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This profile provides a concise and policy-focused overview of the state of health and the healthcare system in Bulgaria, as a part of the broader series of Country Health Profiles from the State of Health in the EU initiative. It presents a succinct analysis encompassing the following key aspects: the current health status in Bulgaria; the determinants of health, focusing on behavioural risk factors; the organisation of the Bulgarian healthcare system; and an evaluation of the health system's effectiveness, accessibility, and resilience. Moreover, the 2023 edition presents a thematic section on the state of mental health and associated services in Bulgaria.
This profile is the collaborative effort of the OECD and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, carried out in cooperation with the European Commission.
This handbook aims to help companies identify, prevent and address child labour and forced labour risks, in the cocoa sector. The handbook builds on the leading international, government-backed standards on supply chain due diligence and responsible business conduct: the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the associated OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct, and the OECD-FAO Guidance for Responsible Agricultural Supply Chains. This handbook was developed in collaboration with the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), with financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and technical inputs from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ).
As the world approaches the midpoint of 2023, the global economic outlook remains uncertain. Escalating trade tensions, inflationary pressures, tight monetary policies and rising risk perceptions are hindering growth and recovery prospects across emerging markets. Furthermore, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to be felt, while Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine costs thousands of lives and generates global energy and food market tensions, hitting the most vulnerable groups of populations. The OECD Development Centre is committed to support its members during these challenging times. In 2022, the Centre celebrated its 60th anniversary with representatives from both the public and private sectors, reaffirming its role as a space for policy dialogue, where stakeholders can come together, share their experiences and expand their mutual understanding. The Centre is strongly focused on supporting countries in achieving stronger, more shared and greener development.
Carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) is an important technology for achieving global net zero emissions. Momentum on CCUS has increased in recent years, but the deployment of projects has remained relatively flat. Emerging business models are opening the door to new investment opportunities, and with that bringing new challenges to be overcome.
The scale-up needed to reach net zero emissions by mid-century represents a major undertaking, and policy support and co-ordination are crucial. Policy makers have a suite of tools at their disposal to create the conditions necessary to drive long-term investment, enabling industry to take the next step forward and push CCUS into a viable and sustainable commercial market.
This IEA CCUS Handbook provides governments with a policy toolkit to tackle the overarching challenges to CCUS deployment. It gives an overview of existing policies that have helped launch CCUS projects to date and identifies the main challenges to future large-scale deployment. The handbook also highlights international best practices, drawing on existing and proposed government efforts to address these challenges.
The handbook is supported by our CCUS Projects Database1 and complements the IEA CCUS Handbooks on Legal and Regulatory Frameworks for CCUS and on CO2 Storage Resources and their Development.
CO2 Emissions in 2022 provides a complete picture of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in 2022. The report finds that global growth in emissions was not as high as some had originally feared amid the disruptions caused by the global energy crisis. This latest release brings together the IEA’s latest analysis, combining the Agency’s estimates of CO2 emissions from all energy sources and industrial processes, as well as providing information on energy-related methane and nitrous oxide emissions.
This report is part of the IEA’s support of the first global stocktake of the Paris Agreement, which will be finalized in the run up to COP28, the next UN Climate Change Conference, at the end of 2023.
International co-operation is key to keep enhancing global nuclear safety. In this regard, the NEA Working Group on the Analysis and Management of Accidents (WGAMA) seeks to advance the scientific and technological knowledge base needed for the prevention, mitigation and management of potential accidents in nuclear power plants, and to encourage international convergence on safety issues in this area.
This report aims to facilitate communication between reactor safety stakeholders by summarising the main aspects of the WGAMA activities. It discusses the key safety topics related to the analysis and management of accidents and their context; the approach and methodologies to cope with reactor safety issues; recent reactor safety issues that have been dealt with; and potential future activities.
While there is a growing interest in the deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs) as a promising option to help mitigate climate change, further international efforts are needed to accelerate the development and safety demonstration of the innovative technologies that are being considered for many of these SMRs. This publication presents the actions taken by the NEA Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (CSNI) and its expert group on SMRs to define the areas of future CSNI research and safety assessment work needed to support sound safety demonstrations for SMRs. The proposed activities address four areas: support for regulatory harmonisation, common safety issues of interest for different designs, experimental campaigns, and benchmarking for computer code validation and verification.
The bioeconomy brings opportunities for economic growth while tackling climate change. Fossil carbon resources can be replaced by bio-based carbon resources, especially biomass. To allow these solutions to be scaled up without threats to biodiversity and the environment, it is necessary to develop the bioeconomy as a circular economy. With this carbon management approach, other sources of carbon complement biomass: industrial waste, including gases such as CO and CO2, as well as physically and chemically recycled carbon. In the future, direct air capture (DAC) may become competitive and form part of the solution. These approaches can be considered ‘circular’ because they close material loops and keep carbon recycling in the economy rather than emitting carbon to the atmosphere. This report reviews a number of hybrid technologies that can be deployed to ‘defossilise’ economic sectors and sets out policy options to bring these technologies to commercial scale.
This report assesses how the United States Commonwealth of Virginia is preparing young people for their working lives through career development. It builds on OECD longitudinal analyses which identify forms of career development that can be most confidently associated with better employment outcomes for young people. Collecting data from current secondary school students and young adults in the labour market, the report provides an oversight of career development in Virginia. It then explores the extent to which students are being effectively, efficiently and equitably prepared for their working lives through career guidance programmes. Career readiness is a policy of high importance and the report identifies many strengths within the Virginia system. In order to enhance provision however, there is need to update career readiness standards, frameworks and instruments, and to engage employers and people in work more systematically within guidance activities. Opportunity exists to better amplify labour market signalling, particularly with regard to the skilled trades. The report highlights international practice that can be expected to reduce inequalities in provision, linked especially to the socio-economic backgrounds of students and their geographic location. Here, scope exists notably to draw on digital technologies to enhance provision.
This compendium of case studies is part of the Starting Strong VII policy review and a supplement to its main report, Empowering Young Children in the Digital Age. The policy review is the culmination of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in a Digital World project, which was carried out between 2021 and 2023 to investigate ways in which ECEC systems can respond to digitalisation, harnessing opportunities to promote high-quality and equitable ECEC while minimising the associated risks.
City-to-city partnerships and decentralised development co-operation (DDC) can play a key role in advancing the SDGs and in addressing global megatrends, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and other shocks. This report discusses the framework conditions for effective city-to-city partnerships and takes stock of existing monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. As a complement, it proposes a systemic monitoring and evaluation framework for city-to-city partnerships to localise the SDGs, combining self-assessment and SDG indicators. This framework aims to bridge the gap in terms of measuring the progress of cities engaged in partnerships on the 2030 Agenda and their compliance with the G20 Rome High-Level Principles on city-to-city partnerships for localising the SDGs. The report also presents lessons learned from a pilot-testing of this new framework and highlights policy implications and ways forward to enhance the sustainability, transparency and accountability of city-to-city partnerships, in a shared responsibility across levels of government and stakeholders.
The Civic Space Review of Portugal provides an in-depth analysis of the national legal frameworks, policies, institutions, and practices relevant to civic space protection, with an emphasis on harnessing user input to facilitate people-centred public service reforms. The Review assesses three key areas: 1) protecting the civic freedoms and information environment that create the conditions for public service reforms; 2) strengthening stakeholder and citizen participation in the process; and 3) moving towards more inclusive, accessible and people-centred public service design and delivery. The two case studies and concrete recommendations in the review offer a tangible path towards more inclusive, participatory public services that place citizens at their core.
The Civic Space Review of Romania provides an in-depth analysis of national legal frameworks, policies, institutions, and practices relevant to civic space protection. It reviews strengths and areas for improvement, and providing guidance on a wide range of issues. The Review assesses four key dimensions of civic space: civic freedoms, media freedoms and online civic space, the enabling environment for civil society organisations, and citizen participation in policy and decision making. The findings and recommendations offer a blueprint for a more transparent, responsive, participatory, and accountable governance in Romania that informs and engages citizens and empowers stakeholders to achieve shared objectives together.
The Clean Energy Transitions Programme 2022 (CETP) provides an overview of the programme’s major achievements in the last year. During this time, the CETP has driven forward an ambitious and impactful agenda, even as the world has contended with multiple overlapping crises. As just some examples, the CETP delivered the Energy Sector Roadmap to Net Zero Emissions in Indonesia , which ministers strongly welcomed at the G20, and has played a key role in shaping Indonesia’s landmark Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP). Similarly, the IEA has been able to take its engagement to a whole new level with various African countries, such as with its first-ever report on the Clean Energy Transitions in the Greater Horn of Africa , and provided policy advice that was directly accepted into China’s latest five-year plan. More broadly, it has also supported strategically important work on critical minerals, energy employment and clean energy investment. Overall, the CETP’s combination of data, insight, advice and capacity building is making a strong positive contribution to advancing clean energy transitions around the world – with a focus on emerging and developing economies.
In the five years since its launch, the CETP has become the largest and most important programme at theInternational Energy Agency (IEA). It has been the main vehicle through which theIEA has established, deepened and strengthened partnerships with major nonmember countries – those countries that are at the forefront of the clean energytransition. The programme has also played a crucial role in enabling the IEA tostrengthen its global leadership role in clean energy transitions at a pace and scalethat would otherwise not have been possible, with great benefit to theprogramme’s focus countries and IEA member countries alike.
This report presents aggregate trends of annual climate finance provided and mobilised by developed countries for developing countries for the period 2013-2021. It includes breakdowns by climate theme, sector, financial instrument and recipient country grouping for the period 2016-2021. The report also provides key recommendations for international providers to increase financing towards adaptation and more effectively mobilise private finance for climate action, which are both important policy priorities and current bottlenecks. The recommendations in this report draw from two OECD publications on scaling up private climate finance and adaptation finance.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) regularly conducts in-depth peer reviews of the energy policies of its member, accession and association countries. This process supports energy policy development and encourages the exchange of international best practices and experiences.
This first energy policy review of Colombia’s energy policies examines the country’s achievements in developing its energy sector as well as the challenges it faces in ensuring a sustainable energy future.
Colombia’s energy transition policy making is an inspiring example of a fossil fuel producing country committed to climate action, based on a long-term decarbonisation pathway and a policy of energy and economic diversification and a just transition.
This report provides insights into Colombia’s unique energy system transformation, which is linked to expanding access to electricity and clean cooking for its citizens and swiftly deploying renewable energy technologies. It analyses the full breadth of the country’s energy sector and presents recommendations for strengthening the country’s people-centred, secure and clean energy transition. These include clean energy technology and innovation, adapting energy market rules, notably in power and gas markets; integrating higher shares of variable renewables; addressing air quality; and reducing vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.
This report examines effective communication strategies that tax administrations can use to assist small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in fulfilling their tax obligations. It analyses the various tools and channels available to tax administrations and their respective roles. The report draws on examples from the OECD Forum on Tax Administration members and includes two detailed case studies. The report was drafted by officials from the United Kingdom’s HM Revenue and Customs, with support from the OECD Forum on Tax Administration's Community of Interest on SMEs.
This market study provides an assessment of competition in three broad areas of the retail banking sector in Tunisia: current accounts, bank loans for micro, small and medium enterprises and mobile payment services. The report identifies areas where competition is not working as well as it could, reducing customers mobility and access to finance and limiting the competitive pressure that fintech companies can exert on traditional banks. The report provides a range of recommendations to improve market outcomes for financial services users and it includes estimates of the expected impact of the implementation of the recommendations on the economy. This competition market study is part of a broader project aiming at fostering pro-competitive reforms in Tunisia.
This market study analyses Ukraine’s electricity sector from a competition perspective. It provides a detailed description and assessment of the regulatory framework within which the Ukrainian electricity markets operate, as well as an analysis of the obstacles to competition in the wholesale and retail markets. This report includes recommendations to address the underlying causes of ineffective competition that, if implemented in the recovery phase following Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, can contribute to achieving a well-functioning, competitive electricity sector.
This document aims to serve as a guide to the pesticide industry developing new products using RNAi as a mode of action and to regulators conducting human health safety assessments of pesticides. This document focuses on issues which will have a bearing on data requirements for determining the toxicological hazards of dsRNA, possible exposure routes, and potential risks to the health of pesticide applicators and bystanders, as well as to consumers of agricultural produce treated with these products.