Browse by: "2021"

À l’heure où les systèmes d’éducation sont confrontés au monde de l’après COVID-19, nous ne devons pas perdre de vue l’importance du bien-être des enseignants. Avant la pandémie, les enseignants éprouvaient déjà des difficultés face à la charge de travail et au stress, comme le montre l’Enquête internationale sur l’enseignement et l’apprentissage (TALIS), l’une des premières initiatives internationales visant à mesurer le bien-être du corps enseignant. Néanmoins, les établissements et les enseignants disposent des outils nécessaires pour améliorer le bien-être et réduire le stress sur le lieu de travail.

Ce document a pour objectif de donner un aperçu des actions concrètes que les établissements et les systèmes d’éducation pourraient mettre en œuvre pour améliorer le bien-être et la satisfaction professionnelle des enseignants.

The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a major shift towards telework and virtual interactions. This paper uses information on job postings from the online job site Indeed to analyse developments in the adoption of telework across 20 countries. It finds, first, that the incidence of advertised telework almost tripled during the pandemic, albeit with large differences both across sectors and across countries. Second, cross-country differences are to a notable extent explained by differences in the extent to which governments restricted mobility during the pandemic. However, while the tightening of restrictions substantially raises advertised telework, their easing only modestly reverses the increase. Third, digital preparedness plays an important role in mediating the response of advertised telework to changes in restrictions. The tightening of restrictions has particularly large effects in sectors that are better prepared to adopt digital business models, while their easing has almost no effect in countries with high-quality digital infrastructure. Overall, these results suggest that telework is here to stay, especially in countries with high levels of digital preparedness. Public policies will need to adapt to reap the potential benefits for productivity and worker well-being.

Motivated by the sudden adoption of telework in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic, the Global Forum on Productivity (GFP) undertook an online survey among managers and workers in 25 countries about their experience and expectations, with a particular focus on productivity and well-being. This paper presents analysis and results from this endeavour. It finds that managers and workers had an overall positive assessment from teleworking both for firm performance and for individual well-being, and wish to increase substantially the share of regular teleworkers from pre-crisis levels. Respondents, on average, find that the ideal amount of telework is around 2-3 days per week, in line with other recent evidence and with the idea that the benefits (e.g., less commuting, fewer distractions) and costs (e.g., impaired communication and knowledge flows) need to be balanced at an intermediate level of telework intensity. To meet the challenges of this “hybrid” working mode, as the survey finds, further changes from management are needed, such as the co-ordination of schedules to encourage a sufficient degree of in-person interaction, and further investment in ICT tools and skills as well as more soft skills to master online communication.

This study provides an in-depth assessment of Spain’s innovation system and the current state of knowledge transfer and collaboration. It identifies five priority areas for reform and long-term investment that should provide the basis of a new Roadmap. These include granting greater operational autonomy to universities and public research organisations in return for accountability on outcomes, putting in place a better integrated system of incentives that takes both individuals and organisations into account, and ensuring sustained investment in core capabilities to connect science and business. To put these reforms in motion and sustain them over time, a new type of covenant between science and society is needed in Spain today. This should be based on a ‘new deal’ between actors in the science and innovation system and society at large, committing to place the pursuit of concrete social benefits in return for more stable and predictable support.

COVID‑19 hit the long-term care sector hard. This brief looks at mortality rates in care homes, as well as the policy responses undertaken during the pandemic. The brief assesses the emergency preparedness of the sector and highlights the lessons learned, including policies to reduce isolation, testing strategies, care workforce and co‑ordination with the health care sector.

During the first decade of the currency union, business cycle fluctuations among Euro Area countries were relatively synchronised and similar in magnitude. This concordance disappeared during the 2008 financial turmoil and the following European sovereign debt crisis, a time when key flaws in the architecture of the euro area became apparent. The recovery helped reduce cross-country differences in unemployment and output gaps, but countries worst hit by the crisis took much longer to recover, and in some cases negative consequences of shocks became entrenched. The COVID-19 crisis could lead to a resurgence in euro area cyclical di-synchronisation, risking to exacerbate economic divergence among member states and putting to the test the macroeconomic stability of the currency union. Diverging cyclical paths among euro area countries originate from differences in economic structures and domestic institutions. However, such differences are compounded by features in the economic policy architecture of the currency union – such as the lack of a common fiscal stabilisation tool – and by remaining frictions in the functioning of the common labour and financial markets. Reforms to the common euro area economic policy framework combined with those to improve labour and capital mobility across euro area members are needed to foster cyclical convergence in the currency union.

Using a micro-level model of investment, this paper finds that firm-debt and investment are negatively associated across firms in Austrian manufacturing industries. The finding is robust to various changes to the model specification. Moreover, in an extension of the basic model, different components of debt are examined, pointing out that debt owed to banks and long-term debt have a stronger negative effect than other forms of debt. Comparisons with investment models estimated for other European countries suggest that the impact of debt on investment is more negative in Austria than elsewhere. Results from interaction models of debt owed to banks with an index of credit easing show that firms in industries which are more bank-dependent invest relatively more than firms in industries that are less bank-dependent after an easing of credit conditions.

Education has a fundamental role in promoting the integration of students with an immigrant background in host societies. It can help them acquire skills to participate in the economy, promote their social and emotional well-being and support their participation in the social and civic life of their communities. However, there are challenges in ensuring good outcomes for students with an immigrant background as, among others, they need to overcome adversities related to displacement, socio-economic disadvantage and language barriers. Building on the 2018 Report “The Resilience of Students with an Immigrant Background: Factors that Shape Well-being” by the OECD Strength through Diversity project, this paper analyses the academic, socio‑emotional and motivational resilience of students with an immigrant background across OECD countries. It provides updated findings with data from the OECD’s Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 and examines how outcomes across different student groups have changed in recent years.

This paper aims to help policy makers understand and improve the conditions for firms to thrive in an increasingly digital economy where data has become an important resource for innovation. The paper: 1) analyses trends in the adoption of information and communication technologies and activities that enable firms to collect, store and use data, including big data analysis (BDA); 2) provides new evidence from micro-econometric analysis of firms’ BDA and innovation in products, processes, marketing and organisation, considering different types of data used for BDA; 3) examines business models of firms that successfully innovate with data; and 4) discusses policies that can help improve the conditions for all firms to go digital and tap into the potential of data for innovation.

To date, no international consensus exists on the definition of giftedness. There is a great diversity in conceptualising giftedness not only between, but also within countries. Inevitably, this has a major influence on how countries design and implement gifted education programmes. This paper starts with an overview of the extended academic literature on the definition and identification of giftedness. It then describes OECD countries’ policy initiatives to respond to the needs of gifted students and to foster their inclusion in education systems. Following the Strength through Diversity project’s framework, the analysis focuses on the areas of governance, resourcing, capacity building, school-level interventions, and monitoring and evaluation of gifted programmes. The paper finds that a greater emphasis is placed on the governance of gifted education, often related to broader equity and inclusion concerns. Nonetheless, further research and evaluations are needed to understand what policies and practices can best benefit gifted learners while ensuring positive educational and well-being outcomes for all students.