Browse by: "2021"

Motorway crashes kill over 200 people in Korea each year. This report reviews international best practices in motorway safety across ten countries to inform ways to make Korea’s motorways safer. Matching the average safety performance observed across Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom would halve the number of motorway deaths. The report offers recommendations for an action plan to 2030, also taking into account the expected uptake of connected and automated vehicles.

While indices tracing the evolutions of regional house prices are increasingly available, this is less the case for similar data on house price levels. And where data on house price levels exist, they are not necessarily consistent with the patterns observed from house price indices. Yet, consistent regional statistics on house price levels are fundamental to assess housing affordability, potential barriers to labour mobility across regions, and for the design of housing policies. This article puts forward a method to compile regional house price levels that are consistent with the evolutions given by quality-adjusted house price indices, representative of the underlying stock of dwellings, and based on the information on house price levels that is available at all dates rather than in a single reference year. This method could be scaled up to different countries. The results obtained with Spanish data show that the decline in house prices following the global financial crisis of 2008-09 initially reduced the dispersion in house prices across Spanish regions, but this dispersion has increased again afterwards, and since 2016, it exceeds the one recorded in 2008. A comparison of price-per-m² to regional-income ratios shows that the relative housing affordability in the region of Madrid deteriorated compared to all other Spanish regions in the last decade. Monitoring whether shifts in housing demand following the COVID-19 pandemic will reverse this trend will be key.

The second in a series of three papers on cross-border government innovation, this paper focuses on the use of innovative methods by governments to identify and share insights and experiment across borders. It looks at efforts to collect ideas and insights from the front lines to create and promote collective intelligence, as well as to experiment and test across borders. The papers offers findings based on hundreds of cases in countries as well as research and expertise, as well as lessons and recommendations for successful cross-border collaboration and innovation governance.

The first in a series of three reports on cross-border government innovation, this paper discusses at how governments are using new governance mechanisms to connect and collaborate in order to tackle issues that cut across borders between administrative entities or areas. Based on cases provided by countries as well as extensive research, it looks at cross-border governance bodies, networks for cross-border collaboration, and emerging governance system dynamics. It highlights progress made in collaboration and identifies lessons for successful cross-border innovation governance.

The thematic policy brief on Resourcing Higher Education in Denmark is the first in a series of thematic policy briefs produced as part of the OECD's Resourcing Higher Education Project. This project aims to develop a shared knowledge base for OECD member and partner countries on effective policies for higher education resourcing through system-specific and comparative policy analysis. In 2017, Denmark embarked on an ambitious reform of its system for funding higher education institutions, aiming to improve teaching quality, graduates’ transition to the labour market and institutional leadership and profiling. Developed for the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, the thematic policy brief compares the Danish system for funding higher education institutions with systems in peer OECD jurisdictions, focusing on the design of different components of the funding model, the use of performance-related mechanisms elements and mechanisms to promote social inclusion and the regional coverage of the higher education system. The brief identifies policy issues that may warrant further attention as part of a planned future review of the Danish funding system.

Mountainous areas are at the forefront of climate change. This working paper presents approaches to strengthening the resilience of human and natural systems in mountainous areas against the impacts of climate change. Chapter 1 provides an overview of climate-related hazards to ecosystems and communities in mountainous areas, especially in developing countries, and their exposure and vulnerability to those hazards. The chapter then examines various ways governments and development co‑operation providers can strengthen the climate resilience of mountain communities and ecosystems. Chapter 2 presents the case of the Indian state of Uttarakhand.

This report provides recommendations for regulatory and data governance frameworks to support the development of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in the Brussels-Capital Region. These highlight the need to enable the development of a competitive and innovative MaaS ecosystem, with both public and private actors, in order to maximise the likelihood that sustainable MaaS business models will be developed. The work identifies the necessary scope of a new legal framework for MaaS and recommends how the existing regulation of mobility operators should be modified in order to integrate effectively with the MaaS framework. Finally, the work also addresses key data governance requirements, including data protection, transfer and reporting needed to support the development of MaaS.

Technological developments are one of the major forces behind the need for retraining, but they can also be part of the solution. In particular, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to increase training participation, including among currently underrepresented groups, by lowering some of the barriers to training that people experience and by increasing motivation to train. Moreover, certain AI solutions for training may improve the alignment of training to labour market needs, and reduce bias and discrimination in the workplace. In order to realise the benefits of AI for training and ensure that it yields benefits for all, it will be necessary to address potential drawbacks in terms of changing skills requirements, inequalities in access to data, technology and infrastructure and important ethical issues. Finally, even when these drawbacks can be addressed, the introduction and expansion of AI tools for training is constrained by the supply of AI skills in the workforce and the availability of scientific evidence regarding the benefits of AI tools for training and whether they are cost-effective.

The recession shadowing the COVID-19 pandemic has been frequently characterised as a “shecession,” implying disproportionately negative effects for women. Yet the crisis might more accurately be called a “momcession,” as women’s work losses were driven in large part by the outcomes of mothers specifically. The OECD’s 2020 Risks that Matter survey presents cross-national evidence that when schools and childcare facilities shut down, mothers took on the brunt of additional unpaid care work – and, correspondingly, they experienced labour market penalties and stress. These findings serve as another reminder that governments must consider inequalities in unpaid work and take a gender-sensitive approach when building their policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis.

La récession qui s’est installée dans le sillage de la pandémie de COVID‑19 a souvent été qualifiée de « récession au féminin », sous-entendant des répercussions négatives beaucoup plus marquées pour les femmes. Ce sont pourtant bel et bien les résultats des mères qui expliquent en grande partie les chiffres des pertes d’emploi des femmes. Il ressort en effet des données internationales présentées dans l’enquête 2020 de l’OCDE sur les risques qui comptent qu’au moment des fermetures des établissements scolaires et des structures de garde d’enfants, ce sont les mères qui ont assumé en grande partie le surcroît de travail familial et domestique non rémunéré et qui ont par conséquent été pénalisées et en difficulté sur le marché du travail. Ces résultats viennent également rappeler que les pouvoirs publics doivent prendre en considération les inégalités en matière de travail non rémunéré et intégrer la dimension femmes-hommes dans les mesures qu’ils prennent face à la crise du COVID-19.

Over the past several decades, public debt has increased substantially in many OECD countries, particularly in the aftermath of recessions. The extent of this increase and the resulting debt levels varied across countries, partly reflecting differences in average budget balances. Despite rising debt, governments’ interest payments as a share of GDP have declined, reducing concerns about debt sustainability. Still, high debt levels make public finances vulnerable to negative shocks. Thus, governments will have to balance the need to minimise the risk of fiscal stress and the need to satisfy growing demands on public finances related to population ageing, climate change, low growth, inequalities, accelerated digitalisation and cyclical demand stabilisation. Limitations of various numerical indicators of debt sustainability give some support to a more qualitative assessment of fiscal policy and stress the importance of effective and resilient fiscal frameworks. Credible and transparent fiscal frameworks can help make appropriate policy choices, which are affected by numerous political biases and constraints. However, such frameworks do not guarantee positive outcomes. Further research on interactions between various elements of such frameworks, such as fiscal rules, medium‑term expenditure plans, budget transparency and independent fiscal institutions, is needed.

The landscapes of housing loan markets vary considerably across OECD countries, reflecting differences in preferences and policy settings. This paper first draws a topography of disparities in mortgage structure, documenting considerable variation across OECD countries in key features such as in use of fixed vs variable interest rates and typical maturities. The paper then discusses policies that can influence these outcomes. It highlights the scope for encouraging inclusive access to housing through tax-and-spending programmes that are neutral between renting and owning rather than through often very costly tax advantages for mortgage borrowing. The paper finally proposes a novel indicator to measure the balance between the rights of borrowers and lenders. Mortgage markets are deepest in countries where the index shows that creditor and borrower rights are balanced rather than severely tilted to one side.

After a decade of steady growth, the tourism sector in Portugal is facing its most acute challenge in modern times, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As inbound visitors return to Portugal, the tourism workforce will need digital skills to make effective use of new technologies, and exploit the opportunities digitalisation is opening up for marketing, as well as product and destination development. Successful digital uptake by businesses will be a driving force in building recovery and resilience in the longer term. While there has been progress in recent years, especially in response to the pandemic, there remains considerable scope to go further. To support this digital transformation, this report examines and assesses current policy approaches to support digital skills and workforce development in the sector, and presents a selection of policy considerations to: i) address digital transformation gaps, shortages and opportunities for workforce organisation and skills development, and ii) enhance governance mechanisms to support the digital skills transformation of the tourism workforce.

Italy’s start-up visa aims to make the national start-up ecosystem more easily accessible to foreign talent, rich with knowledge and skills, and more integrated into global markets. Government reports show that the programme has not yet achieved a critical scale. The analysis of similar initiatives in Chile, France, Ireland and Portugal identifies five gateways for attracting more foreign entrepreneurs, such as an effective policy outreach, smooth inter-institutional co-operation across the migratory process, and the provision of sound support services for a “soft landing” of entrepreneurs upon arrival. These takeaways may also inform new talent attraction policies targeting remote workers, an expanding group in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.