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Glasgow City Region - composed of eight Local Authorities - is Scotland’s largest integrated economic area, accounting for a third of Scotland's jobs and economic output. Over the last two decades, the unemployment rate has decreased to a record low, and the share of degree holders has increased significantly. Despite its overall economic success and high growth potential, Glasgow City Region faces several challenges. The region’s productivity levels compare poorly with other UK cities and major OECD metropolitan regions, and income deprivation and economic inactivity are high. As the economy has recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, the pressure on the labour market has increased, resulting in labour shortages. The challenges for Glasgow City Region’s labour market call for greater efforts to enhance and future-proof the skills and employability systems in the region. This OECD report reviews and offers recommendations on three of the most pressing challenges facing the Glasgow City Region: i) reinforcing re- and upskilling opportunities for individuals in work and aligning skills supply with demand, ii) enhancing labour market inclusion of the economically inactive, and iii) strengthening school-to-work transitions of young people.

This study evaluates the Finnish Education Evaluation Centre (FINEEC), focusing on the scope, quality and usefulness of FINEEC’s activities and outputs. Using a variety of methods, including self-assessment, consultations and international workshops, the report identifies nine areas for improvement and underscores the necessity for strategic and operational enhancements to strengthen FINEEC’s contribution to policy making in Finland.

This report provides an assessment of how foreign direct investment (FDI) contributes to Canada’s sustainable development, particularly in the areas of trade, productivity and innovation employment, job quality and skills, diversity and inclusion, and the low-carbon transition. It provides initial policy considerations on how investment promotion and facilitation can improve such impacts.

This report assesses how foreign direct investment (FDI) contributes to Tunisia’s sustainable development. It uses a wealth of national and international data sources to examine the contribution of FDI to productivity, innovation, job quality and skills development. The report also provides initial policy considerations to improve the impact of FDI on sustainable development in Tunisia.

Since 2020, a series of shocks to the global economy has had significant impacts on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs and their access to finance. Most recently, significant inflationary pressures have led to tighter lending conditions, limiting the flow of finance to SMEs and acting as a barrier to investment. Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs 2024: An OECD Scoreboard monitors SME and entrepreneurship financing trends, conditions and policy developments in close to 50 countries. It documents a strong increase in the cost of SME financing in 2022, alongside a significant decline in SME lending. Equity finance also fell sharply in 2022, after a year of historically high growth in 2021. Women-led and minority-owned businesses, which typically find it more difficult to access venture capital financing, were affected disproportionately. Against this backdrop, the Scoreboard highlights the recent measures governments have taken to support SME access to finance, including finance for the green transition. A continued focus on diversifying financial sources and instruments will be important to meet the different needs of all types of SMEs and entrepreneurs, and enable them to act as an engine of resilient, sustainable and inclusive growth.

Rising disinformation has far-reaching consequences in many policy areas ranging from public health to national security. It can cast doubt on factual evidence, jeopardise the implementation of public policies and undermine people's trust in the integrity of democratic institutions. This report explores how to respond to these challenges and reinforce democracy. It presents an analytical framework to guide countries in the design of policies, looking at three complementary dimensions: implementing policies to enhance the transparency, accountability, and plurality of information sources; fostering societal resilience to disinformation; and upgrading governance measures and public institutions to uphold the integrity of the information space.

As climate change increases exposure to natural disasters, countries need new solutions to mitigate risks of natural hazards. For many in Asia and the Pacific, mobilising existing resources is not enough: they need to consider a grand design of disaster risk financing strategies. Catastrophe bonds (CAT bonds) can be an effective, market-based financing tool for the region. While the global CAT bond market has grown steadily since the 1990s, it remains weakly developed in Asia and the Pacific. Its successful development there requires robust purpose-built legal frameworks; developed general bond markets, especially in local currency; appropriate capacity building; and data-driven pricing models. This report explores each of these conditions along with policy suggestions for fostering them, and discusses the development of multi-country CAT bonds in Asia and the Pacific.

The scale of Uzbekistan’s green transition requires a marked increase in private financing to fill the existing spending gap. The outsized role of the state in Uzbekistan’s economy and its underdeveloped domestic capital market act as significant constraints and call for a diversification of sources to finance the green transition. Since 2021, Uzbekistan has made green bonds a central part of its strategy to fill the financing gap and mobilise new sources of capital for its domestic green infrastructure projects. This publication explores the current market and institutional set-up in Uzbekistan, the reforms that have led to recent issuances of both sovereign and corporate thematic bonds, and the remaining barriers to further uptake of the instrument. The report also provides policy recommendations related to the market's institutional set up, Uzbekistan's regulatory framework for debt capital markets and emerging opportunities for further green bond use aimed at key stakeholders, including policy makers and market participants.

Os comportamentos dos gestores de alto e médio escalão são importantes para promover culturas organizacionais abertas, mitigar os riscos à integridade e fomentar o comportamento ético de seus funcionários. Este relatório examina as principais questões relacionadas à liderança em integridade na administração pública federal do Brasil, com base em uma ampla pesquisa com altos agentes públicos. Informado e inspirado por insights comportamentais, ele fornece recomendações concretas para o fortalecimento da liderança em integridade no Brasil.

This manual has been developed to help compliance officers in Croatian and Serbian State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) to introduce or strengthen their company’s anti-corruption programmes. It is designed as a practical, easy-to-reference tool offering a variety of practices that an SOE could consider implementing.

The framework provides a set of outcome-based competences in financial literacy that children and youth in the EU need in order to make sound decisions on personal finance. The joint framework covers competences into the four main content areas of financial literacy: money and transactions, planning and managing finances, risks and reward, and the financial landscape. Within these areas, the joint framework describes the types of knowledge that children and youth at different ages could benefit from, the behaviours that may help them to achieve financial well-being throughout their lives, as well as the attitudes that will support this process. Moreover, the framework integrates competences on the following cross-cutting dimensions: digital finance, sustainable finance, citizenship, entrepreneurship as well as competences relevant when becoming an adult.

By 2050, the global population living in cities is projected to reach 5 billion, growing from 3.5 billion in 2015. Massive investment in infrastructure will be needed to accommodate this growth, and to adapt infrastructure to climate change and benefit from the digital transition. This report explores three ways to meet this challenge. Firstly, it outlines how new forms of urban planning can help to mobilise private finance for inclusive, resilient and sustainable urban investment. Secondly, it explores how leveraging private investment can help to strengthen cities capacity to support needed investment in a tighter fiscal environment. Finally, it considers the potential opportunities and challenges for mobilising sustainable finance – green, social and sustainable bonds and loans, sustainability-linked bonds and catastrophe bonds – for infrastructure investment by City Governments. The report also includes 17 short case studies from 12 countries that demonstrate innovative practices for creating the Cities of Tomorrow.

Illicit financial flows (IFFs) have a cross-cutting nature and involve a diversity of crimes and offences transcending tax evasion, such as money laundering, terrorism financing and corruption. It is thus highly important for jurisdictions to adopt a whole-of-government approach to addressing them, notably through the sharing of information from tax to nontax authorities, which can include information exchanged under international tax agreements. This latter process is also known as the “wider use of treaty-exchanged information”. Wider use is envisaged by various international tax agreements, bilateral and multilateral, provided that certain conditions are met, usually where a similar use for non-tax purposes is allowed at the domestic level in both collaborating jurisdictions and where prior authorisation is granted by the jurisdiction providing the information. While several jurisdictions are interested in developing this form of co-operation as part of their whole-of-government approach to fighting IFFs, in practice they face operational challenges in implementing wider use, in particular with respect to the need to obtain consent from the jurisdiction providing the information.

The oil and gas industry has some of the best and most cost-effective opportunities to reduce methane emissions. The potential to do so is clear. Some countries and companies have already demonstrated that achieving near-zero emissions from oil and gas operations is technically and economically possible. There are a growing number of initiatives, policies and regulations aiming to reduce emissions globally, and many reductions can be realised while saving money. However, overall progress has been much too slow, despite the record profits that the oil and gas industry saw in 2022. This report looks in detail at the investment requirements to deliver a sharp reduction in oil and gas methane emissions to 2030, and how these could be financed. The analysis is intended to inform discussions in the runup to COP28 and help prompt the necessary actions to accelerate the pace of change.

This report provides policy recommendations on how to strengthen the economic, social and environmental benefits of foreign direct investment (FDI). It provides an extensive assessment on how FDI contributes to Chile’s economic diversification into sustainable and knowledge-intensive activities (e.g. green hydrogen, information technology), and also assesses the policy and regulatory framework influencing the impact of FDI on sustainable development in Chile.