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This working paper provides a conceptual framework for measuring the attractiveness of OECD regions. First, it presents the imperative for rethinking regional attractiveness in the context of global shocks and trends and their regionalised consequences and opportunities. Then, it presents a new framework through which to look at territorial levers for attracting investors, talent and visitors, and where those policy goals can overlap. Various tools, as well a dashboard comprising 55 indicators, are produced which policy-makers can leverage to better understand their strengths and gaps in terms of attractiveness towards international targets.

This study proposes a new indicator of Climate Policy Uncertainty based on newspaper coverage frequency. The indicator currently includes 12 OECD Member Countries and covers the period 1990-2018. The index spikes near major political events and during major discussions around potentially significant climate policy changes. Using a global firm-level dataset, the empirical analysis shows that Climate Policy Uncertainty is associated with economically and statistically significant decreases in investment, particularly in pollution-intensive sectors that are most exposed to climate policies, and among capital-intensive companies. In addition to annual series, the study also provides the indicator at higher frequencies of monthly and quarterly levels, and develops sub-indices that capture the direction of climate policy uncertainty associated with a strengthening or a weakening of climate policies for a sub-set of countries.

Problems in e-commerce can lead to significant consumer harm (detriment), for example, when consumers have to pay more for a product than they reasonably expected (e.g. due to hidden costs); suffer from unfair contract terms; or receive products that do not conform to their reasonable expectations regarding quality or performance. In 2021, the OECD’s Committee on Consumer Policy implemented an online consumer survey in 13 countries to assess the magnitude of financial consumer harm arising from consumers’ most serious e-commerce problems. This paper summarises the survey results, highlighting, for example, that 50% of online consumers faced at least one problem in e-commerce in the year preceding the survey rollout and that the resulting harm is significant, reaching (after redress) up to 3.1% of the total e-commerce market size in some countries. The paper aims to enhance the evidence base for consumer policy and to help policy makers prioritise enforcement activities.

Este informe presenta un análisis en profundidad del sistema español de innovación y de su estado actual en relación con la transferencia de conocimiento y la colaboración entre ciencia y empresa en España. El estudio identifica cinco áreas prioritarias de reforma e inversión a largo plazo como base para una nueva Hoja de Ruta. Estas prioridades incluyen una mayor autonomía operativa para universidades y centros públicos de investigación acompañada por rendición de cuentas centrada en resultados, así como una inversión sostenida en capacidades que permitan la conexión entre ciencia y empresa. Para poner estas reformas en marcha y mantenerlas en el tiempo, resulta necesario un nuevo pacto entre la ciencia y la sociedad española. Esta nueva relación se debería basar en el entendimiento entre todos los actores en el sistema de ciencia e innovación y la sociedad en general mediante un acuerdo que comprometa a los primeros a perseguir impactos sociales como contraparte de un apoyo más estable y predecible por parte de ésta última.

International trade has supported economic convergence and poverty reductions in many emerging market economies. Nonetheless, there are significant challenges during the transition towards a more open economy. Reallocations of resources and structural change are one key source of aggregate productivity improvements, but they will come with adjustment costs. Less competitive firms and sectors may decline, while more competitive sectors will have to adapt and seize new opportunities from trade and global value chains. Some workers will move to more productive firms, change occupations, sectors or even location. Non-trade policies can help to smooth these challenges and support workers seize new opportunities. This paper reviews the existing literature on how policy reforms have managed to support structural change of economies.

Public investment is a key policy lever to tackle the big challenges faced by society – climate change, demographic trends, digitalisation, and economic and other shocks. Investment helps to lay the foundations for future economic prosperity and well-being in our cities and regions. It can also help to reduce inequalities, adapt places to megatrends, enhance resilience and mitigate the impact of shocks. As we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, and already face a new crisis following Russia’s large scale aggression against Ukraine, existing commitments of public investment to support the recovery provide an important opportunity to address current and future challenges. Rising to this occasion calls for effective public investment by all levels of government.

Over time, cities expand their physical footprint on land and new cities emerge. The shape of the built environment can affect several domains which are policy relevant, such as carbon emissions, housing affordability, infrastructure costs, and access to services. This study lays a methodological basis for the monitoring and consistent comparison of land use across OECD cities. An advanced form of deep learning, namely the U-Net model, is used to classify land cover and land use in EC-ESA satellite imagery for 2021. This complements conventional statistical data by monitoring large surfaces of land efficiently and in near real-time. In specific, following the availability of detailed data for model training, built-up areas in residential or business-related use are mapped and analysed for 687 European metropolitan areas, as a case application. Recent urban expansion’s speed and shape are explored, as well as the potential for assessing land use in cities beyond Europe.

This report analyses the potential of the marketplace lending (MPL) model of online credit intermediation to finance small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on a large scale, including the evolution of this model, its comparative advantage to banks and its benefits to borrowers, investors/funders and the market for SME financing. It also covers the risks this model presents, and limitations to its growth. Given the use of FinTechs to facilitate government support to SMEs throughout the COVID-19 crisis, the report analyses the involvement of MPL and FinTech lenders in the roll-out of government guaranteed loans in certain jurisdictions and the learnings from this experience. It then examines the benefits and limitations to their participation and derives lessons for future crisis support programmes.

Trade in plastic waste and scrap plays a potentially important role in helping to strengthen markets for recycled plastics as it can help to achieve economic efficiency through for instance economies of scale. But such trade has also been criticised for leading to plastic pollution when recipient countries lack capacity to treat such waste in an environmentally sound manner. This report aims to identify and assess trends in trade patterns of plastic waste and scrap in the context of recent policy developments, particularly the strengthening of controls applied in the context of the Basel Convention, which came into force at the beginning of 2021. One of the findings is that OECD Member Countries continue to make up a significant share of global trade in plastic scrap and waste (89% of global reported exports and 67% of global reported imports by weight), but that the trade surplus has continued to shrink, as well as the overall volume of trade.

Norway, like a number of other countries, saw steep growth in house prices during the pandemic. This added to past years of strong price increases and has brought renewed concern for housing affordability. Tax advantages to buying homes inflate house prices, contribute to wealth inequality and divert resources from more productive investments. An underdeveloped rental market is an additional consequence of Norway’s pro-homeownership policies. Beyond tax reform and targeted support for low-income households, including renters, lasting improvements in affordability will require measures to enhance the responsiveness of residential construction to increased demand. However, creating room for new housing supply can involve difficult trade‑offs with environmental and other policy objectives.

As countries implement stricter environmental policies, the need for tools to compare countries’ environmental policy stringency is becoming more pressing. The OECD Environmental Policy Stringency (EPS) index has become a widely used tool for policy analysis since its creation in 2014. This paper updates the EPS index over three decades from 1990 to 2020, across 40 countries and 13 policy instruments, focussing on climate change and air pollution mitigation policies. It up-grades the index structure across all years, adding a new sub-index that measures the strength of technology support policies, which complements the existing structure of market based and non-market based sub-indices. The paper shows evolving developments – across countries and time – in the stringency of environmental policies.

Self-report data such as those regularly administered with questionnaires in the OECD’s educational large-scale assessments are subject to response biases such as acquiescence, i.e., the tendency to agree with questionnaire items regardless their content. Research has shown that acquiescence affects the psychometric quality of such data, posing a threat to validity. Using a simple index that can be computed in the presence of both positively and negatively keyed items, the author examined the prevalence, the individual-level correlates, the impact on associations between indicators, as well as the county-level consistency of acquiescence for 16 questionnaires administered in four study programmes (PISA, TALIS, SSES, and IELS). Findings suggest that variation in acquiescence exists both between and within countries, the latter of which is determined by factors largely in line with prior research. Impact on associations as well as high levels of country-level consistency are evident. Based on these findings, recommendations for the construction of questionnaires to be administered in future assessments are derived.

COVID-19 has drawn renewed attention to the economic importance of cross border mobility. Frictions in cross border mobility of labour can substantially impact the economy and international trade, by causing a long-term decrease in net migration that would alter the labour supply in many economies. To capture these macro-economic and trade effects, a global macroeconomic model (NiGEM) and a general equilibrium trade model (METRO) were used to simulate a stylised scenario equivalent to a 20% reduction in net-migration accumulated over the past ten years for all economies and regions. In OECD countries, this would translate into a reduction of the overall labour supply, and this shock would shift some economic activity towards non-OECD countries. At the sectoral level, exports of labour intensive manufacturing activities in OECD countries would contract, with electronics (13% of the total reduction of exports in the long term), automobiles (12%) and pharmaceuticals (9%) among the most affected.

Comprehensive and coordinated action across levels of government responsible for different policy domains (labour, education, housing and welfare/health) as well as across local actors is crucial to migrant integration. To respond to this need for co-ordination, different policy instruments are mobilised by countries. This paper presents six of them, to illustrate three categories of practices supporting migrant integration through better multi-level co-ordination:

Reinforcing co-ordination (financial, human, technical) between levels of governments and private actors such as businesses or non-governmental organisations to foster migrant integration and retention: The Canadian Atlantic Immigration Pilot (AIP) and the French Territorial Contracts for the Reception and Integration of Refugees (CTAIR);

Resolving information and evaluation asymmetries: Vienna (Austria) Integration and Diversity Monitor and the German Network IQ;

Illustrating the positive externalities of territorial development and investment programmes on migrant integration and social cohesion: The Italian Inner Areas Strategy and the French Urban Policy.

Ample research has shown the importance of collaboration between practitioners, researchers, and policy makers to ensure holistic, inclusive, and effective policy making, particularly in the field of refugee education. Many countries, however, still face challenges in engaging with stakeholders during all the stages of the practice – research – policy transfer in the context of refugee education in a meaningful and effective way. The unique and distinct needs of refugee students in education systems require extensive collaboration among schools, service providers, and (refugee) communities to collect evidence whether and how refugee students’ needs are met. Hence, a multi-stakeholder approach or “whole-of-a-society” approach is one of the prerequisites for designing inclusive refugee education policies. This paper highlights the importance of stakeholder engagement at all stages of the practice – research – policy transfer, and maps key stakeholders in refugee education in Europe.

This Policy Insights presents a conceptual framework for understanding the non-financial performance of firms through the lens of the OECD Well-being Framework. Building on existing approaches for measuring non-financial performance, it proposes a measurement framework and indicator set for what may be referred to as “Scope 1” Social performance. This refers to the well-being of stakeholders that operate within the operational boundaries of the firm, namely employees, and the capital resources that a firm contributes to and depletes that are directly relevant to society as a whole. Measuring the non-financial performance of firms in the social area is relevant both to provide insight into a company's impact on society, as well as to inform enterprise value creation.