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The shrinking number of workers due to smaller young cohorts entering the labour market and large-scale outward migration are undermining Bulgaria’s growth prospects, the sustainability of its social institutions and society more widely. Bulgaria needs to provide more support for families and make staying in the country more attractive by raising productivity, fostering the creation of more good-quality formal jobs and reinforcing the social safety net. Bulgarian women have high activity rates, a high share in management jobs and a low wage gap with men, but all this translates into high opportunity costs for educated women of having children. Policies, including access to affordable quality childcare countrywide, more egalitarian burden sharing with men and greater incentives to get back to work, would help reduce those costs. Women from disadvantaged backgrounds should be offered a career path through upgrading skills and lifelong learning. Inactivity rates among the working age population should be addressed by reforms to the social welfare system that would improve activation and through targeted measures. Vulnerable groups, including ethnic minorities, are disadvantaged in multiple ways and need tailored measures to escape poverty, acquire skills and integrate into the labour market.

This paper reviews the different definitions and measures of skills use and shows why it matters for local development policies. Based on findings from the Annual Population Survey and the UK Employer Skills Survey, it provides unique local analysis on how the Leeds City Region compares on skills use relative to other Local Enterprise Partnerships. It then outlines opportunities for new actions that could be implemented in the Leeds City Region to work closer with firms to promote skills use in the workplace.

The Danish financial sector is big and there is a high degree of inter-connectedness between banks, mortgage institutions and pension funds. Danish households have large balance sheets and high levels of gross debt. Even though the high debt levels are matched by large assets, notably in form of pension savings, there are feedback loops with the housing market and households’ balance sheets contributing to macroeconomic volatility. Currently, the very low interest rate environment may contribute to the building up of risks, notably in the housing market. Given the on-going recovery of the housing market, it is an opportune time to eliminate the debt-bias in taxation, which would strengthen the automatic stabilisers of the fiscal system. In addition, further liberalising the private rental market would help create a more dynamic housing market overall and reduce the need to meet housing needs primarily with the owner occupancy segment.

“Despite its flaws and weaknesses, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) remains an invaluable instrument for international security… There is no alternative but to support and strengthen the NPT…”

Foreign Affairs, Defence and Armed Forces Committee of the French Senate

This paper builds a welfare measure encompassing household disposable income, unemployment and longevity, while using two different sets of “shadow prices” for non-income variables. The valuations of vital and unemployment risks estimated from life satisfaction data (“subjective shadow prices”) and those derived from model-based approaches and calibrated utility functions (“model-based shadow prices”) are shown to be broadly consistent once a number of conditions are fulfilled. Subjective shadow prices appear to be inflated by the downward bias on the income variable in life satisfaction regressions conducted at the individual level, while the latter bias is largely removed when running regressions at the country level. On the other hand, model-based shadow prices are typically underestimated as: i) the valuation of the unemployment risk is assumed to take place under the veil of ignorance (i.e. for a representative agent that has no information on her current or future unemployment situation); ii) the standard model relies on a Constant Relative Risk Aversion (CRRA) utility function, which has no specific relative risk aversion parameter for unemployment and vital risks; iii) the Value of Statistical Life that is used in standard calibration pertains to the adult lifespan while life expectancy at birth covers the entire lifetime.

This paper reviews the evidence on emerging thinking and new trends in the sphere of industrial policy. The paper adopts a broad and inclusive definition of industrial policy, and proposes a new typology based on the orientation of policy and the policy domain. Looking at a typology according to the policy domain, the paper proposes a framework based on growth accounting, which parallels the evolution of thinking about the rationale for industrial policy interventions, which has moved from a traditional approach based largely on product market interventions (production subsidies, state ownership, tariff protection), through market failure-correcting taxes and subsidies operating mainly on factor markets (R&D incentives, training subsidies, investment allowances, help with access to finance) to a focus on interventions that help build systems, create networks, develop institutions and align strategic priorities.

• Early climate-related actions should be those with a high local economic and/or environmental payoff per unit of impact on greenhouse gases. • Energy, transport and natural resource management policies can often be better designed to realise greenhouse gas reductions at little or no additional cost. • In energy and transport, investment and network planning need to account for likely future emission constraints in order to avoid costly lock-in effects and premature obsolescence of capital stock. • The local air quality and health benefits of climate policy can be sizeable in the megacities of developing countries, probably exceeding those in OECD countries that have already gone some way to delink carbon emissions from local pollution. • A global market for climate stabilisation services is gradually taking shape in which many developing countries could expect to become net suppliers.

Students are much more than their grades. Beyond performing well in school, students must learn to manage their relationships with others, confront stress, find purpose in what they do, and deal with a series of factors oftentimes beyond their control – all of this, during a particularly sensitive period of their lives. How they do across all these dimensions of life shapes their well-being, which in turn affects their school performance and their life outcomes beyond school.

In 2015, PISA broke new ground by including indicators of student well-being alongside traditional measures of academic performance. However, the data on student well-being often remain overshadowed by country and economy scores in mathematics, science, and reading - traditionally considered the primary outputs of PISA.

This paper presents a proposal to increase the visibility and policy impact of PISA indicators on well-being, by organising them in thematic areas and presenting them through data visualisations that respond to the needs of different kinds of users. The proposed PISA dashboard on students’ well-being has the potential to offer policy makers, educators, parents, and other stakeholders a comparative perspective on how well schools are fostering the essential foundations for students to lead fulfilling lives.

Building on many data sources and country examples on women’s employment in the social and solidarity economy (SSE) the report: i) analyses women’s employment in the SSE, ii) explores challenges to gender equality in the SSE and, iii) provides policy recommendations to recognise women’s work and leadership in the SSE and in the wider economy. It also suggests ways to foster their participation in high-growth sectors within the SSE, such as technology-intensive and green sectors.

This report – linked to the technical documents of the OECD manuals for the measurement of R&D activities (“Frascati Family”) – presents the essential elements of bibliometrics and its application to the analysis of research systems. Bibliometrics is based on the enumeration and statistical analysis of scientific output in the form of articles, publications, citations, patents and other, more complex indicators. It is an important tool in evaluating research activities, laboratories and scientists, as well as the scientific specialisations and performance of countries. The report, having set the background for the development of bibliometrics, presents the databases on which bibliometrics is built, as well as the principal indicators used. Twenty-five examples are presented at the end of the document, illustrating the various uses of bibliometric methods for analysing research systems. These indicators measure scientific output, by counting the number of papers; the impact of ...

We build an indicator of individual subjective well-being in the United States based on Google Trends. The indicator is a combination of keyword groups that are endogenously identified to fit with the weekly time-series of subjective well-being measures disseminated by Gallup Analytics. We find that keywords associated with job search, financial security, family life and leisure are the strongest predictors of the variations in subjective well-being. The model successfully predicts the out-of-sample evolution of most subjective well-being measures at a one-year horizon.