Browse by: "L"

This article by by Marie Pompignan identifies and examines in a critical fashion the key concepts which ought to be included in a general domestic law governing the peaceful uses of nuclear energy,and suggests a definition of the word “concept”.

Public service leaders – senior civil servants who lead and improve major government functions – are at the heart of government effectiveness. They translate political direction into the policies and programmes that keep citizens healthy, safe, and economically productive. In order to do so, however, they need to have both the right skills and institutional support to deploy them effectively. This paper summarises insights from a recently completed project that addressed this challenge. First, the paper identifies four leadership capabilities that are necessary to respond to complex policy challenges: values-based leadership, open inclusion, organisational stewardship, and networked collaboration. Second, the paper outlines a model for assessing senior civil service systems, i.e. the policies, processes and tools needed to develop these capabilities and support leaders in using them. The paper concludes with recommendations to help governments take a systematic approach to the development and management of their public service leaders.

This literature review examines the research on early childhood education and care (ECEC) leadership and how leaders impact process quality in ECEC settings. Process quality refers to interactions and relationships between and among children and ECEC staff, and is a strong predictor of children’s learning, development and well-being. Research suggests that leadership plays a central role in improving and sustaining process quality in ECEC settings. This literature review presents findings about: 1) the functions, roles and structures of leadership in ECEC settings, 2) factors that may support or hinder leadership and its effectiveness, 3) working conditions and professional development for staff, and 4) how these factors might impact process quality. The results suggest that supports for ECEC leadership may be needed to strengthen areas such as leadership recruitment, preparation and professional development, credentialing and compensation, job design and further research.

According to the Commission recommendations, ISAE has recently restructured the methodological framework of its survey on firms operating in the Italian construction sector and in retail trade. The innovations specifically regard the sampling design and the weight system for both sectors; this last revision, in particular, allowed the reconstruction of the ISAE historical series. In the light of the changes introduced, first of all the aim of this paper is to analyze the cyclical features and to evaluate the "leading" performances of the new ISAE series with respect to the quantitative ISTAT data. Finally, we are going to build a "leading indicator" for both construction and retail trade in Italy. We first apply the NBER methodology in order to establish the main cyclical features of the series. Then we use cross-correlation analysis to estimate the extent to which the ISAE variables and the ISTAT series are correlated. Later on the Granger causality and out of sample tests were used to evaluate the forecasting performance of the ISAE series. On the basis of the results obtained, we finally build a leading indicator for both sectors, and test its performance comparing the results to those of the confidence index elaborated by ISAE.

This article examines the role and usefulness of league tables that are increasingly used to measure and compare the performance of tertiary education institutions. The article begins with a general overview and a typology of league tables. It continues with a discussion of the controversies they have generated, including the basis and the range of criticism they have invited, the merit of indicators they use as measures of quality, and the potential conditions that place universities at an advantage or a disadvantage in ranking exercises. The paper ends with a discussion of implications of league tables for national policies and institutional practices both in the developing world and in industrial countries.

Indigenous peoples have rightful aspirations for their languages and cultures, supported under international conventions, jurisdictional treaties, laws, policies and enquiry recommendations. Additionally, the inclusion of Indigenous languages in education can impact positively on Indigenous students’ learning, engagement, identity and well-being, and can increase involvement of their communities in education. This working paper provides an overview of Indigenous languages learning in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Canada. These three jurisdictions participate in an OECD initiative Promising Practices in Supporting Success for Indigenous Students, designed to help education systems to improve the experiences and outcomes of Indigenous students in education. The significance of Indigenous languages constitutes common ground between the diverse Indigenous peoples in these three countries. But learning in Indigenous languages and learning Indigenous languages follow diverse pathways with local language programme designs that fit the different historical and contemporary language contexts within and between the countries.

A growing body of literature studies the effect of providing information about inequality to respondents of surveys on their preferences for redistribution. We provide a meta-analysis combining the results from 84 information treatments coming from 36 studies in Economics, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. This meta-analysis complements and informs a broader project on perceptions of inequality and preferences for redistribution ( Does Inequality Matter? How People Perceive Economic Disparities and Social Mobility , OECD publishing, Paris, 2021). In the meta-analysis, we focus on in-survey experiments where a randomly selected group of respondents receive either information about the overall extent of inequalities, or about their position in the income distribution. The results show that providing information on inequality has a sizeable impact on people’s perceptions and concerns about inequality, but a rather small effect on their demand for redistribution. Inspecting the heterogeneity across treatments and outcomes helps explaining the small average effect on demand for redistribution, but the evidence is not yet conclusive about the potential explanations. We further show that correcting respondents’ misperceptions about their own position in the income distribution increases the preferences for redistribution for those who previously overestimated their position and decreases it for those who underestimated, although the effects are, on average, small.

Based on a review of previous research, the paper describes the distinctive characteristics of rural areas and communities and the factors typically associated with shaping students’ learning experience in rural contexts. Data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 and the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013 are analysed to examine differences in learning outcomes and education expectations between rural and urban students and to assess the extent to which challenges and opportunities in the provision of rural education are commonplace across OECD member and partner countries. To our surprise, some of the perceived challenges of providing rural education, such as an inadequate infrastructure or a lack of quality teachers, are far from universal. Rural-urban gaps in academic performance generally disappear after accounting for socio-economic status and rural students are less likely to expect completing a university degree than city students, but this gap in expectations persists even when rural students have a similar socio economic status, on average across OECD countries. This highlights the importance of raising aspirations and creating opportunities for rural students. The paper concludes with ideas for policy and country experiences that governments may consider to ensure high quality learning for students in rural contexts.

As school after school shuts down in the face of the Covid-19 crisis (in now more than 140 countries), online learning opportunities have been elevated from a bonus extracurricular facility to a critical lifeline for education.