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• Participation by civil society in public expenditure management promises to improve social and economic outcomes while increasing confidence in public institutions. • Participatory budgeting (PB) programmes depend on the effective engagement of three key domestic stakeholders: governments, civil society and legislatures. Participatory budgeting cannot be imposed. • The successful execution of participatory programmes is hampered by serious capacity gaps among key domestic stakeholders. The introduction of PB programmes should be sequenced to reflect different national conditions and policy settings. • Citizen-led participation in budget policy has the potential to improve the effectiveness of nationally driven development strategies such as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). • Donors should focus their efforts on investing in increased capacity among all stakeholders, while encouraging political engagement among governments in particular.

This paper follows the framework developed in past OECD studies for analysis of social assistance programmes that aim to provide low-income clients with adequate financial support while simultaneously promoting their reintegration into labour market and, where necessary, mainstream society. Increasingly, jobless citizens in Germany rely on social assistance: a role for which the programme was never intended. Indeed, there are two other programmes that serve the unemployed in Germany, and this paper discusses social assistance in the context of its relationship to Unemployment Insurance and Assistance benefits.

First, this study provides a concise overview of Germany’s public social system, and discusses federal relations inasmuch they have a bearing on the delivery of public assistance benefits. The study discusses the nature of benefits available to social assistance clients in general, and related support measures for particular client-groups, for example, lone parent families ...

The French government set up in 1995 the Observatoire national de la sécurité des établissements scolaires et d'enseignement supérieur, a national agency for safety in schools and higher education, bringing together the public owners of school buildings, representatives of staff and parents from public-sector schools and those under contract in the private sector, and the relevant ministries. Its mandate covers any issue concerning the safety of people, premises or equipment: solidity of buildings and fire risk, accident analysis and prevention, technology and science equipment, and major hazards.

Seizing the Benefits of ICT in a Digital Economy revisits ICT's contribution to economic performance using new and more recent data to assess the degree to which the findings that appeared valid at the end of 2000 remain intact. This new report also examines whether the policy conclusions from the previous OECD work require adjustment in the current economic environment, and what measures OECD governments should take to seize the benefits of ICT. The findings and policy implications of the work are summarised in this report; they reaffirm and elaborate those of the OECD Growth Study.

This working paper has been written as a contribution to the OECD e-government project launched in 2001, which explores how governments can best exploit information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance good governance principles and achieve public policy goals. The paper highlights the way in which the collection, compilation and dissemination of statistics has changed dramatically as NSOs have taken advantage of the opportunities afforded by ICT advances. In this regard, it describes changes that have occurred in national statistical offices (NSOs) in response to growing citizen demand and outlines both developments that have been made possible and necessary by recent technological advances in software, communications and computing. In addition, the paper shows that statistical institutions have a significant role to play in e-government developments, having often been given a major role in national e-government initiatives. Finally, it shows that the drive towards ...

This article will look at some of the key objectives of Government policy in the UK over the last 20 years, including increasing efficiency and accountability, expansion of student numbers, selectivity in research funding, regionalisation, widening participation, wealth creation and increasing contributions to the quality of life, and at the various measures used to implement such policy. It will contrast the use of "sticks" (i.e. incentives to deliver desired outcomes), and will consider which have been more successful in achieving the goals of Government policy.

The article will also address the implications of such tools of policy on the freedom and autonomy of individual institutions and on diversity within the higher education system. It will consider the role of Government policy in shaping higher education, as compared with other forces for change, including shifting patterns of student demand, rapid developments in technology and methods of learning, new patterns of research and innovation, and the internationalisation of higher education.

1. Policy-makers responsible for publicly-funded drug programmes face continual pressures between the demand to accommodate a steady stream of new and more effective drugs and the ongoing requirement to control costs.
2. In the face of these pressures, a growing number of OECD countries are applying ‘pharmacoeconomic assessment’ (health technology assessment for drugs) - to new drugs to guide decisions about accepting such products for reimbursement under their public programme, or to inform negotiations about pricing.
3. This paper provides an analytical overview of the developing practice of pharmacoeconomic assessment in eleven OECD countries. It looks at the objectives of the activity, some of its processes and some of its impacts.
4. It does this by drawing on a literature review and on an exploratory survey of the activities of pharmacoeconomic agencies in the eleven countries. It also reviews briefly the state of pharmacoeconomic assessment in the United States.
5. The main conclusions are as ...

1. Child development and child well-being are major concerns in many OECD countries and are the subject of ongoing work at the OECD. These concerns have led to a search for policies to offset poverty, deprivation, vulnerability, and the risk factors that can trigger a lifelong cycle of disadvantage. It is in this context that we carried out a review of the research literature on child outcomes and of the different social policies that may affect them. The paper is organized in four parts: (1) a summary of child outcomes of concern in various OECD countries; (2) a discussion of one particular outcome, child poverty, and its negative consequences for children; (3) a summary of the research linking different family types with different outcomes; and (4) the social policies that may lead to different positive and negative outcomes.
2. Our main conclusions from this literature review is that knowledge-building is proceeding, in particular, with regard to child poverty and the policies ...

In contrast to what has happened throughout the 1960s and 1970s, some of the largest EU countries and Japan are no longer closing the income gap vis-à-vis the United States. Worse, the gap may even be widening since the mid-1990s. While in the case of Japan the gap in GDP per capita is essentially due to the lagging performance in labour productivity, the European Union is trailing mainly in terms of labour resource utilisation, reflecting both lower employment rates and fewer hours worked. This paper provides a brief overview of the main structural factors thought to have contributed to differences in the degree of labour resource utilisation, as well as in the intensity of physical and human capital use and in the pace of technological progress. In doing so, it provides a set of performance and policy indicators which can be used to assess progress achieved in structural reform ...

The Ageing-Related Diseases study compares health care systems by examining treatment trends and health outcomes on a disease-by-disease basis. Most of the day-to-day decisions that determine health care system performance are made in treating specific diseases. Therefore, the ARD’s bottom-up approach to comparing health care system performance at the disease level, rather than the more common top-down approach, goes to the heart of health care system performance. This paper presents such an analysis for stroke.

There is considerable variation in treatment trends for the same diseases across countries and much of this variation can be explained by differences in structural characteristics of health care systems. A diseaselevel analysis begins with an examination of these characteristics: the economic incentives, policies and regulations that affect individual providers’ decisions for treating a specific disease, defining a particular health care system’s approach. In order ...

Sierra University was designed to promote the development of the mountain communities in the State of Sonora, Mexico. The university offers high school graduates an opportunity to pursue their studies in their home region, in order to stimulate economic development and contribute to social cohesion in the highlands area. The university is equipped with modern facilities, while its architecture is rooted in the past.

As the highest legal act of Serbia and Montenegro, the Constitutional Charter regulates issues and competences of the State Union, regulates institutions of the State Union as well as its competences. The Constitutional Charter also regulates the issue of leaving the State Union as well as the issue of changes to the Constitutional Charter. Laws as general administrative legal acts regulate in principle issues which are in the competency of Serbia and Montenegro. Implementation of the laws is ensured by secondary legislation acts.

Before the independence of the four other constituent Republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia), Montenegro was a constituent Republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The first multiparty elections in Montenegro took place in 1990 following the period of the one-party system, which had been in force after the Second World War. There were three main principles in the legal system, in relation to the Federal State of Yugoslavia and constituent Republics, as well as in relation to Serbia and Montenegro within the new State. The first was a principle of “double track” in the implementation of laws: (federal authorities execute federal law, and Republican authorities execute the laws of the Republic). The second principle was a presumption of power in favour of the Republics (Serbia and Montenegro). The third principle was the possibility of delegating the power from constituent Republics to the Federal State. These were the main features of the period after dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and means that the competence of the Federal Administration was limited only to the fields that were explicitly envisaged by the Federal Constitution.

Kosovo and Metohija used to be as an autonomous province an integral part of the Republic of Serbia. In 1989 Serbia revoked unilaterally the autonomy of the province. In the second half of the 1990s, the tensions between Kosovo Albanians and Serb military forces led to fighting. The international community and NATO began a military intervention in March 1999 to stop the violence and the humanitarian crisis. After three months of NATO air strikes against Serbian police and military positions the United Nations Security Council issued, in June 1999, Resolution 1244 which established an interim international administration in Kosovo (United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo — UNMIK). The main objective of this provisional administration is to work towards creating the conditions necessary to build provisional democratic institutions of governance to ensure a peaceful and normal life for all the inhabitants of Kosovo. The head of UNMIK is the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Kosovo (SRSG). Bernard Kouchner (France) served as the first head of UNMIK, from July 1999 to January 2001. He was followed by Hans Haekkerup (Denmark) who served from February 2001 to December 2001. Michael Steiner (Germany) served from January 2002 to July 2003. Since July 2003 the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Kosovo has been Harri Holkeri (Finland). The first municipal elections under the administration of UNMIK, for the establishment of the local institutions of municipal governments, were held in September 2000. The second municipal elections were held in October 2002. The general elections for the establishment of the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government (PISG) were held in November 2001.

This study has two components: identification of concrete examples of services exports by developing countries, and quantitative studies on the gains from services liberalisation. While the study is by no means comprehensive, and is subject to many limitations, two fundamental findings emerge. The first of these findings, documented in Part I of the study, is that there is clear evidence that developing countries have important service sector export interests beyond mode 4 (temporary movement of services supplying personnel), being global or regional players in sectors such as business services (out-sourcing), port and shipping services, audiovisual services, telecommunications, construction services and health services. The second of these findings, documented in Part II of the study, is that for most countries, including many developing countries, export-related gains from services liberalisation are neither the only nor the largest basis of expected gains. A large portion of benefits from services liberalisation derive, not from seeking better market access abroad, but from the increased competitiveness and efficiency of the domestic market. Together, the study’s two findings underscore the potential benefits of services liberalisation, both for developed and for developing countries.