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This paper provides a revised measure of regulatory restrictions on inward foreign direct investment (FDI) for OECD countries and extends the approach to 13 non-member countries. The methodology is largely similar to that adopted in the previous version of the OECD indicator and covers three broad categories of restrictions: limitations on foreign ownership, screening or notification procedures, and management and operational restrictions. The FDI restrictiveness indicator captures statutory deviations from "national treatment", i.e. discrimination against foreign investment. When combined with other factors having an influence on foreign investment decisions, it has proven to be a good predictor of countries' inward FDI performance.
This paper provides a revised measure of regulatory restrictions on inward foreign direct investment (FDI)for OECD countries and extends the approach to 13 non-member countries. The methodology is largely similar to that adopted in the previous version of the OECD indicator and covers three broad categories of restrictions: limitations on foreign ownership, screening or notification procedures, and management and operational restrictions. The FDI restrictiveness indicator captures statutory deviations from "national treatment", i.e. discrimination against foreign investment. When combined with other factors having an influence on foreign investment decisions, it has proven to be a good predictor of countries’ inward FDI performance.
The main purpose of the paper is to provide orientations based on a comparative approach to policy makers on drafting legislation on the organisation and functioning of the state administration. It is therefore written in a practice oriented way, although it nevertheless attempts to draw some generalisation.
French

This paper was prepared for the OECD-IEA Climate Change Expert Group (formerly called the Annex I Expert Group) for the purpose of providing useful and timely input on specific topics relevant to international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The papers do not represent the views of the OECD, the IEA, or their member countries, rather they are Secretariat information papers intended to help inform countries as well as the UNFCCC audience on key technical issues in the international climate change negotiations.

As higher education has grown and state funding has been constrained, the financial sustainability of institutions of higher education has become an issue for policy makers and for those who govern and manage these institutions. The challenge for governments is to ensure that increasingly autonomous institutions respond to public interest agendas while taking a greater responsibility for their own financial sustainability. The challenge for institutions is to manage an increasingly complex portfolio of aims and funding. This report examines the conditions needed to secure financial sustainability for the future from the national (policy) and institutional (management) perspectives.
  • 12 Nov 2007
  • Jane Ellis, Sami Kamel
  • Pages: 50
  • in OECD Papers

The market for Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects is continuing to grow rapidly, with the current portfolio expecting to deliver 2 billion tons of CO2-eq greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions by 2012, equivalent to 17% of Annex I Parties’ base year GHG emissions. In total, governments and companies have earmarked over USD11 billion for CDM funding to 2012. This study analyses the various barriers to CDM market expansion in developing countries, and makes recommendations on how some of them can be removed or reduced. It also examines the distribution of CDM projects amongst regions and sectors.

This paper has been prepared by the Sigma Programme following a request of the Government Office of the Czech Republic. The OECD has worked extensively during the last few years on issues relating to the organisational dimension of the national administration and, in particular, on the phenomenon of "agencification" and its impact on governance structures. It has already produced a significant number of analyses1, including a comprehensive comparative publication on Distributed Public Governance (2002)2. Sigma has also published on the topic in the framework of public expenditure management and with reference to transition countries.
This OECD work was prompted by the problems caused by the increasing administrative-functional deconcentration within its member countries. The main questions posed were along the lines of: Does departmentalisation (keeping the whole responsibility within a ministry) ensure better control and efficient management of administrative and other public services or, on the contrary, does agencification (in the sense of setting up separate bodies) result in better management and de-politicisation?

This paper, originally presented at the 1981 meeting of the OECD Working Party of Senior Budget Officials, discusses the fundamental purposes of budgeting and explores how off-budget expenditures weaken a government’s financial control. The paper gives insights on many aspects of budgeting that are still relevant today: the transformation of the public sector, the interface with the private sector, the scope and size of government, the role of regulation, the emergence of new organisational forms, and the use of performance objectives and long-term planning.

This paper was prepared for the OECD-IEA Climate Change Expert Group (formerly called the Annex I Expert Group) for the purpose of providing useful and timely input on specific topics relevant to international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The papers do not represent the views of the OECD, the IEA, or their member countries, rather they are Secretariat information papers intended to help inform countries as well as the UNFCCC audience on key technical issues in the international climate change negotiations.

This study describes the changing patterns of intermediate goods trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) in East Asia and investigates the impacts of international outsourcing on the Japanese and the Korean labour markets. The main findings of the paper are as follows. First, intra-regional trade in East Asia grew remarkably during the period 1990-2003. While overall trade with the rest of the world roughly doubled in this period, intra-regional trade in East Asia more than tripled. Second, the main factor behind increased intra-regional trade in East Asia was the trade in intermediate goods through outsourcing and the international fragmentation of production. Third, reflecting the fact that outsourcing to Asia (particularly to China) has a negative impact on the demand for workers with lower education and a positive impact on the demand for workers with higher education, relative wage shares of workers by educational attainment have changed substantially both in Japan and Korea. Fourth, our empirical analysis provides evidence of labour demand shift towards skilled labour in Japanese manufacturing as a result of outsourcing. For Korea, although the overall effects of outsourcing have been insignificant in Korea partly because a substantial part of Korean outsourcing remained directed towards Japan, our results imply that labour demand would shift away from less-skilled workers towards more-skilled workers if outsourcing to China increased and outsourcing to Japan decreased in the future.
The transport sector’s demand for oil is less price sensitive than any other part of the economy. This is partly because demand for transport services is relatively insensitive to price and partly because substitutes for oil in road transport are currently far from cost-effective. Evidence from the USA suggests that as incomes rise, transport sector oil demand becomes even less price sensitive. This implies that oil consumption is set to become increasingly concentrated in the transport sector. It also implies that relatively limited fluctuations in demand can have increasingly significant effects on oil prices.
The strong and sustained rise in oil prices observed in recent years poses a challenge to monetary policy and its ability to simultaneously achieve low inflation and stable output. Against this background, the paper studies monetary policy in a small open economy New Keynesian DSGE model including oil as a production input and a component of final demand. It investigates the performance of alternative price level definitions, notably headline and core CPI, in standard interest rate rules with respect to output and inflation stabilisation. The analysis puts special emphasis on the impact of price and real wage rigidity and their interaction on the policy trade-off induced by the oil price shock. While the degree of price rigidity alone is found to have little impact on the shock transmission and generates only small differences between alternative monetary strategies, the simulations suggest a more important role for real wage stickiness. Real wage stickiness triggers second round effects and complicates stabilisation whatever the policy rule. A focus on core inflation tends to limit the contraction of output in this context. The results also point to some interaction between nominal price and real wage rigidities. In the presence of real wage rigidity, greater price flexibility is found to be destabilising, as it amplifies the initial inflation effect of shocks, thereby triggering a stronger monetary policy response and a larger output effect.
The policy guidance lays out the policy responses that need to be in place to ensure that consumers engaging in mobile commerce transactions are adequately informed, and are protected against security or privacy risks.

The feasibility and relevance of measuring human rights, democracy and governance have long been controversial both in the human rights community and in the international statistical family. Within the human rights community, the term “indicator” has had two distinct - and somewhat contrasting - meanings: while for some it designated, in the strict statistical sense, quantitative synthetic information based on robust data (Türk, 1990; Alston, 1998), for many others it designated a qualitative synthetic overview based on extensive sets of questions or “checklists” related to key human rights dimensions (Green, 2001). The latter meaning has deeply marked the approach to human rights assessments that has prevailed within the UN system and among most human rights leading experts during the last decades.

French
Open plan schools have been largely contested in Portugal; many teachers, administrators and even parents consider this model of schooling inappropriate and therefore a failure. Recently however the Escola da Ponte, one of the open plan schools that has survived, was recognised as one of the country’s most innovative educational facilities. Curiously, one of the main reasons for the school’s “success”, in the opinion of its teaching staff, is precisely the open space design.
French
Designing school buildings to respond to change is not a new idea. But perhaps what is different today is the kind and degree of change which we have to anticipate. The OECD is carrying out projects that can help in the planning and design of future educational facilities – exploring trends in education and studying innovative learning environments. Education planners have long grappled with the type of change connected with demography, for example changing local patterns in the number of school places needed over a period of time. But new challenges lie in the complexity and uncertainty which are characteristic of the 21st century world. The findings of the OECD’s project “Schooling for Tomorrow: Trends Shaping Education” show some sources of this uncertainty, including falling birth rates, increasing economic globalisation and growing numbers of single parent families. Such issues suggest that policy makers and education providers alike need to address questions about what education is and how it should be delivered. Another OECD project, a study of innovative learning environments, is looking at how schools can respond to changes in the type of teaching and learning that make individuals lifelong learners. Developing individuals as self-directed learners, who are able to acquire expert knowledge in different fields and to change careers, benefits the economy and society generally. Research into learning shows both the importance of allowing students to take control of their own learning and that learning must be a social, cultural, intrapersonal and an active process. Research also demonstrates that an understanding of complex subjects can be best achieved in settings where the learner is engaged with others in the community, in activities where knowledge is being applied. The learning environments that support this must be fundamentally different from what has gone before, with less emphasis on teachers addressing a group of students in a traditional classroom setting. However, just how the physical environment must respond is a complicated issue. To meet the needs of 21st century learning, the physical environment will have to be agile so that it is capable of providing a mixed range of learning settings from large group spaces to smaller, more individual tutorial type spaces. However, the interaction between a building’s users and the physical infrastructure is complex. The physical environment is always a constraint, but a key question might be to what extent does it offer the teachers the freedom and empowerment to do with it what they want. The different learning settings may be facilitated by clever use of furniture which can be easily rearranged in a variety of ways thus providing a range of spaces within spaces. These are all issues that future work of the Programme on Educational Building will explore further, building on the current OECD work on innovative learning environments.
French
Open innovation has received a lot of attention in the business management literature and recently also in policy discussions. Until now, most of the empirical evidence has been based on case study work offering detailed insights into some best practices of open innovation in companies’ innovation strategies. While existing large-scale data may offer interesting empirical evidence on open innovation, they have surprisingly not really been analysed in great detail. Especially the increasing importance of open innovation on a global scale in so-called global innovation networks, calls for internationally comparable data on open innovation. This paper presents different indicators using existing data on R&D investments, innovation survey data, patent data and data on licensing, illustrating the increasing importance and the different characteristics of open innovation across companies, industries and countries.
In May 2007, OECD Ministers mandated the preparation of an OECD Innovation Strategy. The Strategy has two broad aims: first, addressing countries’ needs for a more comprehensive, coherent and timely understanding of how to promote, measure and assess innovation and its underlying dynamics of change; and, second, shedding light on appropriate multi-sector and whole-of-government approaches to innovation as a driver of sustainable growth, productivity and development and as a tool to address global challenges. Work on the Strategy is to take place over 2008-09, with a synthesis report to be delivered to the Ministerial Council Meeting in 2010. This paper forms part of the first phase of work on the Innovation Strategy. It draws on OECD work from the last ten years to provide a broad-brush overview of “what we know” about good policy practices for innovation. It also highlights recent changes in innovation processes and patterns, describes the increasing levels of internationalisation, and draws together early thinking on the contribution of innovation to solving global challenges related to the environment.
The global financial crisis that emerged in mid 2007 has caused considerable economic disruptions in the United States and elsewhere, and exposed major flaws in the global financial system. After examining the origins of the crisis, this paper recommends specific policy responses to resolve the immediate problems and discusses how to make the US financial system more resilient and stable in the future.

Many OECD governments are facing unprecedented challenges in the markets for bonds and bills, as a result of the explosive growth in their borrowing needs. Amidst an unusually uncertain economic outlook, the gross borrowing needs of OECD governments are expected to reach almost USD 12 trillion in 2009. The key policy issue is how to raise smoothly new funds at low cost, while also managing a rapidly growing debt stock.

For the time being, several factors are offsetting the trend towards higher yields. But the risk is that when the recovery gains traction and risk aversion falls, yields will start to rise. There are already signs that issuance conditions are becoming tougher with reports of weaker demand at some recent government bond auncts. Thus far, these less successful auctions can best be interpreted as "single market events" and not as unambiguous evidence of systemic market absorption problems. Also from this perspective lowering OECD sovereign ratings is not obvious.

The future could become more challenging, given that rising issuance is occurring in tandem with increasing overall debt levels. Also contingent debt is on the rise. In response, sovereign debt managers have begun to plan or implement credible medium-terms exit strategies to avoid future "crowding out" and issuance problems.

Although fund raising strategies have become more flexible and somewhat more opportunistic, OECD debt management framework so as to minimise medium-term borrowing costs. The other key challenge, roll-over risk as a result of the increasing use of short-term instruments, is being addressed by OECD debt managers by rebalancing the profile of their issuance programmes by incorporating more long-term instruments.

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