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*This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is line with UNSCR 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence.
Korea’s fertility rate fell to 0.72 children per woman over her lifetime in 2023, the lowest in the world, while surveys show that people ideally would want more children. Employment and wage gaps between men and women are among the highest in the OECD, pointing to difficulties in combining careers and motherhood as a main culprit, combined with high spending on private education and housing. Family policies, labour market structures and gender norms combine to define the career-family trade-off, but high performance in one does not necessarily make up for gaps in the other two. OECD experience can guide Korea in its efforts to improve the situation. Korea has scaled up family policies considerably and compares well with other OECD countries on many indicators, but gaps remain to bring childcare fully in line with working parents’ needs. Parental leave eligibility is restricted and take-up low for a number of reasons including low replacement rates and weak legal protection against discrimination compared to OECD best practice. The adoption of flexible working arrangements is lower and working hours remain longer in Korea than in most other OECD countries, constraining the time available for family. Labour market duality leads young people to delay career starts and family formation and weakens their financial position. Social norms assign the responsibility for caregiving to mothers and charge fathers with being breadwinners much more strongly than in the rest of the OECD.
It is sometimes asserted that an era of faster economic growth has come about --the so-called New Economy. New technology, notably information and communications technology (ICT), is seen as a key factor at work, together with international economic integration. This report examines the issue from a labour market perspective. The findings suggest that sanguine predictions about the New Economy are unlikely to materialise unless the appropriate policy environment is in place, notably as regards employment and human capital development policies.
New technology holds the promise of higher economic growth, ...
True, new technologies hold the promise of higher economic growth and improved living standards. Besides the potential impact of technology on efficiency gains, ICT may provide opportunities for better utilising existing skills. In this regard, the availability of telework to groups so far underrepresented in the labour market is a positive phenomenon. Also, new technology will ...
In this paper we present an international comparison of growth trends in the OECD countries, with a special attention to developments in labour productivity - allowing for human capital accumulation – and multifactor productivity (MFP) - allowing for changes in the composition of fixed capital. An attempt is also made to identify both the embodied (in particular in ICT equipment) and disembodied components of technical progress. The possible relation between improvements in MFP and the accumulation of knowledge (as proxied by R&D expenditures) is discussed, and some tentative policy considerations are advanced, mainly with reference to general framework conditions that might have a bearing in fostering technological changes.
The main conclusions are that some “traditional” factors lay behind the disparities in growth patterns across the OECD countries. In particular, they refer to the ability of countries to employ their labour force. There also seem to be some new factors behind ...
This paper focuses on a key issue for university managers, educational developers and teaching practitioners: that of producing new operational knowledge in the innovation system. More specifically, it explores the knowledge required to guide individual and institutional styles of teaching and learning in a large multi-disciplinary faculty. The case study presented outlines a sustainable approach for achieving quality enhancement of teaching and learning and producing new operational knowledge. Sustainability is achieved by linking to, and being sympathetic to, the innovative activity-led concept of learning reported in this paper. This leads to the identification of elements of evaluation that are appropriately aligned to the teaching and learning behaviours, attitudes and approaches that are critical for the innovation to be successful. Such context-sensitive evaluation elements allow meaningful feedback for the purposes of creating new operational knowledge that may then be applied and tested for on-going refinement and learning.