Browse by: "2023"

Education systems around the world are increasingly recognising that social and emotional skills (SES) are essential for students and societies. This paper contributes to the Innovative approaches to measuring social and emotional skills project, which aims to complement self-report measures of SES with more direct assessments. It addresses criticisms of the OECD framework for SES used by the OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills and discusses the use of the Big Five model as an underlying structure for organising SES. The paper then examines the teachability of SES through a comprehensive literature review. In addition, it reviews the evidence for the relationship between different SES and key life outcomes. The paper also seeks to reconcile divergent conceptual understandings in the literature by providing a clear definition of SES and highlighting discrepancies in skill definitions. The conclusions of the paper identify gaps in current research, highlight teachable skills with notable predictive value SES relevant for educators and policy makers, and support the development of direct SES assessments.

This paper examines the experiences of self-employed online freelancers working on digital labour platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on interviews with freelancers and platform managers and experts in Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. Their experiences during COVID-19 reveal issues of asymmetric power vis-à-vis platforms. Notably, they reported lack of transparency and certainty in their contracts with platforms, lack of power in negotiating with clients, and limited ability to engage with clients on other platforms. In addition, they often experienced difficulties in accessing government temporary supports for businesses during the pandemic. The paper puts forward policy recommendations to address these issues.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is one of the largest and most ambitious research infrastructure ever to be built. South Africa will be hosting one of its two main sites. The decision to host such an ambitious project for a middle-income country required careful consideration of the potential benefits and the associated risks for the socio-economic development of the country and the region more broadly. This working paper describes how the potential impact of SKA for South Africa was envisaged from the start of the project, how this was integrated in the project development, what policy initiatives and interventions were taken to maximize impact and the lessons learned, from South Africa’s science policy perspective, during the early phases of the development of the SKA.

With many countries struggling to boost the attractiveness of the teaching profession, it is important to understand the sources of teacher stress better. This brief explores data on lower secondary teachers from TALIS 2018 to investigate whether stressors vary according to students’ socio-economic background. In addition, it looks at which stressors are more likely to be associated with teachers’ job satisfaction and plans to continue in the role.

The report analyses the extent and quality of official development assistance (ODA) and other official flows (OOF) for refugee situations in low- and middle-income countries in 2020-2021, towards the burden- and responsibility-sharing rationale of the Global Compact on Refugees.

This report outlines a new methodology and provides a first exploratory analysis of technologies and applications that are at the core of recent advances in AI. Using AI-related keywords and technology classes, the study identifies AI-related patents protected in the United States in 2000-18. Among those, “core” AI patents are selected based on their counts of AI-related forward citations. The analysis finds that, compared to other (AI and non-AI) patents, they are more original and general, and tend to be broader in technological scope. Technologies related to general AI, robotics, computer/image vision and recognition/detection are consistently listed among core AI patents, with autonomous driving and deep learning having recently become more prominent. Finally, core AI patents tend to spur innovation across AI-related domains, although some technologies – likely AI applications, such as autonomous driving or robotics – appear to increasingly contribute to developments in their own field.

The green transformation of the economy is expected to lead to a sharp reduction in employment in carbon-intensive industries. For designing policies to support displaced workers, it is crucial to better understand the cost of job loss, whether there are specific effects of being displaced from a carbon-intensive sector and which workers are most at risk. By using German administrative labour market data and focusing on mass layoff events, we estimate the cost of involuntary job displacement for workers in high carbon-intensity sectors and compare it with the displacement costs for workers in low carbon-intensity sectors. We find that displaced workers from high carbon-intensity sectors have, on average, higher earnings losses and face stronger difficulties in finding a new job and recovering their earnings. Our results indicate that this is mainly due to human capital specificity, the regional clustering of carbon-intensive activities and higher wage premia in carbon-intensive firms. Workers displaced in high carbon-intensity sectors are older, face higher local labour market concentration and have fewer outside options for finding jobs with similar skill requirements. They have a higher probability to switch occupations and sectors, move to occupations that are more different in terms of skill requirements compared to the pre-displacement job, and are more likely to change workplace districts after displacement. Women, older workers and those with vocational degrees as well as workers in East Germany, experience particularly high costs in case they are displaced from high carbon-intensity sectors.

This paper examines the nature and evolution of data localisation measures and their impact on business activity. It highlights that data localisation measures are growing and increasingly restrictive. By early 2023, 100 such measures were in place across 40 countries, with more than two-thirds combining local storage requirements with flow prohibition, the most restrictive form of data localisation. Insights gained from businesses operating in the e-payments, cloud computing, and air travel sectors suggest that data localisation can have unintended consequences. It not only increases operating costs, with implications for downstream users, but can also lead to increased vulnerabilities to fraud and cybersecurity risks, and reduced resilience to unexpected shocks. While international regulatory efforts have largely taken place through regional trade agreements (RTAs), this paper calls for continued monitoring of the regulatory environment with a view to informing efforts to agree on global rules that take into account legitimate public policy objectives while avoiding excessive fragmentation, especially through discussion at the WTO under the Joint Initiative on e-commerce.

Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine has had profound effects on the maritime sector. It directly disrupted maritime activities in the Black and Azov seas, causing the suspension of Ukrainian port operations and agricultural exports. Although an export corridor temporarily resumed activities, the termination of the agreement in July 2023 continues to affect Ukrainian shipping. International sanctions against Russia and Belarus have notably targeted shipowners and shipbuilders, restricting Russian ships' access to OECD ports. These sanctions have also halted orders for Russian ship owners in OECD countries, reducing new orders and vessel completions in Russian shipyards. While global seaborne trade and ship demand remain relatively unaffected, the war has prompted longer-term impacts such as altered trading routes, changes in energy demand and costs, potential implications for maritime decarbonisation, and an increase in "dark fleet" vessels.

Intersectionality highlights that different aspects of individuals’ identities are not independent of each other. Instead, they interact to create unique identities and experiences, which cannot be understood by analysing each identity dimension separately or in isolation from their social and historical contexts. Intersectional approaches in this way question the common classification of individuals into groups (male vs. female, immigrant vs. native etc.), which raises important implications for the policy-making process. In education, analyses with an intersectional lens have the potential to lead to better tailored and more effective policies and interventions related to participation, learning outcomes, students’ attitudes towards the future, identification of needs, and socio-emotional well-being. Consequently, as elaborated in this paper, some countries have adjusted their policies in the areas of governance, resourcing, developing capacity, promoting school-level interventions and monitoring, to account for intersectionality. Gaps and challenges related to intersectional approaches are also highlighted.

Module A of the OECD Higher Education Policy Survey (HEPS) 2022 elicited information on policies to promote digitalisation of higher education in OECD member and accession countries. In total, 30 jurisdictions responded, providing comparative information on various areas of digitalisation policy, from regulation and governance to financial and human resources. The survey results provide insight into the role of public authorities in guiding, coordinating and resourcing the digital transformation of higher education institutions. The analysis and comparative tables in this working paper provide insights that can support the development of strategic digitalisation policies.

First adopted in 1980, the OECD Privacy Guidelines are the first internationally agreed-upon set of privacy principles. They are framed in concise, technology-neutral language and have significantly influenced legislation and policy in OECD member countries and beyond. In 2018, the OECD initiated a comprehensive review of the Privacy Guidelines, which included a survey of Adherents, an ad hoc group of experts, and several workshops to explore the main challenges for privacy and personal data protection in an ever-evolving digital environment. This report presents the review's findings, confirming the continued importance and relevance of the Privacy Guidelines. However, it also highlights persistent and emerging implementation challenges and provides recommendations for addressing them.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach that makes producers responsible for their products at the post-consumer stage of the lifecycle. It has been widely adopted by governments and companies across the OECD membership and beyond and is currently most commonly used for electronics, packaging, vehicles, and tyres. The success of EPR in increasing material recovery rates has triggered a debate about expanding the use of EPR to additional product groups. Additionally, there is a debate about expanding producer responsibilities to additional impact categories, which go beyond the traditional use of EPR to cover end-of-life costs that occur at the domestic level. This paper presents a discussion of relatively novel applications of EPR to additional product groups (plastic products beyond packaging, textiles, construction materials, and food waste) and to environmental impacts (design considerations, pollution and littering) that occur throughout the product lifecycle. Based on select case studies, this report evaluates the successes and challenges that early adopters of applying the EPR approach to new product groups or additional environmental impact categories have experienced. It reviews the arguments for further application of EPR, possible limitations and provides guidance on when and how to best apply an EPR.

This paper exploits the information available in the OECD Key Indicators of Informality based on Individuals and their Household (KIIBIH) to shed light on several elements that could help inform national strategies for the extension of social protection to workers in the informal economy. It provides an assessment of current social protection coverage of informal workers throughout a large sample of developing and emerging economies and proposes a statistical framework to examine country-specific data, upon which a strategy for extending social protection to informal workers could be articulated. While the paper does not intend to provide detailed country-level recommendations, it highlights a number of important findings and policy directions as regards the way to extend non-contributory and contributory schemes to informal workers.

This paper makes the case for greater transparency of investment incentives and explores how governments can enhance transparency of these measures, notably for investment facilitation purposes. It proposes three overarching principles of transparency that can be used to better inform policy design: availability, accessibility and clarity of information. It also sets out a framework and typology to understand the scope of incentives offered in a country and identify what information could support transparency, drawing on data on the use and level of transparency of incentives (including tax, financial and in-kind benefits) in a sample of 15 developing economies.

Fiscal equalisation and regional development policies have often been perceived as separate policy fields. As a result, little is known about their potential interactions and implications for economic growth and welfare. This working paper reviews the two policies, explores the potential for enhanced synergies between the two, and proposes a theoretical framework linking them. The latter, which has not been empirically tested yet, posits that if regional development policies are correctly designed and implemented, their success should result in a drop of income disparities. Coupled with good governance practices and a framework that clearly allocates responsibilities among levels of government, more equal jurisdictions would find it easier to provide similar levels of services with comparable tax rates across the country. Therefore, whilst correctly designed and implemented fiscal equalisation policies remain a tool to patch gaps that may occur due to the shifting variety of revenue potential and spending needs of subnational entities, the need and the size of fiscal equalisation transfers could be significantly reduced if regional development policies in place are effective. This working paper concludes with a discussion on the benefits and challenges of enhancing synergies between the two policies, opening the door for future in-depth research.

The OECD AI Principles call for AI actors to be accountable for the proper functioning of their AI systems in accordance with their role, context, and ability to act. Likewise, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises aim to minimise adverse impacts that may be associated with an enterprise’s operations, products and services. To develop ‘trustworthy’ and ‘responsible’ AI systems, there is a need to identify and manage AI risks. As calls for the development of accountability mechanisms and risk management frameworks continue to grow, interoperability would enhance efficiency and reduce enforcement and compliance costs. This report provides an analysis of the commonalities of AI risk management frameworks. It demonstrates that, while some elements may sometimes differ, all the risk management frameworks analysed follow a similar and sometimes functionally equivalent risk management process.

Produced as part of the OECD Global Action “Promoting Social and Solidarity Economy Ecosystems” funded by the European Union, it explores the potential of procurement from the social and solidarity economy in creating social dividends, takes stock of global trends in social procurement among both public and private buyers, identifies challenges in access to markets for social and solidarity economy entities, and finally, provides concrete recommendations for policy makers on how to overcome them.

This paper provides empirical evidence on the short and long-term sectoral effect of environmental policy stringency on CO2 emissions, exploiting longitudinal data covering 30 OECD countries and more than 50 sectors. The analysis relies on the OECD Environmental Policy Stringency (EPS) index, a composite index tracking climate change and air pollution mitigation policies. Estimates obtained from panel regressions suggest that more stringent environmental policies are associated with lower emissions, that the effect builds over time and differs across sectors depending on their fossil fuel intensity. A one unit increase in the EPS index (about one standard deviation), is associated with 4% lower CO2 emissions in the sector with median fossil fuel intensity after two years and by 12% after 10 years. For sectors in the top decile of the fossil fuel intensity distribution, the estimates point to a decline in emissions by 11% after two years and 19% after ten years. Environmental policies targeted at energy, manufacturing and transport sectors have the largest potential impact on emissions. Illustrative policy scenarios based on these results indicate that achieving emission reductions consistent with net-zero targets will require raising the stringency of environmental policies more drastically and rapidly than in the past.

In the midst of the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, trade and economic growth face new challenges as the Russian Federation’s large-scale war against Ukraine has increased uncertainty and tensions along supply chains and the People’s Republic of China’s trade performance has fallen short of expectations. Merchandise trade is recovering slowly and has been dampened by high and volatile commodity and energy prices, coupled with monetary tightening. Some durable goods, such as motor vehicles, have not regained their pre-pandemic share in global trade. Services trade has yet to recover losses incurred during the pandemic, with travel services in particular recovering slowly. Russia’s trade is adjusting as the war continues, with repercussions for commodities markets. This report uses detailed trade data to monitor recent developments in trade in goods and services and in commodity markets.