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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.

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 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.

The OECD Privacy Guidelines are the first internationally agreed-upon set of privacy principles and are recognized as the global minimum standard for privacy and data protection. They are a solid foundation for building effective protection and trust for individuals, and also for developing common international approaches to transborder data flows. Since their adoption, they have influenced legislation and policy in OECD countries and beyond. This document reproduces the two existing explanatory memoranda that accompany the OECD Privacy Guidelines. The first, published in 1980, was developed alongside the original version of the OECD Privacy Guidelines to help in their interpretation and application. The supplementary Explanatory Memorandum was developed to provide context and rationale for the revisions to the OECD Privacy Guidelines made in 2013.

This paper was prepared as a background note for discussions on “Ex-post Assessment of Merger Remedies” taking place at the 2023 Global Forum on Competition on 7-8 December 2023,

This report analyses the demand for positions that require skills needed to develop or work with AI systems across 14 OECD countries between 2019 and 2022. It finds that, despite rapid growth in the demand for AI skills, AI-related online vacancies comprised less than 1% of all job postings and were predominantly found in sectors such as ICT and Professional Services. Skills related to Machine Learning were the most sought after. The US-focused part of the study reveals a consistent demand for socio-emotional, foundational, and technical skills across all AI employers. However, leading firms – those who posted the most AI jobs – exhibited a higher demand for AI professionals combining technical expertise with leadership, innovation, and problem-solving skills, underscoring the importance of these competencies in the AI field.

The rise of remote working in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic may have reshaped people’s preferences on residential locations, thus generating a new geography of housing demand. So far, the literature has mainly focused on what has become known as the “doughnut effect”, the hollowing out of large metropolitan centres towards their respective suburban areas (“commuting zones”). However, changes in residential preferences might have affected urban and rural living in more nuanced ways. This paper shows that changes in relative house prices – a proxy for short-term changes in demand for home ownership (“housing demand”) – have gone beyond the metropolitan boundaries, consistent with the idea of longer but less frequent home to work commuting. Interestingly, we are not seeing a re-emerging preference for rural life as such but, rather, a desire to move to places that combine the benefits of rural and urban life. In the areas outside the main metropolitan centres but within the commuting zones, housing demand has increased the most in low density, more affordable, settlements (rural). In contrast, beyond the boundaries of large metropolitan areas, where most space tends to be rural, housing demand has increased the most in high-density settlements (cities).

In recent years, international development co-operation has undergone a transition from a conventional donor-recipient model to a partnership-centred approach, including with regions and cities. Friuli Venezia Giulia, a small region in north-eastern Italy with extensive policy autonomy, has been active in international co-operation and is seeking to get more out of its actions both for the region and with its co-operation partners around the world. This paper evaluates its strategy on international partnership and co-operation and proposes recommendations, including more targeted initiatives that leverage the expertise of the region for greater impact in partner countries and for local benefits.

The digital security of communication networks is crucial to the functioning of our societies. Four trends are shaping networks, raising digital security implications: i) the increasing criticality of communication networks, ii) increased virtualisation of networks and use of cloud services, iii) a shift towards more openness in networks and iv) the role of artificial intelligence in networks. These trends bring benefits and challenges to digital security. While digital security ultimately depends on the decisions made by private actors (e.g. network operators and their suppliers), the report underlines the role governments can play to enhance the digital security of communication networks. It outlines key policy objectives and actions governments can take to incentivise the adoption of best practices and support stakeholders to reach an optimal level of digital security, ranging from light-touch to more interventionist approaches.

Tax incentives such as intellectual property regimes provide for reduced taxation of the income derived from research, development, and innovation related activities. By doing so, they lower the overall tax burden from investing in certain qualified intangible assets. This paper proposes a methodology to build indicators comparing the effect of income-based tax incentives for R&D and innovation on firms’ incentives to make R&D intangible investments. It provides insights into how such incentives affect firms’ decisions on whether, where and how much to invest in R&D intangibles. These indicators are used to illustrate the extent to which these tax incentives may create potential distortions to firms’ investment, protection and commercialisation decisions. The model is further developed to account for the design changes to such tax incentives introduced by the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting minimum standard.

Several efforts have been made to track progress on environmental innovations using very different approaches. However, many lack coverage, granularity, timeliness and may involve high data collection costs, especially when conducted on a large scale. Traditional indicators also overlook commercialised innovation and breakthrough innovation. This issue is particularly relevant for environmental innovation, where scaling-up is considered key to address the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises. The paper reviews potential metrics to measure commercialised climate change-related innovation and to measure breakthrough environmental innovation. By comparing advantages and drawbacks of various options, the paper selects two families of metrics to measure commercialised climate change-related innovation: one based on patent assignments and the other one based on licensing agreements. For breakthrough environmental innovation, the paper concludes that a family of metrics based on venture capital data is currently the most promising option to pursue. The paper then develops the selected new metrics and provides trends in environmental innovation over time, across sectors and when possible across countries. The paper concludes that additional data sources should be explored to extend the application of the proposed new metrics in more countries and consider a more comprehensive set of supports to innovation.

This country policy profile on education in Australia is part of the Education Policy Outlook series. Building on the first policy profile for Australia (2013), it offers a concise analysis of where the education system stands today and how this compares to other systems. The profile analyses the evolution of ongoing and emerging related policy efforts in Australia, including education responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also offers relevant international policy examples that may serve as possible inspiration as policy makers work to address Australia's key challenges and priorities. The report brings together over a decade's worth of policy analysis by the Education Policy Outlook, as well as recent OECD data, relevant thematic and country-specific work, and other international and national evidence. It also benefits from the Education Policy Outlook's ongoing comparative analysis of resilience and responsiveness in education policy.

Insurance coverage plays an important role in protecting households, businesses and governments from the financial impacts of climate-related disasters. However, climate change is expected to increase the frequency and/or intensity of a range of climate-related (weather) perils and could potentially limit the availability of affordable insurance in the future. Risk reduction through adaptation to climate change will be the only sustainable means to limit the increase in future climate damages and losses and potential disruptions to insurance markets. This paper examines the contribution of the insurance sector to climate adaptation. It outlines some of the challenges to assessing future climate risks, encouraging policyholder risk reduction and supporting resilient reinstatement. The paper also identifies potential approaches that policymakers, regulators and supervisors could consider to support a greater contribution of the insurance sector to climate adaptation.