be adressed directly by the programme’s goals. The report concludes with some general recommendations and lessons learned of relevance for other countries.

This paper identifies over 50 000 patents filed worldwide in various water-related adaptation technologies between 1990 and 2010, distinguishing between those related to water availability (supply) and water conservation (demand) technologies. The paper then analyses the innovation activity – including inventive activity by country and technology, international collaboration in technology development, and international diffusion of such water-related technologies. The results suggest that although innovation activity in water-related technologies has been increasing over the last two decades, this growth has been disproportionately concentrated on supply-side technologies. Moreover, most innovation worldwide occurs in countries with low or moderate vulnerability towards water scarcity. While this is a reflection of the fact that most developed economies do not face severe water stress, this result highlights the importance of international technology transfer and policies that facilitate broad diffusion of these technologies in water-stressed countries.

This paper presents an analysis of the effect of international co-authorship of scientific publications on patenting in wind energy technologies. It is found that the number of scientific publications co-authored by researchers in OECD countries has a positive and very significant impact on the number of wind energy innovations patented in OECD countries. However, non-OECD countries produce a greater number of patent filings when their researchers collaborate with OECD countries. This suggests that there exist knowledge spillovers between OECD and non-OECD countries that particularly benefit non-OECD countries. This empirical finding is important because it strengthens the case for international research cooperation between OECD and non-OECD countries in the area of climate mitigation.