Browse by: "2021"
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This article discusses why the composition of emergency fiscal packages in response to the COVID-19 pandemic make it important for governments to monitor and manage their balance sheets going forward. It analyses current practices with transparency and risk analysis concerning balance sheet-based measures drawn from case studies of nine OECD countries. It then identifies further steps governments should consider to increase transparency and strengthen risk analysis on COVID-19 related balance sheet-based policies that will help to strengthen fiscal frameworks.
This article uses bureaumetric methods and five years of data on the UK civil service to test several key claims about shared service implementation on a larger scale. It begins by examining organisational dualisms and the promises and challenges of shared services. It then describes the United Kingdom’s case, and develops the bureaumetric method for assessing reform progress. Finally, it presents the findings from the study and discusses implications for research and practice.
This review discusses the significant progress made since the last OECD budget review of Bulgaria in 2009. It begins with a discussion of the institutional and legislative framework for budgeting before addressing fiscal policy and medium-term planning. It then turns to the state budget formulation and execution before discussing transparency and openness in budgeting. It concludes with a discussion of parliament’s role in the budget process and external oversight. Recommendations are made for each of these topics.
This review examines the successes and challenges for the United Kingdom’s Office for Budget Responsibility. It discusses its institutional context, its resources, its publications and underlying methodologies, and its impact on the public debate.
This article presents a brief overview of the fiscal rules framework in Brazil. It introduces the concept and stages of implementing a medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF) and suggests ways to refine Brazil’s incipient medium-term fiscal framework. It then proposes to bring the Brazilian budget process more in line with the best international fiscal planning practices, with the adoption of an MTEF, in order to incorporate the medium-term perspective into the allocation of public resources. By way of conclusion, it describes the benefits of having an MTEF directing public sector accounts.
SMEs and entrepreneurs are of critical importance for reaching climate objectives. They have a significant environmental footprint on aggregate, but also make important contributions to reaching net zero through their innovations and greening efforts. This paper discusses the importance of taking entrepreneurs and SMEs into account in climate and environmental policies. It analyses the drivers and barriers of green entrepreneurship and the greening of SMEs, and discusses policy options to support these objectives.
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of this century. Due to the urgency of the issue and the pressure on governments to act, the debate on climate change is moving quickly from the political level to focused conversations on policy choices and implementation options. This background paper discusses the role of competition policy and enforcement in supporting and incentivising sustainable and pro-competitive business practices. It analyses the practical approaches that competition authorities may take when assessing cases with an environmental dimension. It was prepared as a background note for a discussion held at the OECD in December 2021 on environmental considerations in competition enforcement.
The OECD Career Readiness project makes use of quantitative evidence to investigate how teenage career-related activities and attitudes are associated with better adult employment outcomes. Review of multiple national longitudinal datasets confirms 11 indicators of better outcomes linked to the ways in which teenagers explore, experience and think about their potential futures in work while in secondary education. This Policy Brief summarises findings from three OECD working papers. It describes the project methodology and results.
The OECD Career Readiness project makes use of quantitative evidence to investigate how teenage career-related activities and attitudes are associated with better adult employment outcomes. Review of multiple national longitudinal datasets confirms 11 indicators of better outcomes linked to the ways in which teenagers explore, experience and think about their potential futures in work while in secondary education. This Policy Brief summarises findings and draws out implications for secondary schools, including 14 questions for consideration by guidance counsellors and school leaders linked to the indicators.
One of the key objectives of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is to instigate design for the environment. In collective EPR schemes, the fee schedule set by Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs) is typically quite simple and provides weak incentives for design change by producers. Fee modulation, changing fees paid by producers in a collective EPR scheme based on product design, can provide producers with stronger design incentives, but adds complexity to the system. The paper defines a classification for fee modulation (by criteria and methodology) and discusses potential challenges and opportunities. It concludes with key policy insights that can further stimulate this emerging policy approach.
The OECD Career Readiness project makes use of quantitative evidence to identify how teenage career-related activities and attitudes are linked with better adult employment outcomes. Review of multiple national longitudinal datasets confirms that teenage experiences of the workplace through part-time working and volunteering are routinely associated with better prospects in work during adulthood. While the evidence base is much weaker, it is also likely that students who undertake workplace placements through their schools can have much to gain. This policy brief draws on evidence from longitudinal studies and beyond to explore the following questions:
Why is it important for secondary school students to have first-hand experience of work?
What difference does workplace experience make?
And how can schools and education systems best optimise its benefits?
The paper analyses the role of loan guarantee programmes following the COVID-19 outbreak in alleviating firm distress as well as their broader impacts on productivity via reallocation, relying on a simulation model and econometric estimations. The simulation exercise relies on a simple cash-flow accounting model, a large dataset reporting balance sheets of firms located in 14 countries and granular data on the magnitude of the COVID-19 shock. Our findings suggest that i) the COVID-19 shock had the potential to seriously distort market selection; and ii) policy actions corrected up to 30% of the inefficiency of market selection in the short-term, shielding many high productive firms from distress and supporting zombie firms only to a limited extent. The econometric exercise, based on historical data and standard models of dynamic allocative efficiency, examines how loan guarantees may shape the efficiency through which resources are allocated across firms of different productivity levels over the medium-term. Results suggest that, over the 2007-2018 period, increases in large-scale loan guarantee schemes were associated with weaker reallocation of credit and labour from low to high productivity firms. However, these effects are found to be more benign in intangible-intensive sectors and even positive for smaller scale programmes. Overall, engineering an effective exit strategy from these schemes, preserving their benefits while reducing their drawbacks through a gradual and state contingent phasing out, is critical to foster the recovery of the corporate sector. Further, monitoring debt overhang risks and facilitating firms’ entry and digital diffusion are relevant complementary challenges to address once COVID-19 related support is withdrawn.
Circular Economy Labels and Information Schemes (CELIS) compose the group of labels, certifications, standards of information schemes that fully or partially address one or more resource efficiency or circular economy elements. CELIS can play an important role in fostering circular economy activities. They can empower market actors to distinguish and discriminate products based on environmental performance, which stimulates market development and innovation in resource efficient products and services. Information systems also enable better supply chain management and allow firms to identify environmental impacts and risks in their supply chains.
This paper provides an overview of the current CELIS landscape, assesses the drivers and barriers to a greater uptake of business-to-business information systems, and identifies circular economy aspects that are underdeveloped in the existing consumer labels landscape.
Iceland is an innovative country, but has untapped innovation potential. Strengthening innovation, especially in the ICT area, is crucial for strong productivity growth and performance in an increasingly digitalised world, as well as a sustained recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Ensuring more effective public support for business R&D is important. The R&D tax incentive scheme is generous by international comparison, but take-up has been low and many smaller firms have not been inclined to innovate. Following increased support, outcomes need to be monitored regularly. Adopting new technologies is also essential for stronger innovation outcomes. Competition-friendly framework conditions are key to sharpening firms’ incentives to adopt advanced technologies. The public sector too could become more digitalised. The education system needs to provide relevant skills. Participation of adult workers, especially the less educated, in re-skilling and up-skilling programmes should increase further. At the same time, business and universities need to collaborate more to maximise knowledge flows, with important benefits for innovation and society.
3D printing technologies have attracted the attention of the trade policy community for their potential to disrupt international trade. It is argued that greater cross-border exchange in design files for local printing may lead to less trade in physical goods. New evidence presented in this paper suggests quite the opposite: that the adoption of 3D printing technologies, proxied by measures of imports of 3D printers, appears to be complementary to goods trade. On average, an increase of around USD 14 000 in imports of 3D printers is associated with a USD 3.3 million increase in the value of exports of 3D printable goods. Similar dynamics are found for imports of 3D printable goods. Overall, this implies that the wider adoption of the technology has, at present, limited implications for the ongoing debate on the renewal of the WTO Moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions as it is unlikely to result in loss of goods trade and traditional tariff revenue.
Trade negotiations are frequently accompanied by sustainability impact assessment (SIA) to evaluate the potential economic, environmental, social and human rights effects of a possible agreement. SIAs can help promote environmental protection, and support the better integration of women, vulnerable populations, and small businesses into the global economy, as well as address growing concerns from civil society. They provide a critical opportunity for dialogue among stakeholders and trade policy makers, and thereby help to rebuild confidence in the trading system. However, SIA approaches ‒ including economic modelling, qualitative causal chain analysis and stakeholder consultations ‒ each have their strengths, challenges and limitations. Those need to be understood by policy makers if reliable and policy relevant conclusions are to be provided. This paper offers a perspective on the challenges and opportunities of various approaches and discusses best practices for assessing the sustainability impact of trade and trade agreements.
Asset tokenisation can generally be described as the digital representation of physical assets on distributed ledgers (also referred to as digital twins) or the issuance of native tokens on the blockchain. Although initially associated with mostly non-compliant initial coin offerings over the period 2017-18, currently tokenisation represents one of the most prominent cases of distributed ledger technologies in financial markets. This Going Digital Toolkit note identifies the different approaches that policy makers have adopted around tokenised assets and the markets for such instruments, and provides examples of these approaches. These approaches are not mutually exclusive and policy makers may differ in the way they address asset tokenisation, participants of tokenised markets, and risks arising in these markets. This Toolkit note does not classify approaches into categories, but rather describes elements and characteristics of different jurisdictional approaches to asset tokenisation, some of which can co-exist.
The Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) calls for a comprehensive response to refugee situations, including easing the pressure on refugee hosting countries, burden and responsibility sharing by the international community, and promoting self-reliance of refugees and hosting communities. As a pledge to the GCR, the OECD launched the 2020 survey on refugee financing. This report measures progress towards the responsibility-sharing goal of the GCR, and examines the strengths and challenges of donor practises when it comes to official development assistance (ODA) for refugees and hosting communities. It situates actual financing flows in 2018-19 in the broader agenda of strengthening the application of the Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus for refugees and hosting communities. The report constitutes the first comprehensive baseline of bilateral ODA financing to refugee situations globally, after an initial refugee financing survey carried out in 2018, which was more limited in scope. It also includes a segment on the engagement of multilateral development banks (MDBs) in refugee situations. The financing data is informed by 36 respondents to the refugee financing survey, including 28 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members, 4 other bilateral ODA donors, and 4 multilateral development banks (MDBs).
This paper explores the interaction between the governmental policies adopted to face the COVID-19 emergency and competition policy. It was prepared as background for a discussion on the role of competition policy in promoting economic recovery held in December 2020.