Browse by: "2024"

Although uptake of digital practices by SMEs continues to increase, so too has the “digital gap” with larger firms. Understanding the drivers and persisting bottlenecks of SME digitalisation as well as gaining a deeper understanding of their practices and digitalisation processes is key to inform policy decisions to help bridge this gap. This is the primary purpose of the survey this paper draws its findings from, conducted in seven OECD countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain and the United States), in co-operation with digital platforms partners of the OECD D4SME Global Initiative. Survey findings provide new insights on SMEs’ digital journeys and how digital tools can support them in navigating short-term challenges and enhancing long-term resilience. The survey also provides evidence about SMEs' use and perception of AI technologies (with a focus on “generative AI”), their application of data analytics for tracking environmental performance, and the impact on mental wellbeing of digital practices in the workplace.

Effective waste management policies are critical for addressing environmental issues ranging from climate change to pollution. This report uses new survey data to provide evidence on the most important factors in determining key waste-related outcomes at the household level. Results show that providing collection services is critical in supporting household waste prevention efforts and that charging schemes for mixed waste can play an important complementary role in supporting sustainable waste management. Based on a discrete choice experiment, most households are shown to be willing to pay a price premium for products with sustainable packaging, but at the same time, around a third of households would require a price discount in order to opt for such products. Taken together, findings from the analysis show that waste policies play an important role in stimulating demand for sustainable consumption.

Concentration – the share of an industry’s output accounted for by its largest firms and a frequently used proxy of competition – has increased in European countries. This paper provides evidence about this development by introducing several methodological refinements in the cross-country measurement of concentration: it defines industries at a disaggregated level, mostly 3-digit; it takes into account the geographic level at which competition takes place - domestic, European or global; and it accounts for linkages between firms within the same domestic and multinational business group in the relevant geographic region of competition. It then applies these improvements to representative data for fifteen European countries, showing that average concentration increased by about 5 percentage points over the period 2000-2019, from 26% to more than 31%. Third, the paper investigates how each of the methodological improvements affects the levels and trends of concentration.

Les dépenses sociales publiques ont triplé en 60 ans, atteignant 21 % du PIB en 2022, mais avec des variations significatives entre les pays de l'OCDE. Cette hausse à long terme est liée au développement des États-providence, au vieillissement de la population et à une succession de chocs économiques qui ont entraîné des augmentations progressives des ratios de dépenses sociales par rapport au PIB, dont ils ne se sont que partiellement remis. Ce document compare les systèmes de protection sociale en France et en Allemagne, en analysant les règles institutionnelles, l'efficacité des programmes, les sources de financement, et l'impact des politiques fiscales et sociales sur différents types de familles. Il évalue également les réformes depuis 2015, en se concentrant sur les revenus des ménages, les incitations au travail et les coûts de la main-d'œuvre.

This paper develops a taxonomy of 151 industries, mainly defined at the 3-digit level, indicating at which geographical level competition takes place. It classifies 40 industries as competing at the domestic level, 85 at the European level, and 26 at the global level. First, this paper creates a novel dataset that combines production and international trade data for both goods and services industries, defined at a detailed level of industry aggregation for 15 European countries (based on data availability). Then, by comparing domestic sales with international trade flows, and their source/destination, it identifies the geographic level of competition of each industry. The proposed classification can be used in numerous applications, from the design of trade policies to the assessment of competition by antitrust authorities. The paper shows that the taxonomy is broadly consistent with external data sources that provide alternative ways of inferring the degree of internationalisation of each industry.

In recent years, the call for transparency in pharmaceutical pricing has gained momentum among policymakers and stakeholders. Following a resolution of the 72nd World Health Assembly and the establishment of the Oslo Medicines Initiative, there has been a concerted push for greater transparency in pricing practices. However, the exact scope of transparency measures remains unclear. Key questions persist regarding which prices and for which medicines should be disclosed, the conditions under which countries are willing to share this information, and the barriers hindering such efforts. To clarify these issues and advance the policy debate, the OECD examined the feasibility of sharing medicine price information across countries. A country survey was conducted to explore the willingness, expectations, and motives of governments and payers for sharing information on medicine prices. This report presents the key findings derived from the survey and concludes with an assessment of the feasibility of sharing net medicine price information among OECD countries.

This policy brief explores possible paths forward for policy makers in Brazil seeking to enhance quality and equity in lower secondary education. Drawing on analysis of OECD data, international policy examples, and insights from the Policy Dialogues in Focus seminars, the brief covers three key topics: 1) Strengthening learners’ resilience, by listening and responding to their needs; 2) Empowering resilient educators, to balance change and innovation with ongoing needs; 3) Supporting learners’ transitions, through their learning pathways. Building on the OECD’s Framework for Responsiveness and Resilience in Education Policy, these Policy Dialogues in Focus seminars from the Education Policy Outlook brought together federal and subnational policy makers, civil society actors and researchers in Brazil as well as policy makers from Chile, Colombia and Spain.

This Spotlight presents findings from Education at a Glance 2024 on equity in and through education, the theme of the 2024 edition. The indicators presented in this Spotlight highlight how different demographic groups face disparities in educational resources, proficiency, access to education, study choices and completion rates. The Spotlight first presents an overview of equity in education, analysing the main trends at each of level of education from early childhood to tertiary education. It goes on to consider disparities in opportunities, exploring how educational inequalities persist and assessing the fit between educational outcomes and labour-market experiences. Finally, it analyses how education affects labour-market prospects and outcomes.

Ce Coup de projecteur s'appuie sur les conclusions de Regards sur l'éducation 2024 sur l'équité dans l'éducation et au-delà, le thème de l'édition 2024. Les indicateurs choisis mettent en évidence les disparités entre les différents groupes démographiques en matière de ressources éducatives, de compétences, d'accès à l'éducation, de choix d'études et de taux de réussite. Le Coup de projecteur s'ouvre sur une vue d'ensemble de l'équité dans l'éducation, en analysant les principales tendances à chaque niveau, de la petite enfance à l'enseignement tertiaire. Il se penche ensuite sur les opportunités qui en découlent, en explorant la manière dont les inégalités éducatives persistent et en évaluant l'adéquation entre les résultats de l'éducation et les expériences sur le marché du travail. Enfin, il cherche à déterminer si les efforts en matière d'éducation améliorent réellement les perspectives d'emploi et les résultats sur le marché du travail.

Ensuring equal access to the latest cancer medicines is one of the most pressing challenges facing OECD health systems today. Despite the emergence of new oncology drugs, disparities in patient access—particularly through clinical trials and early access programs—remain a critical issue. Rising costs are also straining even the most affluent healthcare systems, making affordability a concern for all. This working paper examines various aspects of inequalities in access to cancer medicines, covering key stages in a medicine's life cycle, from marketing authorization to reimbursement decisions and uptake in clinical practice. The analysis draws on original findings from the 2023 OECD Policy Survey on Cancer Care Performance. It also explores potential strategies to stimulate competition among oncology medicine producers, which could create significant budget headroom, allowing reinvestment in new cancer medicines that offer substantial clinical benefits to patients.

Cette troisième édition suit l’évolution des politiques et pratiques des services de partage de contenu en ligne en matière de contenus terroristes et extrémistes violents (CTEV). Quinze des 50 services populaires publient des rapports de transparence sur les CTEV, contre 5 en 2020 et 11 en 2021. Cette édition examine aussi les 50 services comptant le plus de CTEV. Seuls 11 services sont communs aux deux groupes, ce qui montre que les acteurs terroristes utilisent davantage les petites plateformes. Seuls 8 services parmi ceux comptant le plus de CTEV publient des rapports de transparence, 13 ne les interdisent pas et 17 ne donnent aucune information. Les résultats montrent que la taille des services et la cryptographie ne sont pas des obstacles insurmontables à la publication de rapports de transparence. Enfin, la fragmentation réglementaire s’intensifie à mesure que de nouvelles juridictions imposent des règles en matière de transparence.

By combining information from online job postings with firm-level financial data provided by Orbis, as well as firm-level merchandise trade data, this paper seeks to get a deeper understanding of the characteristics and performance of data-intensive firms in the United Kingdom since 2015. Data-intensive firms are defined here as firms which are hiring data-related skills. One key contribution of the analysis is to match in a more efficient way the two data sources, Lightcast and Orbis, which are now used extensively in the economic literature. Both the number and the share of data-intensive firms increased sharply in the United Kingdom from 2015 to 2021, with a peak in 2020. The number of highly data-intensive companies and data-intensive multinationals (MNEs) display the same pattern. A large share of data-intensive firms operate within the information and communication industry and are predominantly located in the Greater London area, especially in London itself. Those firms tend to employ more staff and are more capitalised than non data-intensive firms. They are on average more productive, generate more revenues and trade more in foreign markets. While data-intensive firms can be found in all firm size groups, the firms displaying on average the highest level of data intensity were medium sized in 2015 but are now small sized. In terms of international trade, UK dataintensive firms are, generally, more export intensive than non data-intensive firms, but estimates vary across industries.

Over the past decades, productivity growth and technology diffusion have slowed down, and business dynamism has declined in many advanced and emerging economies. Meanwhile, inequalities in economic outcomes, such as in income and wealth, and in opportunities, such as access to quality education and training, are pervasive. By hampering social mobility and the efficient allocation of talents, inequality of opportunities may trigger slower growth and even higher inequalities in outcomes. Policies to boost growth and make it more inclusive should focus on (i) ensuring broad access to quality education, from childhood onwards, and upskilling throughout working lives; (ii) addressing labour market insecurity and informality and improving job quality; (iii) curbing market power in products and labour markets to boost business dynamism; (iv) enhancing the efficiency and progressivity of taxes and transfer systems; and (v) fostering international cooperation, for instance in trade and taxation.

This report reviews the literature on the distributional consequences of climate change and mitigation and transition pathways. The heterogeneous levels of exposure and vulnerability to climate change across countries, regions, households, and workers hint at the significant distributional costs of inaction. Climate policies will likely trigger a reallocation from “high-polluting” sectors to “green” sectors, disproportionately affecting certain regions and low-skilled workers. Price-based policies, such as carbon taxation, show varied effects across countries: they tend to be more regressive in developed countries and more progressive in developing countries where energy affordability and energy poverty are major concerns. Non-market-based policies are often regressive and can result in equity issues. Effective climate action requires balancing distributional outcomes, ensuring political acceptability, and understanding the link between policy perceptions and support.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in finance has increased rapidly in recent years, with the potential to deliver important benefits to market participants and to improve customer welfare. At the same time, AI in finance could also amplify existing risks in financial markets and create new ones. This report analyses different regulatory approaches to the use of AI in finance in 49 OECD and non-OECD jurisdictions based on the Survey on Regulatory Approaches to AI in Finance.

This paper estimates the artificial intelligence-hiring intensity of occupations/industries (i.e. the share of job postings related to AI skills) in the United Kingdom during 2012-22. The analysis deploys a natural language processing algorithm (NLP) on online job postings, collected by Lightcast, which provides timely and detailed insights into labour demand for different professions. The key contribution of the study lies in the design of the classification rule identifying jobs as AI-related which, contrary to the existing literature, goes beyond the simple use of keywords. Moreover, the methodology allows for comparisons between data-hiring intensive jobs, defined as the share of jobs related to data production tasks, and AI-hiring intensive jobs. Estimates point to a rise in the economy-wide AI-hiring intensity in the United Kingdom over the past decade but to fairly small levels (reaching 0.6% on average over the 2017-22 period). Over time, the demand for AI-related jobs has spread outside the traditional Information, Communication and Telecommunications industries, with the Finance and Insurance industry increasingly demanding AI skills. At a regional level, the higher demand for AI-related jobs is found in London and research hubs. At the occupation level, marked changes in the demand for AI skills are also visible. Professions such as data scientist, computer scientist, hardware engineer and robotics engineer are estimated to be the most AI-hiring intense occupations in the United Kingdom. The data and methodology used allow for the exploration of cross-country estimates in the future.

The contribution of services in the United Kingdom (UK) to exports, value added, and employment is one of the highest amongst OECD countries. UK employment also depends strongly on exports of digital services: in 2019 the jobs of around 3.2 million domestic workers in digital services sectors were embodied in UK exports. Median wages in these services are considerable higher than wages in other sectors of the UK economy. Econometric analysis shows that strong growth of employment in digital services generates multiplier effects benefitting local economies in the United Kingdom, with each additional digital services job creating around 0.3 jobs in the local non-tradable sector. Continued support for plurilateral and multilateral initiatives to dismantle barriers to services trade, including via the WTO Joint Initiative on Services Domestic Regulation, can help to enable more UK firms to take advantage of the potential for further growth in digital services trade. Improving the availability of training programmes and aligning curricula with the rapidly evolving needs of exporters of digital services is crucial to enable for workers to shift into sectors with growing labour demand.

The digital transformation is having a profound impact on the international trade of the United Kingdom (UK). Digital trade exports have grown three times faster than other exports and now represent more than half of total exports, twice the OECD and EU averages. This strong performance is, in part, driven by a favourable domestic regulatory environment and an ambitious digital trade agenda in the United Kingdom’s trade and digital economy agreements. Econometric analysis shows that digital trade chapters in trade agreements can double the impact of the agreements, with issues around data protection, consumer protection, source code and cybersecurity potentially delivering the largest gains. To remain at the forefront of digital trade the United Kingdom should continue domestic reforms, including digitisation of trade documents and processes. To ensure that exporters maintain access to other markets, the United Kingdom should continue to engage in discussions on digital trade provisions in trade agreements and support ongoing multilateral and plurilateral discussions, including in the context of the WTO Work Programme on E-commerce and the Agreement on E-commerce.

Social connections refer to the ways that people interact with and relate to one another. Their role in shaping well-being is increasingly recognised by government, alongside an understanding of the role public policy plays in creating the structures that promote or hinder connectedness. To improve the evidence base on this emerging policy priority and lay the groundwork for full measurement recommendations, this paper reviews a selection of official surveys fielded in OECD countries to understand patterns in data collection, establish priority areas for harmonisation, and create an inventory of available measures. The results are encouraging, in that all countries measure social connections. Yet challenges remain: (1) despite policy attention, loneliness is included in fewer than half of surveys, (2) there is little convergence in the actual indicators used to measure concepts like “loneliness”, “social support” or "frequency of socialising", and (3) survey frequency, particularly for time use, could be improved.

The OECD database on export restrictions on staple crops is an integral part of the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) initiative. Data collected between January 2007 to April 2024 show an increased use of export restrictions during the global food price crisis of 2007-08, the COVID-19 pandemic, and following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the first period witnessing a significantly higher use of export restrictions than the two subsequent crises. During the first two periods, export taxes prevailed, while prohibitions have been more prominent during the war in Ukraine. The analysis shows that the type of export restriction most commonly used varied by commodity. Maize experienced predominantly export taxes and prohibitions, while minimum export prices and quotas were frequently used for rice. Soybeans were primarily targeted by export taxes, whereas a mix of export quotas and taxes were used for wheat. Only a small proportion of export restrictions lasted less than a month.