Browse by: "2021"

Regional inequality has increased in Sweden over the past decades, albeit from a low level. While redistribution and other public policies can narrow regional gaps in income, well-being and access to services, productivity growth is key to maintaining economic dynamism, creating job opportunities and attracting and retaining skilled workers. Against this background, this paper documents the performance of Swedish large regions (TL2) on the main productivity drivers identified by the literature. Panel regressions on a dataset covering up to 125 OECD regions in 17 countries identify the factors associated with high regional productivity, namely rail and road connectivity, knowledge-intensive employment and research and education. Investment in construction and finance is linked to somewhat weaker productivity. Even after taking these factors into account, the Stockholm region benefits from a sizeable productivity advantage, which likely reflects agglomeration effects.

Infrastructure can have a major impact on women’s access to resources and agency over their well-being, and thus on women’s empowerment. Infrastructure itself is not gender-neutral: women and men have different needs and use infrastructure differently given their specific social roles, economic status or preferences. Poor infrastructure quality also poses differentiated threats to women’s safety and well-being. Moreover, infrastructure has traditionally been a heavily male-dominated sector, leaving women little or no voice in investment decisions that affect their economic opportunities, day-to-day lives and well-being. Increasing women’s participation in infrastructure policy and decision making is thus crucial.

This report explores the challenges policy makers face when mainstreaming gender into infrastructure and proposes a framework for incorporating gender considerations at each stage of the public investment process. The report also provides guidance on how to involve more women in infrastructure leadership and decision making.

In many countries, schools and classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse along a variety of dimensions, including migration; ethnic groups, national minorities and Indigenous peoples; gender; gender identity and sexual orientation; special education needs; and giftedness. To navigate this diversity, adopting a multidimensional and intersectional lens could help education systems promote equity and inclusion in education and foster the well-being and learning of all students. Such an approach could also support education systems in preparing all individuals so that they can engage with others in increasingly complex and diverse societies. To build equitable and inclusive education systems, analysing policy issues regarding governance arrangements, resourcing schemes, capacity building, school-level interventions, and monitoring and evaluation is key. The Strength through Diversity: Education for Inclusive Societies project seeks to help governments and education systems address diversity to achieve more equitable and inclusive education systems. This paper presents the project’s theoretical and analytical framework.

A growing body of literature studies the effect of providing information about inequality to respondents of surveys on their preferences for redistribution. We provide a meta-analysis combining the results from 84 information treatments coming from 36 studies in Economics, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. This meta-analysis complements and informs a broader project on perceptions of inequality and preferences for redistribution ( Does Inequality Matter? How People Perceive Economic Disparities and Social Mobility , OECD publishing, Paris, 2021). In the meta-analysis, we focus on in-survey experiments where a randomly selected group of respondents receive either information about the overall extent of inequalities, or about their position in the income distribution. The results show that providing information on inequality has a sizeable impact on people’s perceptions and concerns about inequality, but a rather small effect on their demand for redistribution. Inspecting the heterogeneity across treatments and outcomes helps explaining the small average effect on demand for redistribution, but the evidence is not yet conclusive about the potential explanations. We further show that correcting respondents’ misperceptions about their own position in the income distribution increases the preferences for redistribution for those who previously overestimated their position and decreases it for those who underestimated, although the effects are, on average, small.

This paper explores the conceptual framing and measurement of transboundary impacts in the context of the 2030 Agenda. It starts by defining transboundary impacts and reviewing different measurement approaches used so far. It then proposes a typology of transboundary impacts, classified depending on the type of international flows involved: financial flows, trade flows, movements of people, environmental flows and knowledge transfers. For each of these flows, transboundary impacts can be either positive or negative, depending on the aspect considered and on the conditions in origin and destination countries. Based on this framework, the paper presents evidence from a qualitative survey of experts about the potential impact of these five flows on each of the 17 Goals and 169 targets of the 2030 Agenda. Transboundary impacts are deemed by experts to be quite pervasive across SDGs, but also limited in scope to a small number of well-identified targets. Finally, the framework is operationalised for some specific areas within each of the five types of flows mentioned above, with the help of some proxy indicators. At the global level, the five types of transboundary relationships are dominated by three macro-regions, namely China, the United States-Canada and Europe, mainly reflecting the large size of these regions in most cases. When the assessment is conducted in relative terms (i.e. when impacts are normalised by population size or GDP), the picture becomes more nuanced, as 7 out of the 11 world regions considered record at least two large transboundary impacts. While this operationalisation is only meant to show how the proposed framework could be applied to concrete cases, the paper recommends its applications to other areas within each of the five flows, based on a richer set of indicators.

Domestic outsourcing has grown substantially in developed countries over the past two decades. This paper addresses the question of the technological drivers of this phenomenon by studying the impact of the staggered diffusion of broadband internet in France during the 2000s. Our results confirm that broadband technology increases firm productivity and the relative demand for high-skill workers. Further, we show that broadband internet led firms to outsource some non-core occupations to service contractors, both in the low and high-skill segments. In both cases, we find that employment related to these occupations became increasingly concentrated in firms specializing in these activities, and was less likely to be performed in-house within firms specialized in other activities. As a result, after the arrival of broadband internet, establishments become increasingly homogeneous in their occupational composition. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that high-skill workers experience salary gains from being outsourced, while low-skill workers lose out.

Estonia is currently finalising its new Education Strategy 2035, a horizon that goes beyond strict education performance and encompasses the knowledge, skills and attitudes for people to thrive in the 21st century. To achieve the ambitious goals set in the strategy, Estonia requested support from the European Commission, under the Structural Reform Support Programme, in the area of education monitoring and data-informed decision making.

This Policy Perspective presents the final output of this two-year collaboration between the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, the European Commission, and the OECD. The overall goal of this project is to support the Estonian Government in strengthening data-informed decision making in education through improvements to its education monitoring system. After reviewing comprehensively the existing data and monitoring processes in Estonia, the OECD has prepared guidelines for education monitoring and a coherent set of indicators to support the achievement of the goals set in the Estonian Education Strategy 2035.

The report will be valuable not only for Estonia, but also to the many countries that are looking to strengthen monitoring practices, select relevant indicators, and promote data-informed decision making at every governance level to steer school improvement.

This report presents a methodology to classify skill requirements in online job postings into a pre-existing expert-driven taxonomy of broader skill categories. The proposed approach uses a semi-supervised Machine Learning algorithm and relies on the actual meaning and definition of the skills. It allows for the classification of more than 17 000 unique skill keywords contained in the Burning Glass dataset into 61 categories. The outcome of the classification exercise is validated using O*NET information on skills by occupations, and by benchmarking the results of some empirical descriptive exercises against the existing literature. Compared to a manual classification, the proposed approach organises large amounts of skills information in an analytically tractable form, and with considerable savings in time and human resources.

This brief presents a factual and retrospective analysis of the relationships between urbanisation and demography in North Africa and West Africa. It shows that the process of demographic transition is now fully underway in this region. North of the Sahara the new demographic equilibrium features a birth rate higher than expected, according to theoretical model predictions, resulting in continuous population growth. Over 70% of the population now lives in cities, a number that is expected to continue to rise in the coming decades. South of the Sahara all countries have seen death rates plummet, followed by a decrease in birth rates. The gap between the change in the two variables has contributed to spectacular natural growth in the space of a few decades. This growth is occurring in parallel with a redistribution of populations to urban areas, which are now home to close to one of every two inhabitants. West African urbanisation is likely to accelerate the social, economic and political changes that favour the demographic transition. One of the main challenges facing the region is the question of how to reduce the regional variations seen in fertility rates between the continent’s urban and rural areas.

The OECD Higher Education Policy Survey (HEPS) is a new instrument developed by the OECD Higher Education Policy Team to gather comparative information on system features and characteristics of policies across OECD jurisdictions, to support policy analysis and peer learning. The first HEPS was fielded in 2020, to support the ongoing thematic project on Resourcing Higher Education. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the results of the survey, examining student support systems, institutional funding mechanisms, human resource policies and higher education resource governance across the 29 OECD jurisdictions responding to the survey.

Cette note propose une analyse factuelle et rétrospective des relations entre urbanisation et démographie en Afrique du Nord et de l’Ouest. Elle montre que les pays de la région sont résolument engagés dans le processus de transition démographique. Au nord du Sahara, le nouvel équilibre démographique est marqué par une natalité plus forte que ce que le modèle théorique prédit, avec pour conséquence une croissance continue de la population. Plus de 70% de la population vit désormais en ville et cette proportion devrait continuer à croître dans les prochaines décennies. Au sud du Sahara, tous les pays ont connu une chute rapide de la mortalité suivie d’un recul de la natalité. Le décalage entre l’évolution des deux variables a contribué à un accroissement naturel spectaculaire en l’espace de quelques décennies. Cette croissance s’accompagne d’une redistribution des populations en faveur des zones urbaines, qui accueillent désormais près d’un habitant sur deux. L’urbanisation que connaît l’Afrique de l’Ouest est susceptible d’accélérer les changements sociaux, économiques et politiques qui favorisent la transition démographique. L’un des défis principaux est de parvenir à réduire les variations régionales observées dans les taux de fertilité entre zones urbaines et rurales du continent.

Governments are created and run by humans, who can experience the same behavioural biases and barriers as individuals in society. Therefore, it makes sense to explore how behavioural insights (BI) can be applied to the governance of regulatory policy making, and not just to the design of regulations themselves. Applying BI can help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the decision-making process, which can, in turn, help improve regulatory decisions. This paper maps the ways in which barriers and biases can affect the institutions, processes and tools of regulatory governance, with a focus on regulatory oversight bodies and regulatory management tools. It concludes with practical ways governments can translate these findings into research and reforms that can help future-proof regulatory policy making and ensure it is agile, responsive and fit for tackling important and complex policy challenges.