Browse by: "B"

The paper provides an overview of the fiscal situation in Chinese Taipei and outlines its system for budget formulation and budget approval in detail. It highlights the organisation and functions of the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics. The paper analyses key milestones in the budgeting process and compares current practices in Chinese Taipei with the best practices of the OECD Spending Better Framework.

The rapid and deep emissions reductions needed to keep global warming to 1.5°C rely critically on an immense scaling-up of investment in clean energy technologies. The cost of capital plays a key role in determining investment decisions and, when elevated, can pose a significant barrier to accelerated climate action. The high capital expenditure needs of clean energy technologies make them more vulnerable to changes in the cost of capital than fossil fuel alternatives. This paper provides an overview of the cost of capital as a barrier to clean energy investment and depicts the key risk factors that determine the cost of capital for specific investments. It shows how, particularly in developing countries and for new and emerging technologies, a high cost of capital can significantly stifle investment, and calls on governments to implement better risk sharing mechanisms to overcome this barrier.

Over the past two decades, the use of research in educational practice has emerged as a policy imperative in many OECD countries. However, concerns about the significant gap between research evidence and practice are persistent. This working paper delves into the role of research-practice partnerships in bridging this divide. It critically evaluates common assumptions associated with such partnerships through an overview of research, insights from recent OECD data, and importantly, through in-depth case studies. These illustrate partnerships between education researchers and school practitioners in three countries: Norway, the United States, and Germany. They examine the conditions under which these can achieve an impact on both research and practice, and illuminate challenges and open questions associated with these collaborations. The paper aims to inform policy makers and researchers alike on the potential and limitations of research-practice partnerships.

This report examines public financial management in Moldova, with a particular focus on budget preparation, execution and reporting. Moldova has already implemented the foundations of modern budget arrangements, and has made good progress in aligning with the OECD Recommendation on Budgetary Governance. The most significant reforms have been the introduction of new budget legislation, greater transparency of budget arrangements, a medium-term budget framework, performance budgeting, reforms to capital expenditure management, and piloting spending reviews. This report focuses on ways to strengthen existing arrangements to improve the quality of the country’s system of budgetary governance.

This Education Spotlight, the second in a series of three, presents key lessons and inspiring examples of policy and practice to inform how traditional higher education programmes, like bachelor’s degrees, can effectively cultivate competencies crucial for green and digital innovation. The Spotlight was prepared by the OECD Higher Education Policy Team as part of the Education and Innovation Practice Community (EIPC), an action of the European Union’s New European Innovation Agenda, flagship 4 on “Fostering, attracting and retaining deep tech talent”. EIPC seeks to bring together peers from policy and practice to advance understanding of the competencies that can trigger and shape innovation for the digital and green transitions, and the mechanisms through which higher education can contribute to their development in secondary education, higher education, and adult upskilling and reskilling.

This report examines the work of the business ombudsman institutions of Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan in order to identify their successful practices, as well as gaps that can be addressed through mutual learning and knowledge sharing. It reviews key aspects of the work of these institutions, including the legal framework for their operations, independence and accountability safeguards, funding mechanisms and operational procedures. Based on the analysis, the report offers a number of recommendations that can help improve existing institutions and also be useful to countries that are considering establishing them.

The Autonomous Province of Trento (Trentino) is among the most productive regions in Europe, but over the past two decades its productivity growth has stagnated. As a result, the productivity gap of Trentino widened by over 20% compared to regions with the same productivity level in 2000. The benchmarking of productivity drivers in Trentino with those of “peer” regions points to several policy priorities, including: reviving productivity in tradeable sectors, also through increased internationalisation; increasing the share of the labour force with a tertiary education; and getting more out of public R&D while boosting private sector R&D.

This paper reviews a number of previous studies that have investigated how measure of non-cognitive skills predict important life outcomes such as educational attainment, employment, earnings, and self-reported health and life satisfaction. All reviewed studies analyse data from large-scale surveys from multiple countries and rely on the Big-Five framework to assess non-cognitive skills. The paper finds that measures of non-cognitive skills are robustly and consistently associated to indicators of life success in youth and adulthood, and have incremental predictive power over traditional measures of cognitive ability.

This report provides an overview of the main trends of annual development finance with biodiversity-related objectives for the period 2015 to 2021, from a range of sources: bilateral Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members and non-DAC members, South-South and triangular co-operation providers, multilateral development banks (MDBs) and other multilateral institutions, private finance mobilised by development finance, and private philanthropy. The estimates are based on OECD statistical data, capturing both official development assistance (ODA) and non-concessional development finance. It includes breakdowns by biodiversity-related providers, sectors, financial instruments, recipient country groupings, and on the biodiversity and climate change nexus. These elements can help DAC members and other stakeholders to step up and target their biodiversity-related investments, notably to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity and track progress against its Target 19(a) on resources mobilisation. The findings in this report draw from the OECD publication A Decade of Development Finance for Biodiversity: 2011-2020.

This paper examines how the loss of biodiversity – and of the ecosystem services it provides – affects the various dimensions of fragility, amplifying existing risks and diminishing coping capacity in fragile contexts. It calls on all stakeholders in development co-operation to align (i) efforts to manage natural resources in a sustainable manner, (ii) measures protecting and restoring biodiversity, and (iii) actions addressing the causes of multidimensional fragility.

Ireland is home to a vibrant social enterprise community, active in essential sectors such as health, care, and education, as well as local development and cultural and creative sectors. This report provides an in-depth analysis of social entrepreneurship and social enterprises in Ireland. It identifies the country’s strengths and challenges and provides policy recommendations. An action plan with concrete and actionable measures is also provided to support Ireland in the development of its new national social enterprise policy. Following an overview of the socio-economic landscape (Chapter 1), the report describes factors underpinning social entrepreneurship, social enterprises and the social economy in the context of Ireland (Chapter 2); analyses the institutional and legal framework around social enterprises (Chapter 3); explores conditions and opportunities for access to finance and funding (Chapter 4); navigates developments in access to public and private markets for social enterprises (Chapter 5); looks at the existing state of social impact measurement and data availability on social enterprises (Chapter 6) and concludes with skills and business development for social entrepreneurship (Chapter 7).

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.

Climate change and other environmental threats require urgent government action. This policy paper discusses how governments can use better regulation instruments (good regulatory practices, risk-based and agile approaches, regulatory delivery, international regulatory cooperation, economic regulators, and behavioural insights) to design, implement and evaluate efficient and effective regulations for the environment. It explores the challenges governments face and presents good practices for environmental and other regulations, to ensure that all policy instruments coherently pursue environmental goals. Finally, the paper suggests how regulatory policy systems can meet present and future environmental challenges. It argues that to fully exploit the potential of better regulation for the environment, governments should implement measures that ensure an inclusive, cooperative, outcome-based and global approach to regulating.

Climate shocks such as extreme floods and storms, droughts and heatwaves have complex, inter-connected and far-reaching consequences across multiple policy sectors and systems. Shocks in other systems, such as financial or health crises, can, in turn, affect climate challenges. Applying a systems approach to climate change helps policymakers understand linkages between issues that are treated separately and propose cross-sectoral, multi-disciplinary solutions in cities. This paper proposes a four-pronged policy framework to disentangle the different elements of economic, social, environmental, and other systems operating in cities, maximise co-benefits and manage trade-offs across systems, and build systemic climate resilience in cities. It summarises the contribution of the Working Party on Urban Policy and the Regional Development Policy Committee to the 2021-2022 OECD Horizontal Project on “Building Climate and Economic Resilience in the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy”.

This working paper explores the use of behavioural science for promoting environmentally sustainable tourism. It looks at how to use behavioural science to encourage sustainable behaviour, targeting both the consumers and suppliers of tourism activities and services. It concludes with recommendations for planning and implementing a tourism recovery strategy that prioritises both economic and environmental sustainability.