Browse by: "O"

Open government is a powerful catalyst for driving democracy, public trust, and inclusive growth. In recognition of this, the OECD Council adopted the Recommendation on Open Government in 2017. To date, it remains the first - and only - internationally recognised legal instrument on open government and has guided many countries in designing and implementing their open government agendas. This report takes stock of countries' implementation of the Recommendation, its dissemination, and its ongoing significance. It is based on an OECD survey carried out in 2020/2021 among all countries that adhered to the Recommendation and other partner countries, as well as on further data collected through a perception survey with delegates to the OECD Working Party on Open Government.

Minor use is the use of chemical pesticides or non-chemical means of crop protection where the potential use is on a scale not sufficiently large to justify registration of that use from an applicant’s perspective alone. The key driver for minor uses is a lack of economic return to an applicant from registration of those uses, in particular the associated costs of generating the data required for obtaining and maintaining regulatory approval and potential liability from those uses once approved. Typically, minor uses involve crops grown on a small scale (minor crops) and often are high value speciality crops. Additionally, minor uses can involve uses within major crops in terms of controlling minor pests and diseases. This results in a situation where speciality crop industries are either without or are lacking sufficient access to pesticides to adequately protect those crops. This guidance has been developed to provide a document that centralises the variety of existing information and global approaches for facilitating the registration of minor uses. It is not intended to reproduce existing information, but rather briefly discuss and collate in a single document the sources of information utilised to address and solve minor use gaps.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become, in the last two decades, a global threat that poses potentially dramatic health and economic consequences. AMR is referring to antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal resistance. Although it remains a complex issue, antibacterial resistance is, presently, of greatest concern and the main drivers of AMR are antimicrobial overuse and misuse in human, animal, agricultural and environmental sectors and the spread of resistant bacteria and resistance determinants within and between these sectors and across countries. This document aims to provide an overview of how OECD member countries assess AMR of microorganisms used as biopesticides and summarise the available approaches. The aspiration is that the document also highlights the main issues to be considered during the evaluation of the AMR potential of microorganisms used as plant protection products.

OECD Member Countries are interested in increasing the use of omics technologies in regulatory toxicology to advance chemical risk assessment. In this context, the OECD has developed this Guidance Document and accompanying Excel template for reporting omics studies, which is referred to as the OECD Omics Reporting Framework (OORF). The OORF is intended to facilitate data sharing for omics toxicology experiments, increase the transparency of omics data processing approaches used, enable quality assessment of the study experiment and data, and promote reproducibility.

Despite commitments to scale up and speed up climate action, the fiscal cost of government support for fossil fuels almost doubled in 2022 to reach more than USD 1.4 trillion as governments across the OECD and partner countries introduced substantial initiatives to mitigate high energy costs on households and firms, caused in part by Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. This rising trend is a real threat to our collective net zero goals and highlights the challenges of staying on track with net zero commitments in the face of geopolitical and economic disruption. Going forward, it will be critical that support measures are reformed to better target those most in need. Support for fossil fuels should also be phased out as soon as possible. This will help free up much needed resources for the transition towards net zero emissions and accelerate innovation to improve energy efficiency.

The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) conducts peer reviews of individual members once every five to six years. Reviews seek to improve the quality and effectiveness of members’ development co-operation, highlighting good practices and recommending improvements. A DAC member since 2013, Poland has aligned its 2021-2030 Multiannual Programme with the 2030 Agenda, under the leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). Building on recommendations made in Poland’s first peer review in 2017, this review identifies opportunities for the Polish development co-operation system to work better together, programme bilateral official development assistance (ODA) more efficiently, and enhance multilateral and civil society partnerships. Recommendations include moving from annual calls for proposals to a more sustainable partnerships model, strengthening the MFA’s capabilities to co-ordinate with other actors in partner countries and better aligning Poland’s international engagement with its commitments to sustainable development.

Over the past few decades, economies and technologies have changed in ways that have made people’s economic prospects more insecure. While non-standard work and digital transformation have created opportunities for many, they have also exposed individuals to fluctuations in their incomes, known as "income instability", as have major recent shocks. Recognising that individuals’ jobs and circumstances can change multiple times in a year, this report uses novel techniques to identify who is most exposed to income instability in European OECD countries and examines the effects it has on their lives, social mobility, and inequality. Income instability can be difficult to manage for individuals who lack the financial resources to smooth their incomes. In this report, people facing the twin problems of exposure and vulnerability to income instability are considered to be economically insecure. Economic insecurity falls predominantly on people with weak attachments to the labour force and on those who are not well-placed to leverage the benefits of digitalisation. People at risk of economic insecurity are more likely to worry about losing their jobs in the future than economically secure individuals and, as shown in other research, experience poor health, food insecurity, and poor childhood development outcomes, which can impede social mobility. Finally, the report reviews a range of policies to improve the timeliness of social protection to better support people with highly unstable incomes and explores options to help those most at risk of economic insecurity build financial buffers.

This new web format for Country Notes on Fossil Fuel Support provides interactive on-line access to the latest data from the OECD Inventory of Support Measures for Fossil Fuels by country – identifying and estimating the value of support arising from policies that encourage the production or consumption of fossil fuels. The web version allows users to download, share and play with the data. Interactive graphics enable data visualisation, in national currency, by beneficiary and by energy product. These Country Notes provide, for each of the 50 economies covered in the Inventory, a snapshot of energy market structure, the current state of energy prices and taxes, and recent developments and trends in fossil fuel support. Data and country notes for the EU Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries have been collected and prepared as part of the GREEN Action Task Force.

The Brazilian economy rebounded strongly after the Covid-19 pandemic. Resilient domestic demand, supported by social transfers, continues to drive growth. Inflation is decreasing, providing room for further monetary policy easing. However, public debt remains high, calling for a credible fiscal framework and improved spending efficiency. The planned reform of the consumption tax system will reduce compliance costs significantly. Productivity has declined over the past decade, and rekindling it will require further structural reforms. Stringent regulations and administrative burdens in goods and services markets are hampering productivity growth, although recent reforms have addressed some issues. Supporting female labour force participation and reducing informality would improve labour markets. Expanding access to early childhood education, especially for single mothers and those with low incomes, can allow more women to enter the labour market and improve learning outcomes. Despite significant public spending on education, a more targeted resource allocation can help to address inequalities in opportunities. Enhancing infrastructure investment through better planning and coordination between federal and subnational governments would help to address longstanding infrastructure bottlenecks. A consistent enforcement of the Forest Code and the adoption of new technologies will be key for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This report reviews Egypt's FDI statistics to assess their compatibility with the international guidelines (BPM6 and BMD4); assesses the data sources and estimation methods used; and examines both the feasibility and the usefulness of compiling additional series, such as by country of ultimate investor.

This publication presents guidance for the compilation of distributional results on household income, consumption and saving consistent with national accounts totals. These results are a key input for evidence-based policies targeting inequality and fostering inclusive growth, providing insights into key dimensions of material well-being across household groups. The results complement existing inequality measures by including elements that are often lacking from micro statistics and by providing inequality measures consistent with macroeconomic aggregates, broadening the scope for analyses, while also capturing households and transactions that are typically underrepresented in micro data. Moreover, while the estimates do require a number of statistical choices and assumptions, they have a high degree of international comparability because of the common methodology and their alignment to national accounts results. The handbook provides an overview of the conceptual framework underlying the distributional results and discusses various aspects in relation to the compilation and presentation of the distributional results. It aims to assist compilers in deriving high-quality distributional results and to provide users with more insights into the main benefits of these results as well as into the way that the results have been derived.

OECD:s riktlinjer för multinationella företag visar och uppmuntrar till att företagen bidrar positivt till ekonomiska, miljömässiga och sociala framsteg och att företagande negativt kan påverka arbetstagare, mänskliga rättigheter, miljö, korruptionsbekämpning, konsumenter och företagsstyrning. Syftet med denna vägledning är att hjälpa företagen att förstå och genomföra tillbörlig aktsamhet för ansvarsfullt företagande. Den är också ett sätt att försöka skapa en samsyn bland regeringar och intressenter om tillbörlig aktsamhet för ansvarsfullt företagande.

The OECD Territorial Review of the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium, provides an in-depth assessment of the trends, challenges and opportunities for sustainable and inclusive urban development in the region. It aims to help tackle the so-called ‘Brussels paradox’ between a highly performing region in terms of economic wealth creation and competitiveness but relatively poor social conditions. The region is also grappling with a shortage of affordable and quality housing, as well as several mobility challenges, including a high reliance on individual cars and traffic congestion, resulting in high commuting times and pollution levels, despite good accessibility to public transport. Although a comprehensive urban and land-use planning system exists, there is a lack of co-ordination with the surrounding regions and municipalities to drive more effective policies on housing, mobility, and other infrastructure investments. This review also examines the governance and institutional framework and suggests policy actions to strengthen co-ordination and co-operation mechanisms, and promote incremental collaboration at the metropolitan level. Finally, the review provides recommendations to enhance public finances in the region, focusing on better compensating for its additional charges, co-ordinating public investment among levels of government more efficiently, and establishing a metropolitan fund.