Browse by: "2021"

All countries need vaccines but not all can produce them. Vaccine production is highly specialised, subject to comparative advantages, and concentrated in few countries, making trade a vital means to deploying vaccines broadly. Keeping markets open by reducing tariffs, streamlining trade-related processes at and behind the border while ensuring better co-ordination of logistical processes will be key to ensuring timely access to vaccines for all. This note discusses trade and trade policy considerations underpinning access to the final and intermediate goods needed to effectively produce, deliver and administer COVID-19 vaccines. It focuses on the international aspects of the vaccine supply chain, discussing the sourcing, production, distribution and need to expedite international border crossing and transportation (including in the context of the cold supply chain).

With most students around the world having experienced remote learning over the past year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of teachers and schools has become all the more evident. Temporary school closures underline how richly students benefit from being in school with their teachers and classmates. Positive, High-achieving Students? What Schools and Teachers Can Do pinpoints some of the factors that make an effective teacher and school.

The International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study puts a spotlight on how children are faring at 5 years-of-age. Children’s early well-being and learning are primary determinants of their later outcomes in schooling and in adulthood. Yet children’s development during their early years remains one of the most neglected areas of international research in education. As a consequence, the international evidence countries can draw on to inform their policy approaches for children’s early learning is sparse. The International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study has been developed and designed to fill this gap. Education systems that prioritise evidence on children’s actual needs and who learn from other countries’ achievements and challenges will be more successful in giving every child a strong early start, thereby building more successful and equitable systems.

Health systems continue to adapt to cope with the COVID‑19 pandemic. Much focus has been placed on the scaling-up of hospital capacities. However, the pandemic is also deeply affecting the health of many people who are not infected by the virus. People living with chronic conditions are not only highly vulnerable to complications and death from COVID‑19, but they are also suffering from disruptions to their regular care routines. The COVID‑19 crisis demonstrates the importance of placing primary health care at the core of health systems, both to manage an unexpected surge of demand and to maintain continuity of care for all. Strong primary health care – organised in multi-disciplinary teams and with innovative roles for health professionals, integrated with community health services, equipped with digital technology, and working with well-designed incentives – helps deliver a successful health system response. The innovations introduced in response to the pandemic need to be maintained to make health systems more resilient against future public health emergencies, and able to meet the challenges of ageing societies and the growing burden of chronic conditions.

From “traditional” software to cloud services and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, our economies and societies are increasingly reliant upon “smart products” that contain code and can connect to each other, e.g. through the Internet. Such products are vulnerable to cyber security risk, and economic factors often play a major role in their relative ‘insecurity’. This report discusses how policy makers can address key challenges that prevent smart products from reaching an optimal level of digital security. Increasing transparency and information sharing, promoting co-operation (including at the international level), and ensuring the duty of care of supply-side actors (e.g. through the principles of security-by-design, security-by-default and responsible end-of-life) are important avenues for policy action. Policy makers can leverage many tools to achieve these objectives, from public procurement, certification and multi-stakeholder partnerships, to labels and ex ante legal requirements.

Economies and societies are increasingly reliant upon “smart products” that contain code and can connect to one another, e.g. through the Internet. Recent cyber-attacks such as Mirai, WannaCry, NotPetya and SolarWinds have underlined that the exploitation of vulnerabilities in smart products can have severe economic and social consequences. Such attacks increasingly threaten users’ safety and well-being, as well. This report shows that economic factors play an important role in the relative “insecurity” of smart products. It develops an analytical framework based on the value chain and lifecycle of smart products, and applies the framework to three case studies: computers and smartphones, consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud services. It demonstrates that complex and opaque value chains lead to a misallocation of responsibility for digital security risk management, while significant information asymmetries and externalities often limit stakeholders’ ability to behave optimally.

This paper analyses ‘mission-oriented innovation policies’ (MOIPs), a new type of systemic intervention that a growing number of countries has implemented in order to tackle mounting societal challenges. These policies aim to alleviate some of the most prevalent weaknesses within many national systems of innovation, notably the lack of holistic strategic orientation and policy co-ordination, and fragmented policy mixes. This paper leverages a dedicated analytical framework to systematically explore the challenges and opportunities that these policies present at initiative and country levels. In doing so, it provides a better understanding of the different ways in which governments design, fund and coordinate MOIPs, and contributes to broadening the range of options available to either improve or initiate this policy approach. This paper complements the MOIP Online Toolkit (https://stip.oecd.org/stip/moip), the OECD knowledge platform on MOIPs.

Recent technological developments linked to secure messaging and traceability present an opportunity to address certain challenges in international and domestic payment systems. From an international perspective, foreign exchange markets remain costly and relatively less efficient than domestic payment systems. From a domestic perspective, the decline in the relative importance of cash in most economies reflects changes in consumers’ preferences, which questions the future of money and payment infrastructure. Against that background, private initiatives falling outside of current regulation, such as stable coins and other virtual assets, are associated with several risks and opportunities and have fueled the debate on the opportunities for central banks to issue new form of digital public currency. This note reviews those different propositions and examine their implication for the international and domestic payment systems.

As the roll out of coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines begins, this policy brief asks how to ensure vaccines for all. In doing so, it examines the case for multilateral approaches to access and delivery, maps key challenges, and identifies priority actions for policy makers. The absence of a comprehensive approach to ensure vaccine access in developing countries threatens to prolong the pandemic, escalating inequalities and delaying the global economic recovery. While new collaborative efforts such as ACT Accelerator and its COVAX initiative are helping to bridge current gaps, these are not enough in circumstances where demand far outstrips supply. Based on the current trajectory, mass immunisation efforts for poorer countries could be delayed until 2024 or beyond, prolonging human and economic suffering for all countries. Policy actions to support equitable vaccine access in developing countries include: (i) supporting multilateral frameworks for equitable allocation of vaccines and for crisis response, resilience and prevention; (ii) highlighting the role of development finance; and, (iii) promoting context-driven solutions.

The impacts of laws and regulations on competitiveness have strong implications for OECD economies, as they can lead to unforeseen negative externalities and considerable regulatory costs for businesses and citizens. Nevertheless, the use of regulatory policy to assess the impacts of regulations on competitiveness has seldom been examined. This paper fills this gap by reviewing OECD members’ regulatory impact assessment (RIA) frameworks and the extent to which the competitiveness effects are currently appraised. It categorises regulatory impacts on competitiveness into three strongly interrelated components – cost competitiveness, innovation, and international competitiveness – and builds upon the OECD’s expertise to examine how regulations affect each component of competitiveness in turn. In doing so, the paper proposes a more complete structure that regulators can use to define and assess the competitiveness impacts of regulation as part of their RIA processes framework.

This paper uses firm-level data analysis to assess the extent, and the economic and policy implications of state-owned enterprises (hereafter SOEs) in the shipbuilding sector. Even though the available data appears to be limited in certain respects, one of the paper’s key findings demonstrates that SOEs occupy a significant share in global ship completions, but are likely to operate with lower profitability rates and to be more highly leveraged than private enterprises. This report also presents a number of guiding principles to assess SOEs’ behaviour and their potential impact on the shipbuilding market, such as good corporate governance frameworks and the principle of competitive neutrality. To provide a concrete comparative analysis of SOEs and their private counterparts, the paper examines a case-study comparing the Chinese central state-owned enterprise CSIC and its private counterpart Yangzijiang Shipbuilding.

The landscape of health services delivery is undergoing significant transformation from fragmented and disease-centred toward integrated and people-centred care. Health workers find themselves at the centre of this transformation that demands from them commensurate changes in the skill-set employed in day-to-day practice, among other challenges. The paper identifies transversal (core) skills that are becoming increasingly crucial for all front-line health workers to reap the potential benefits of people-centred care, such as better patient and population outcomes, higher productivity, and higher retention/job satisfaction combined among the workers themselves. These transversal skills include interpersonal skills, such as person-centred communication, interprofessional teamwork, self-awareness and socio-cultural sensitivity, as well as analytical skills, such as adaptive problem solving to devise customised care for individual persons, system thinking, openness to continuous learning, and the ability to use digital technologies effectively. Recognising the need to prepare health professionals for meeting the dual challenges of technically and emotionally complex healthcare workplace is a prerequisite to building and maintaining resilient and resourceful health workforce. This paper provides also a brief overview of skills assessment methods and tools that could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of health workforce policies and suggests a skills assessment strategy to evaluate the impact of reforms on the skills and performance of health workforce.

Only a small number of companies, located in a few countries, have specific technological expertise in wind turbine manufacturing. New quantitative analysis shows this expertise to be a significant driver of trade in wind turbines. Moreover, countries’ wind power generation efficiency is shown to depend on access to higher quality wind turbines available in international markets. Trade in wind turbines thus provides access to technologies with a level of efficiency that cannot be replicated domestically in importing countries. These results have important policy implications: i) barriers to trade in wind turbines are also barriers to the dissemination of key environmental technologies which are not otherwise widely available; ii) trade-discriminatory measures can also negatively impact non-manufacturing job creation in the renewable sector, as this relies on the continuous deployment of wind energy, which in turn depends on access to high quality turbines from international markets; and iii) policies should not focus on the creation of national champions, but rather on ensuring that domestic firms can apply their specific capabilities to new opportunities in the global value chains of renewables industries.

The Coronavirus pandemic has put extreme pressure on public health services, often delivered at the local and regional levels of government. The paper focuses on how countries made changes to the configuration of federalism during the first wave of the pandemic. These changes typically have involved the centralisation and decentralisation of certain health-related activities, as well as the creation of new coordination and funding mechanisms. Specific tools that have been used include an enhanced role of the executive branch (“executive federalism”), the use of centres of government for vertical coordination, as well as the introduction of unique state-of-emergency laws. New horizontal coordination arrangements have also emerged with the more decentralised approaches. The strengths, weaknesses and implementation risks of various approaches are analysed using country examples.