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In the wake of significant price increases in 2021 and 2022, countries introduced new or revised their fertiliser policies, further complicating the policy landscape in a highly concentrated market susceptible to supply disruptions. This report takes stock of the variety of policies in place and develops a framework for their classification and analysis. Key insights include the evolution and composition of farmer support estimates for mineral fertiliser use, the generally low or zero import tariffs reflecting high import dependence, and the non-transparent and frequently changing export restrictions imposed by major exporters. The analysis also shows a clear shift in policies from supporting mineral fertilisers to reducing their use or supporting organic fertiliser production and use. Yet, despite the potential of organic fertilisers, expanding their use and development will require substantial investment, changes in farm management, and policy adjustments.
Asset tokenisation can generally be described as the digital representation of physical assets on distributed ledgers (also referred to as digital twins) or the issuance of native tokens on the blockchain. Although initially associated with mostly non-compliant initial coin offerings over the period 2017-18, currently tokenisation represents one of the most prominent cases of distributed ledger technologies in financial markets. This Going Digital Toolkit note identifies the different approaches that policy makers have adopted around tokenised assets and the markets for such instruments, and provides examples of these approaches. These approaches are not mutually exclusive and policy makers may differ in the way they address asset tokenisation, participants of tokenised markets, and risks arising in these markets. This Toolkit note does not classify approaches into categories, but rather describes elements and characteristics of different jurisdictional approaches to asset tokenisation, some of which can co-exist.
The goal of this paper is to provide tools to understand and analyse waves of "agencification" in transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Agencification is a shorthand for the process of delegation and devolution, in which more autonomy, particularly in personnel and financial issues, is granted to public bodies, which either remain legally part of the state or acquire their own legal personality. It can also mean creating or moving functions to bodies, which are subsidiary or separate from ministries/departments (Gill, 2002). In transition countries, most public organisations inherited a legal personality already from communism, with consequences which are both procedural and substantive. Therefore, agencification in transition countries usually means the creation of new autonomous bodies for new functions or a significant increase in the autonomy of existing legally separate bodies either on an individual or a collective basis.
Hospitals are the most expensive component of OECD health care systems, accounting for around one third of total health care expenditure. Given growing pressures on government budgets, this is an area of expenditure that has already been, and will continue to be, thoroughly scrutinised for potential increases in efficiency. One way to assess hospital efficiency is to measure the amount of resources each hospital uses to treat specific conditions. A care delivery process may be seen as more efficient – after accounting for broader health system and market factors that may constrain the hospital from operating at an efficient level – if it consumes fewer resources while delivering adequate care for the same condition, the dimension of efficiency under review here. In this light, measuring hospital length of stay and costs for a given condition helps the understanding of how efficient (better performing) hospitals are relative to each other. Through international comparative work, this paper helps policy makers understand the scope and nature of length of stay/costs variation across hospitals in OECD countries. It also explores whether characteristic of hospitals or of countries' regulatory and operating environments can explain differences in efficiency. Data on length of stay and costs to treat patients admitted to hospitals for nine tracing conditions/treatments were collected and analysed for Canada (Alberta province), France, Ireland and Israel for 2012-2014. Our analysis shows that hospitals with a number of beds ranging between 200 and 600, and not-for-profit hospitals report shorter length of stay and lower costs for several conditions/treatments. It also shows that variations in efficiency are more likely to exist at the hospital level for cardiac surgery (acute myocardial infarction with percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty and coronary artery bypass graft), and at country level for hysterectomy, caesarean section and normal delivery. These results shed some light on the importance of hospital payment system in fostering efficiency in care delivery for standard/high volume treatments such as normal delivery, whereas hospital management and organisation seem to drive efficiency for more complex/technology driven treatments such as bypass surgery.
The rise in European unemployment has inspired much new research on the causes and mechanisms of unemployment, analogous to the interest devoted to unemployment in the 1930s. The new research has to a large extent focused on wage-setting behaviour, as is revealed by the rapid growth of theoretical and empirical work on models of wage bargaining, insider-outsider relationships, and efficiency wages. A common theme in this new work is a desire to provide satisfactory microeconomic foundations for the existence and persistence of involuntary unemployment.
This paper offers a survey of recent research on unemployment persistence and insider-outsider forces in wage determination. It begins in Section II with an overview of major themes in the theoretical work on unemployment. Section III reviews results from a number of recent empirical studies inspired by these new theories. Section IV concludes with a discussion of directions for future research ...
This paper deals with trends and cycles of unemployment and labour-force participation. Empirical evidence on both trends and cyclical movements in unemployment and participation is presented. Some of the mechanisms behind the observed developments are also analysed, examining how well they fit into different theoretical frameworks. The implications for the assessment of labour market slack of the observed interplay between unemployment and participation are discussed. The paper ends by presenting some unexplained puzzles concerning the interplay between trends and cycles of unemployment and participation ...
This paper analyses the impact of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) extensions on jobseeker households in selected US states and examines how these extensions compare to the pre-pandemic policies. The analysis finds that PUA extensions increase benefit duration for all jobseekers, but due to interactions between other government benefits, this translates to significant increases in benefit generosity only for jobseekers without children. This has an impact on the financial incentives to take up employment, although incentives are still above the OECD average. PUA extensions have little impact for people who have been unemployed for a very long time, and jobseekers with no recent contribution history. PUA extensions also have minimal impact on jobless families with children who continue to receive less support compared to other OECD countries.
In the 1960s and 1970s a number of views were formed about unemployment in developing countries, which have remained largely accepted since then. The views can be summarized as three propositions: a) the poor cannot afford to become unemployed; b) labour markets in developing countries are always sufficiently open and flexible for work to be found, so that c) unemployment is a reflection of the search for jobs with high earnings on the part of those able to finance search costs.
In contrast, the conclusions of this review are that the poor can be and are increasingly to be found in large numbers among the unemployed; many young people have great difficulty in finding any sort of work, especially regular work; unemployment is high and appears to have been rising over the past 20 years. In sum, in the light of this review of evidence, the conventional wisdom described in the so-called luxury unemployment hypothesis is seriously flawed and should be set aside.
The OECD Competition Committee debated unilateral disclosure of information with anticompetitive effects in February 2012. This document includes an executive summary of that debate and the documents from the meeting: an analytical note by the OECD Secretariat, written submissions from Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, the European Union, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Norway, Peru, Romania, the Russian Federation, Spain, Chinese Taipei, Türkiye, the United Kingdom, the United States and BIAC as well as an aide-memoire of the discussion.
This paper shows that corporate tax provisions can lead to different effective tax rates (ETRs) if there is a capital cost-intensive and a variable cost-intensive way of producing the same output. It develops a framework for analysing sources of the difference in ETRs and adapts existing models to compare forward-looking ETRs for low-carbon and high-carbon electricity generation technologies, considering tax provisions for cost recovery in 36 countries. It finds that standard tax systems are technology neutral when investments are debt-financed because the deductibility of interest payments compensates for the fact that capital allowances are based on nominal (rather than real) capital costs. Under equity finance, ETRs are higher for investments in capital-cost-intensive technologies as the cost of equity finance is often not deductible. Since low-carbon electricity generation tends to be relatively capital-intensive, this result represents a form of unintentional misalignment of the corporate tax system with decarbonisation objectives,.
The OECD Competition Committee debated universal service obligations in October 2003. This document includes an executive summary and the documents from the meeting: an analytical note by the OECD, written submissions from Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, the European Commission, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, Chinese Taipei, the United States, as well as an aide-memoire of the discussion.
Trade globalisation is beginning to affect universities worldwide. In response to this outside pressure, institutions have become more geared to gaining international repute through research than to maintaining their reputation at home for the quality of their teaching. As a result of this focus on research, French universities, for example, are losing ground to other kinds of higher education institutions. One of the main reasons is that research encourages specialisation, whereas the market increasingly requires multi-disciplinary and cross-cutting skills. In order to explore how society’s contradictory demands can be met, two opposing models will be presented, one that seeks to preserve the universalist role of universities and another that would prompt higher education institutions to become increasingly specialised in pursuit of research excellence. Between these two extremes, there is perhaps a middle way that is difficult to follow, but that is exceptionally enriching for the university community, provided that university management is rethought. The primary mistake that can be made in any process of change is to seek to merge the role of individuals with that of institutions. Although universities can continue to pull together all the various threads that contribute to economic development, individuals cannot be expected to have the same multi-faceted profile. This means that the quality of tomorrow’s universities will depend on the quality of interpersonal relationships and how they are managed....
The last decade has seen a growing increase in policy discourse in many countries on entrepreneurship and innovation with a prominent emphasis on the role to be played by universities. However, it is far from clear to what extent institutional behaviours are influenced by this enterprising policy discourse based on the broad assumption that “knowledge” is the most precious asset for economic growth in the knowledge economy. This article examines the links developing between the universities and innovation processes especially at the regional level as observed in the United Kingdom, highlighting interactions between public policy and institutional behaviour in a multi-level governance (MLG) structure of knowledge production. Different strategic processes of networking between universities and the links universities are developing with Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) and other partners in nine English regions are illustrated in light of recent government policies which influence the resources and strategies of universities. Universities need to be analysed as critical actors in regional development processes, and their wide range of activities and strategies at different geographical levels need to be strategically co-ordinated as part of a territorial development process within the globalising knowledge economy.
National and international rankings of institutional performance are playing a growing role in contemporary higher education. It is critical that researchers develop pragmatic, educationally sensitive and methodologically informed approaches for managing this aspect of higher education. This paper compares three approaches for modelling key indicators which underpin a national evaluation of university education in Australia: rankings of aggregate institutional performance; comparisons of institutional change over time; and performance variations within fields of education. The results show that simple institution-level aggregations are misleading, and that contemporary analytical methods must be used to account for the influence of fields of education. More broadly, the findings expose the need for a more robust methodological development of university rankings.