Browse by: "2021"
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The full potential of digital technologies remains unrealised and their benefits unequally shared because of insufficient investment in enabling intangible assets and communication networks within and across countries. The COVID-19 shock poses new challenges and opportunities. Drawing on past and ongoing OECD work, the paper proposes a multipronged policy approach to durably accelerate the diffusion and uptake of digital technologies across all layers of society, and share their benefits more widely. The building blocks of the proposed LIFT approach include: Lifelong learning for all to ensure everybody has the opportunity to acquire and upgrade the skills needed to thrive in a digital world; Intangibles finance for the knowledge economy to allow more firms, especially small ones, to increase intangible investment and seize the opportunities offered by the digital transformation; Framework market conditions for the digital age to upgrade policies to the digital age, especially in the areas of taxation, competition law and enforcement, digital security, firms’ entry and exit, and e-government; Technology access via digital infrastructure to facilitate access to communication networks and accelerate the take up of digital technologies and their international diffusion.
This paper summarises a discussion on "Competition Issues in Books and e-Books" held in November 2021 covering the rationale and impact of the policies and regulations in the books market; the interplay between regulation and market developments, namely the launch of e-books; and whether the enforcement cases on e-books had an impact on market developments.
Raising the effectiveness of Italy’s public sector is more urgent than ever. It will be key to revive investment and productivity and improve access to quality public services for the most vulnerable. The quality of public goods and services is variable, weakening Italy’s resilience to shocks like the COVID-19 crisis and the ability to secure a more sustained and inclusive recovery. Excessive regulations and their onerous enforcement add to businesses’ operating costs. Trust in public institutions and public service delivery is one of the lowest across OECD countries. In the coming years Italy will have a unique opportunity to improve the effectiveness of its public sector, through the Recovery and Resilience Plan, the renewal of the public sector workforce, and the potential of technological innovations. This paper proposes options to strengthen public sector effectiveness by looking at what interventions the public sector makes in the economy, how the public sector mobilises its workforce, procures goods and services, and leverages the benefits of digitalisation, and who acts across levels of government and between the public and private sector. It concludes that recruiting and developing the necessary skills in the workforce, monitoring performance, as well as encouraging coordination will be key to better budget allocations, regulatory environment, and delivering quality public goods and services.
On a daily basis, a deluge of academic studies, reports and news tell us that the Earth’s ecosystem is in danger. They further warn that we need more than just information to address the climate crisis, protect the environment, and promote a sustainable way of living. We need action.
Education plays a pivotal role in raising awareness and sensitivity about the environment. It must provide the foundational knowledge and skills to identify and resolve environmental challenges, and shape attitudes and behaviours that lead to both individual and collective action.
This paper proposes a ranking of the countries where forest carbon sequestration is the most cost-efficient among 166 countries for which data are available. Taking into account the main cost factors leads to a more nuanced ranking of the countries to be favoured for cost-efficient forest carbon sequestration compared to the assumption that these would always be in tropical areas with high rainfall. The ranking reflects the differences in the opportunity cost of land use and labour cost (production costs), the quality of the business environment (transaction costs), natural conditions (forest productivity), wildfire risk and the avoided GHG emissions from alternative land use. Cost-efficiency also depends on the type of forest project (afforestation, reforestation or forest conservation) and how private (wood harvest) and non-private (environmental and social) co-benefits are counted. A sensitivity analysis is undertaken to examine the robustness of the results with respect to uncertainties in values of the cost and quantity factors of forest carbon sequestration. The results support the view that forests can be a cost-efficient way to offset GHG emissions and that significant cost reductions are possible by targeting the country and sub-national regions in which to locate forest carbon sequestration projects. The report also reviews the literature on the significance and cost of forest carbon sequestration and provides an overview of forest carbon offset schemes.
Smart Specialisation Strategy is a place-based EU policy that seeks to enhance regional competitiveness through leveraging and bolstering innovation in the selected priority areas (industries or technologies) in each region. The new iteration of S3 requires developing cross-border collaborations with regions possessing complex and complementary technological expertise currently missing in a region to upgrade its technological evolution. The reason for this is that new growth opportunities arise from recombining existing technological capabilities while more complex technologies offer strong competitive advantage. This paper presents a simple roadmap for regional S3 internationalisation and the results of an in-depth case study on the opportunities for and barriers to S3 internationalisation in Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG), a region in the North East of Italy. The paper develops recommendations on how to make the most of the Research, Technology, Development and Innovation endowments in FVG through enhancing the innovation-internationalisation nexus in order to improve competitiveness of the region.
Making trade work for all and harnessing popular support for openness to trade depends on consumers benefitting from lower prices and broader product variety. The present study reveals that those benefits depend on competition in services markets, in particular in telecommunication. These findings result from employing an industrial organisation framework to estimate the transmission of prices from the world market to consumers of certain services in local markets (distribution, transport, and financial services). The OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (OECD STRI) is used to explore the relationship between the pass-through rate of input prices to consumer prices and policy measures that capture the openness and strength of competition in services markets. The OECD STRI in telecommunications is found to be associated with a more complete and faster pass-through of prices in all markets studied. The results also illustrate the crucial role played by the internet in allowing for price comparisons that generate competitive pressure on distributors.
Although the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are not integrated explicitly into the main urban development plans of the city of Moscow, the local government has started using them as a checklist to assess the contribution of its sectoral programmes to sustainable development, as well as related strengths and weaknesses. Moscow presents very positive educational results, low unemployment rates and a strong innovation capacity, but challenges exist regarding sustainable consumption and production, affordable housing and air quality. The SDGs provide a framework to address these challenges in an integrated way and to contribute, in particular, to the sustainable transition of its industrial sector, which accounts for 16% of the city’s value added. The SDGs also allow to promote synergies across the three main urban development plans, catalyse needed investments in sustainability and enhance collaboration with the private sector.
This paper provides a descriptive analysis of patterns and trends of worker transitions across European countries and the United States, with an emphasis on differences across socio-economic groups. Understanding labour market transitions is important to gauge the scope of labour market reallocation and scarring effects from the COVID-19 crisis. Results of this work show that labour market transitions vary significantly from one country to another and also within countries from one socio-economic group to another. For instance, women are much more likely than men to move in and out of jobs. This reflects the unequal burden of family-related work, which contributes to the higher propensity of women to drop out of the labour force. Zooming in on labour market transitions over the great financial crisis provides an illustration of the long-lasting effects and scarring risks associated with recessions on labour market transitions, especially for young people entering the labour market. The results of this granular analysis inform the policy debate for an efficient and inclusive recovery. While current priorities vary across countries based on economic and social context, one overarching challenge for the recovery is to facilitate hiring dynamics and to minimise long-term unemployment and scarring risks among vulnerable groups who have been hardest hit and face higher risks of scarring from the recession, in particular young people and women.
Inter-regional migration – the movements of the population from one region to another within the same country – can be an important mechanism of spatial economic adjustment, affecting regional demographic and growth patterns. This paper examines the economic and housing-related factors that affect the decision of people to migrate to another region within the same country, drawing empirical evidence from country-specific gravity models of inter-regional migration for 14 OECD countries. The results suggest that inter-regional migrants move in search of higher income and better employment opportunities, but are discouraged by high housing costs. In particular, house prices are found to be an important barrier to migration, especially in countries having experienced strong increases in the level and cross-regional dispersion of house prices. There is however large heterogeneity across countries in terms of what factors matter the most and in terms of the magnitude of the migration response.
There is no guidance on how to deal with the effects of catastrophic events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, on stated preference survey responses, despite the possible impact such events can have on stated values and survey responses. This paper provides a concise analysis of the likely effects of extreme events on stated preference surveys, focusing on the validity and temporal stability of estimated values, and offers a set of recommendations. These recommendations can also be of use for designing other types of household and individual surveys, beyond economic valuation surveys.
This policy note explores the different ways in which the digital economy affects investment promotion. As foreign direct investment (FDI) can be a key driver of digital growth and transformation, investment promotion agencies (IPAs) are increasingly seeking to attract firms operating in digital sectors or activities. In turn, IPAs also need to undergo their own digitalisation to become more efficient and improve their performance. Investment promotion practices need to respond to the challenges posed by new technologies and adapt new business models – particularly in the COVID-19 context.
This paper gathers some of the most salient regulatory proposals and amendments to existing laws, which were available to the public as of August 2021 to compare and contrast them. It was prepared as background materials to a discussion on Ex Ante Regulation and Competition in Digital Markets held at the OECD in December 2021.
Nitrogen management policies introduced in the past decades by some OECD countries have succeeded in reducing excess nitrogen use by farmers, but half of global mineral fertiliser use is still lost for crops. While about half of OECD countries have nutrient surpluses of between 25-50 kg N per hectare, a smaller number of countries are still having surpluses of more than 100 kg N per hectare. Since the production and use of mineral fertilisers have a large greenhouse gas footprint and to achieve the deep reductions in emissions as the Paris Agreement aims for, nitrogen management policies could be reinforced and pursued more systematically. The paper identifies significant reduction potential by eliminating the excess use of nitrogen fertilisers and improving efficiency in the use of manure-nitrogen, which could be obtained with a redesign of nitrogen management policies and schemes for public financial support. To underpin such measures a tax on the nitrogen surplus at farm level could play a vital role. Based on the available estimates of environmental externalities of nitrogen, the paper identifies an average rate of EUR 1-2 as a suitable starting point for a tax or penalty on the surplus application of nitrogen. The paper also explores the opportunities for sustainable nutrient management in agriculture with climate mitigation benefits relating to nitrous oxides in particular.
This policy paper aims to improve understanding on how SMEs responded to the COVID-19 crisis and adapted to the new environment, and how different players in their ecosystems are contributing to their digital transition. The first part of the paper sets the scene on the digital transformation of SMEs, by providing an overview of key trends in SME uptake of digital technologies across OECD countries. The second part of the paper focuses on some of the main trends emerging from - or being strongly accelerated by - the COVID-19 crisis, including access to digital infrastructure, e-commerce and teleworking. The third and last section discusses international practices in SME digitalisation policies and presents original evidence from the “rescue” and “recovery” packages launched by OECD governments to face the crisis; as well as case studies and qualitative evidence from private-sector programme provided by partners of the Digital for SMEs Global Initiative (D4SME).
Ce rapport dresse un état des lieux des règles et des procédures mises en œuvre par les 50 principaux services mondiaux de partage de contenus en ligne pour lutter contre les contenus terroristes et extrémistes violents, l’accent étant mis sur la transparence. Il en ressort que seuls cinq des 50 services étudiés publient des rapports de transparence dédiés à ce type de contenus, et qu’ils suivent ce faisant des approches diverses. Ils se fondent sur des définitions différentes du terrorisme et de l’extrémisme violent, ne signalent pas les mêmes types d’informations, s’appuient sur des mesures et des méthodes d’estimation disparates et publient leurs rapports à des fréquences et selon des calendriers distincts. Compte tenu du nombre peu élevé d’entreprises publiant des rapports et de l’hétérogénéité de la teneur, des calendriers et des modalités y afférents, il est impossible d’avoir une vision intersectorielle claire et exhaustive de l’efficacité des mesures prises par les entreprises pour lutter contre les contenus terroristes et extrémistes violents diffusés en ligne, ou des conséquences que ces mesures pourraient avoir sur le respect des droits humains. Cette situation pourrait s’améliorer si les entreprises étaient plus nombreuses à publier des rapports de transparence et y faisaient figurer des informations plus aisément comparables.
Relying on linked employer-employee datasets from 10 countries, this paper documents that the skills and the diversity of the workforce and of managers – the human side of businesses – account on average for about one third of the labour productivity gap between firms at the productivity “frontier” (the top 10% within each detailed industry) and medium performers at the 40-60 percentile of the productivity distribution. The composition of skills, especially the share of high skills, varies the most along the productivity distribution, but low and medium skilled employees make up a substantial share of the workforce even at the frontier.
High skills show positive but decreasing productivity returns. Moreover, the skill mix of top firms varies markedly across countries, pointing to the role of different strategies pursued by firms in different policy environments. We also find that managerial skills play a particularly important role, also through complementarities with worker skills. Gender and cultural diversity among managers – and to a lesser extent, among workers – is positively related to firm productivity as well. We discuss public policies that can facilitate the catch-up of firms below the frontier through skills and diversity. These cover a wide range of areas, exerting their influence through three main channels: the supply, upgrading and the matching across firms (the SUM) of skills and other human factors.
In line with the EU Public Procurement Directives, the Slovak legislation foresees the use of criteria accounting for quality, environmental benefits or social inclusion in public tenders. However, their use remains limited in practice. This report provides analysis and evidence to help the Slovak authorities design a national strategy to mainstream the use of criteria beyond price in public procurement.
Gender-responsive procurement involves using public procurement opportunities to advance promote gender equality. Mainstreaming gender considerations in public procurement is a key dimension of strategic procurement in which public buying power is harnessed to advance public priorities to improve the well-being of society as a whole. This paper presents how governments and public buyers can use their purchasing power to promote gender equality and encourage suppliers to improve their performance on women’s empowerment. It explores the different ways that gender considerations can be integrated into public procurement policies and processes, and discusses the challenges that both policy makers and procurement practitioners face in promoting gender equality through public procurement.
Episodi di siccità sempre più frequenti e gravi minacciano il settore agricolo italiano. Si prevede che il cambiamento climatico accelererà questa tendenza, pertanto il settore deve sviluppare una resilienza nel lungo periodo. A questo fine, saranno necessarie una pianificazione e una preparazione migliore per assorbire l’impatto degli episodi di siccità e per la successiva ripresa, nonché una maggior efficacia in termini di adattamento e trasformazione a fronte di tali eventi. I recenti sviluppi positivi nel paese includono una migliore raccolta dei dati sull’approvvigionamento idrico e sui danni e le perdite subiti dall’agricoltura a causa di rischi naturali, i quali consentono maggiore consapevolezza nella gestione delle risorse idriche e nelle decisioni di investimento; un maggiore impegno verso politiche di prevenzione per la gestione dei rischi; e approcci più partecipativi alla gestione delle risorse idriche. Tuttavia il portafoglio delle politiche agricole al momento sottovaluta gli investimenti per la preparazione ad affrontare le emergenze e per l’adattamento a livello di azienda agricola, prediligendo strumenti che sono mirati ad assorbire gli impatti, come gli strumenti assicurativi. Ulteriori sforzi per sviluppare la resilienza del settore agricolo potrebbero trarre vantaggio da una strategia olistica di gestione dei rischi settoriali nel lungo periodo; una valutazione del bilanciamento tra le spese relative agli strumenti per l’assorbimento degli impatti, e gli investimenti per la misure volte a alla preparazione per la gestione delle catastrofi naturali e alla mitigazione degli impatti; e una considerazione più esplicita della demografia e delle capacità degli agricoltori nell’elaborazione delle politiche.