Browse by: "T"
Index
Title Index
Year Index
This discussion paper overviews the different perspectives and approaches to measuring accessibility, reviews the strengths and weaknesses of different accessibility indicators and describes the use of accessibility indicators in the Dutch policy and planning practice. In choosing accessibility measures, there clearly is a trade-off between theoretical and practical strengths/weaknesses. Dutch transport planners have focused on infrastructure-based accessibility metrics. Only in recent years, increasing attention has been paid to integrated transport, spatial planning and more advanced accessibility measurements. A growing stream of studies explores the concept of accessibility in order to examine equity and distributive justice of transport policies. The choice and operationalisation of accessibility indicators for equity and distributive justice is currently still open for discussion. It requires a more complete understanding of accessibility than traditional indicators offer, and also depends on the theory of justice used.
The current focus of transportation policy around disruptive events is to adopt an engineering resilience-oriented approach, which focuses on returning assets to good workable order as soon as possible. This will remain critically important in the future to reduce the scale and severity of disruptive events which are likely to become more commonplace in many locations due to climate change. It is, however, only one part of ensuring that such events have more limited impacts on society and the economy. A broader consideration of societal resilience and responses outside the transport sector is needed. People travel in order to take part in activities (work, education, caring and so on), and a smarter resilience response requires us to better understand these activity patterns and intervene accordingly. There is significant adaptive capacity within society that could be better harnessed to reduce the impacts of disruptive events. The work also shows that many of our assumptions about the short and long run impacts of disruptive events need re-examining to get a fuller picture of the true economic effects of disruptive events on society and the economy. Without this it will be difficult to make the case for many types of resilience investment. This briefing paper presents evidence collected from new studies of behavioural adaptation during disruptive events and uses this to identify four areas for action to improve how we plan for resilience and how we assess the worth of different types of investment strategy:
1. The development of Smart Resilience Strategies – which are a combination of transport and non-transport responses which work together to minimize the impacts of temporary infrastructure loss;
2. Measures to improve the usefulness, impact and co-ordination of communications with the public and businesses during disruptions, enabling social adaptation and reducing time wasted in unnecessarily perilous and extended journeys;
3. A continued programme of developing the capacity of travellers and businesses to adapt to different events through greater multi-modality and an increase in smart and flexible working practices; and
4. A reassessment of the approach to understanding the economic impacts of disruptive events which extends well beyond the apparent reductions in flows and increases in journey times observed on the networks and captures the societal and economic impacts in a more holistic way.
Modern family life brings with it profound changes to children's family living arrangements. An increasing number of children live with unmarried parents whose informal cohabitation implies unequal rights in terms of access to welfare benefit and social protection programmes compared to those in married life. In addition, children experiencing family dissolution are increasingly likely to share their time between the two homes of the separated parents, and/or to live in a stepfamily. The family living arrangements that result from these trends are very diverse and generally not well identified by official statistics, as well as their consequences on families’ living standards.
This paper takes stock of the trends in children's family living arrangements based on available international statistics and calls for the development of data that more accurately and reliably reflect children's family situation and its economic consequences. It also discusses adaptations of social protection systems to ensure that all children receive support appropriate to their concrete family living arrangements, and to guarantee that children in a non-traditional family setting are treated on an equal footing vis-à-vis children with married parents.
The paper particularly discusses issues raised by the fact that children whose parents live together informally do not always have the same legal and economic security as children of married couples. It also reviews challenges associated with the fact that parents are increasingly sharing custody of their children after separation.
This paper gives a brief overview of the foundations of legal privilege, examines the personal (“who”) and material (“what”) scope of legal privilege, and how it can be lost or waived. it also looks at the implications of legal privilege for competition authorities’ information requests and inspections, gives an overview of privilege claims by clients and their assessment and explores the ways and implications of sharing potentially privileged information. It was prepared as a background note for a discussion held at the OECD in November 2018 on the Treatment of Legally Priviledged Information in Competition Proceedings.
This brief discusses policies needed to ensure equitable and universal access by all those in need globally to future vaccines for SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and treatments for the disease. It provides a snapshot of the vaccine and drug candidates in the current R&D pipeline. It then discusses the need for international co-operation to focus on three critical issues which are beyond the initial phases of clinical research. First, there is a need for pull mechanisms to incentivise the swift completion of the most promising R&D projects, and avoid that they are abandoned mid-way should the pandemic subside. Second, large-scale manufacturing capacity has to be built even before we know which candidates will be successful. This is particularly important for vaccines to ensure timely production of a large number of doses needed,and could also be achieved through designing appropriate pull mechanisms. Third, rules need to be set now to manage intellectual property rights and procurement to ensure equitable access, affordability and supply in sufficient quantities.
Given that safety is the number one priority for the nuclear industry, it would seem normal that procedures exist to ensure the effective implementation1 of the provisions of the conventions on nuclear safety,2 as already exist for numerous international treaties.3 Unfortunately, these procedures are either weak or even nonexistent. Therefore, consideration must be given to whether this weakness represents a genuine deficiency in ensuring the main objective of these conventions, which is to achieve a high level of nuclear safety worldwide.4 But, before one can even address that issue, a prior question must be answered: does the specific nature of the international legal framework on nuclear safety automatically result in a lack of non-compliance procedures in international conventions on the subject? If so, the lack of procedures is justified, despite the drawbacks.
This “Trend-Analysis of Science, Technology and Innovation Policies for BNCTs” aims to analyse policies pertaining to nanotechnology and biotechnology over the past years with regard to their directionality and technology-specificity.
The analysis provides some evidence that technology-push policies are favoured for young technology fields, while application-pull policies tend to be applied to more mature fields. In technology-specific policies, the percentage of pure application-pull policies is much lower than that observed for general STI policies. Most individual STI policies are technology-specific in their title or description. Most general STI policies also mention a specific technology and are thus applicable to both the field of general STI and the field of the respective technology. In the case of biotechnology, nanotechnology and ICT, by contrast, at least one third of the policies are unique to the respective field, and only up to a quarter are shared with any other technology field.
This paper uses a multivariate generalisation of the Beveridge and Nelson methodology to model trends and cycles of business-sector labour productivity in the major OECD countries. The method implies that the trend is the long-term forecast of productivity, given all available information; the cycle is thus interpreted as the total excess growth that one would forecast beyond "normal" rates of productivity (see Evans and Reichlin, 1992). Multivariate trends in productivity were estimated including series that Granger-cause and, possibly, are cointegrated with productivity. The corresponding cycles were compared with those generated by the Hodrick-Prescott filter and with the business-cycle dating of the OECD. The stability and predictive properties of the Beveridge-Nelson and Hodrick-Prescott trends were compared. Finally, the estimated productivity gaps were used as proxies for capacity utilisation in econometric models of price formation in order to assess their empirical ...
- This paper summarises trends and driving factors in income distribution and poverty in 21 OECD Member countries analysing separately the working- and the retirement-age populations. Shifts in relative incomes in the past ten years generally favoured prime-age and elderly age groups. Persons living in multi-adult households have seen their income shares rise somewhat, especially in households without children, or when there are two or more earners present. On the other hand, younger age groups generally lost ground, and relative income levels of single parents and persons in households with no earners tended to weaken further in many countries.
- There has been no generalised long-term trend in the distribution of disposable household incomes since the mid-1970s. However, during the more recent period (mid-1980s to mid-1990s), income inequality has increased in about half of the OECD countries studied, while none of the remaining countries recorded an unambiguous decrease in ...
Trade in higher education in its many diverse forms transcends and challenges the national regulatory frameworks in higher education, including national quality assurance and accreditation systems. New kinds of international quality assurance and accreditation are seen as the crucial elements of regulation in a more and more trade oriented international higher education market. In this paper four models of development of international quality assurance are analysed: 1) Strengthening the capacities of national quality assurance and accreditation systems; 2) Promoting cross-border quality assurance and the mutual recognition of quality assurance and accreditation; 3) Developing meta-accreditation of quality assurance and accreditation agencies on an international and global level; and 4) Establishing international quality assurance and accreditation schemes. Current developments and strategies in international quality assurance are situated within these four models and discussed with reference to the trade in education issue.
Smart cities represent the future of urban development in Emerging Asia as more and more cities and countries resort to smart technologies to build more efficient and liveable urban environments, boost economic growth, foster well-being and facilitate citizen engagement. Policy makers in the region have adopted plans to develop and promote the use of technology to organise and run urban areas. Governments have also provided significant financial backing to smart city projects, acknowledging the importance of public support in this field. The development of smart cities offers significant prospects to tackle enduring issues faced by Emerging Asian cities in policy areas such as transport, the provision of public services, education, healthcare and utilities.
This paper discusses the main trends of car use and travel demand, as well as changes in policy responses and attitudes to managing the growth in urban traffic. It highlights the importance of orienting transport policies towards broader objectives beyond efficiency of congestion relief. Such a comprehensive set of objectives would include improvements in health, air quality, active travel activity, human well-being, as well as accessibility and fairness.
This report examines developments in environmental financing in Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA) since 2000. It focuses on expenditures, both domestic sources of finance, as well as external environmental assistance; the latter includes Official Development Assistance/Official Assistance (ODA/OA), and lending from International Financial Institutions (IFIs).
This paper reviews immigration trends and their economic impacts in a number of OECD countries. While migration systems present similarities across countries, institutional arrangements vary widely and impact on the size and composition of migration flows. Some of the main factors driving immigration are then briefly discussed. The paper also considers the economic, fiscal and social implications of immigration. The study suggests that immigration can confer small net gains to the host country. However, the benefits are not necessarily evenly distributed and some groups, in particular those whose labour is substitutable with immigrants may lose, calling for a smooth working of labour and product markets in OECD countries. The paper also claims that, while migration can partly offset slower growing or declining OECD populations, it cannot provide by itself a solution to the budgetary implications of ageing populations. Finally, the paper touches on some development issues, such as ...