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This Round Table examines changes in freight transport users' motivation for modal choice and includes reports from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.

The scope for road pricing in urban areas is now a matter of the most urgent concern. It involves research and the implementation of projects both aimed at reducing urban congestion and curbing the resulting environmental damage. While the arguments in favour of urban tolls are sound, Round Table 97 highlights the many objections raised particularly on grounds of equity. This publication demonstrates the need for reappraising the entire urban transport system. With its comprehensive overview of the issues now on most countries' agendas, this Round Table raises questions that have yet to be adequately explored.

Surveys in a number of European towns reveal that no less than 30 per cent of car journeys could be made by some ecological form of transport. Achieving this shift requires a sea change in our thinking. In some towns, for example, efforts to raise consciousness among car drivers have effectively and enduringly changed their behaviour at little cost. If car drivers simply eliminated two car trips every three months, car use levels would be reduced to those of fifteen years ago. Public transport should target a high quality service for which people are prepared to pay. A systematic transport evaluation made prior to all new construction projects would be a means of officially recognizing the importance of the environment to society. Indeed, many options exist for reversing today's trends. {Round Table 102} brings together the leading European experts on these issues, and identifies the key policies for the immediate future that could reconcile towns and transport.

In many countries a new concept is emerging as an alternative to command-and-control regulation: the concept of shared responsibility between governments and businesses. Governments and businesses are seeing a need for co-operation and partnership, rather than confrontation and adversarial relations. Increasingly, governments and businesses, often represented by business federations, are engaged in dialogue to find more effective and efficient solutions to conflicts between public and private interests, solutions in which multiple public and private bodies set goals, identify solutions, and monitor outcomes. This Occasional Paper contains case studies on different strategies of public/private co-operation from Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Cryptography is one of the technological means to provide security for data on information and communications systems. It can be used to protect the confidentiality of data, such as financial or personal data, whether that data is in storage or in transit. Cryptography can also be used to verify the integrity of data by revealing whether data has been altered and identifying the person or device that sent it. These techniques are critical to the development and use of national and global information and communications networks and technologies, as well as the development of electronic commerce. This book includes the Recommendation of the OECD Council concerning Guidelines for Cryptography Policy, the text of the Guidelines itself, and a report which explains the context for the guidelines and the basic issues involved in the cryptography policy debate.

Some 15 to 30 per cent of our children and youth are at risk of failing in school where learning and behaviour problems touch ever younger children. In many countries with very different political and cultural backgrounds, these challenges are being met by increasing the co-ordination of education, health and social services, a process often galvanised by a broader involvement, extending to business and senior citizens. This is more than merely tinkering with statutory systems of service provision. Current services are mismatched; our vision of the family and its needs is changing along with the balance between prevention and remediation, and the ways that professionals work together. This book provides the detailed stories of how this process has developed in seven OECD countries: Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States. It looks at system change from the points of view of policy-makers, managers, practitioners and service users. It provides information on the background to the changes, highlighting what was provided to help the changes happen and investigating the process of change and the outcomes of the reforms. The scope of the work is broad: it covers pre-school, school age and transition to work.

In many African countries, violent conflicts have slowed down economic and social development, if they have not actually pushed it backwards. In order to manage conflicts in a non-violent manner, governance methods adapted to the development process are needed. Effective conflict prevention, however, demands thorough understanding of the origins and dynamics of these conflicts. The outcome of a meeting jointly organised by the Development Centre and the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, this volume considers the options available to donors in the effort to prevent conflict and enhance prospects for peaceful social, economic and political development. Despite the complexity of the subject, the contributors to the book arrive at some prudent conclusions of interest to policy makers. At the national level, action programmes should promote social, political and economic justice; empower civil society through skill, knowledge and resource transfer; develop good governance for conflict management; and accommodate different groups and interests in society. Internationally, a greater sensitivity to conflict issues is needed within broader development efforts. The international community should seek to provide the means by which conflicting groups can negotiate their own solutions to tension, rather than imposing externally devised solutions.

Interest in the concept of civil society has undergone a remarkable renaissance in the 1990s. It is currrently seen as a potential tool to overcome some of the main theoretical and political stalemates. But what exactly does the concept of civil society mean ? Can civil society really be a counterweight to governments which have become too remote from their people ? The Western concept of what constitutes civil society may well have to be adjusted when applied to developing economies where different cultural forces and values come into play.
This book takes up the challenge of defining civil society's role in furthering developmental objectives within the context of developing societies themselves. It compares the activities and attitudes of different elements of civil society within the development process, and suggests ways in which they could be made more effective. It also shows that governments should not try to replace their own development activities with those of civil society.

Countries receiving large-scale capital inflows are at risk if these flows do not find their way into productive and long-term investment, as the Asian crisis of the late 1990s has proven. This book, the result of a joint project between the OECD Development Centre and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), examines the policies of a group of major Latin American countries faced with large inflows. The authors conclude that domestic policies impact on the effects of capital inflows. They demonstrate that certain countries, particularly Chile and Colombia, have been able to use policy to direct capital inflows into investment and thereby reduce the risk of instability in the financial sector. Such policies lead to effective management of foreign capital inflows and the creation of a stable, growth-oriented environment conducive to more sound external investment. The lessons of this book are as applicable in other regions of the world as they are in Latin America.

This publication provides information about VAT and excise duty rates (for alcoholic beverages, mineral oil products and tobacco products) across the OECD. It also describes a range of taxation provisions in OECD countries such as the taxation of motor vehicles and outlines the preliminary findings of a study of taxes on environmentally relevant goods currently in progress.

The competitiveness of firms in a global economic environment is an essential element in development strategy, but simply creating an open economy will not suffice to stimulate competitiveness if innovation is lacking. This is the major finding of this cross-country and multi-industry study based on the experience of Brazil, Chinese Taipei, India and Korea.
In developing countries and emerging economies, which can be considered technological latecomers, traditional industrial practices can be linked to policy changes which foster innovation, but can equally result in stagnation if the policy/practice mix is wrong. The case studies demonstrate that where industrial habits tend to reduce competitiveness, policies can make a difference, especially where they are directed to managing the timing, sequencing and type of market-opening steps. The book therefore opens a fresh debate on the industrial policies which developing countries need to adopt in order to compete and grow in a globalised economic environment.