Browse by: "2023"

Open government data has become a vital instrument for addressing both longstanding and emerging policy issues. In particular, the recent pandemic and the green transition have underscored the need for governments to ensure access to timely, relevant, and high-quality data to foster resilience and facilitate a comprehensive whole-of-society response. This paper presents the main findings of the fourth edition of the OECD Open, Useful, and Re-usable data (OURdata) Index for 2023, which benchmarks efforts made by governments to design and implement national open government data policies. It encompasses over 670 data points collected from 36 OECD countries and 4 accession countries throughout 2022.

Croatia’s labour market has made important progress over the past decade. Employment rates are rising, reducing the gap with OECD countries, and poverty has fallen. While important weaknesses remain, many dimensions of equity and working conditions are similar to OECD countries. Continuing this progress is essential for Croatia’s incomes and well-being to converge with OECD countries, to counter accelerating population ageing and to make the most of emerging opportunities, including from digitalisation and the green economy transition. For employers, filling increasingly advanced skill needs is a growing obstacle. Relatively few of the young and older adults are in work – contributing to weakening skills, lower incomes and higher poverty risks. Addressing these challenges will require dramatically expanding participation in re-skilling and adult education programmes, and raising the workforce’s flexibility, for example by strengthening active labour market policies, improving the housing market’s dynamism and making the most of immigrants’ and returned emigrants’ skills. This Working Paper relates to the 2023 OECD Economic Survey of Croatia.

This paper outlines key issues and provides insights to government leaders looking to design and implement initiatives that require joint working across public agencies. The first part of this paper defines key concepts and explores the benefits and related costs of cross-agency initiatives. The second discusses various contextual elements that need to be considered when making decisions about how to design cross-agency initiatives, including the nature of the objectives, the systems of government, and relationships among potential partners. The third section looks at different models across four fundamental elements: governance; people (team support), funding, and performance monitoring. The final section looks at some of the main systemic elements that can support cross-agency initiatives success.

This paper presents a methodological supervisory framework to help central banks and financial supervisors assess biodiversity-related financial risks, impacts and dependencies in the financial sector, including transmission channels for physical and transition risks. This framework is designed to translate biodiversity risks into financial risks. It draws on a previous mapping of existing approaches, while also accounting for broader nature-related financial risks. While acknowledging different national circumstances, this methodological framework is designed to be applicable broadly for central banks, supervisors and commercial banks across different countries.

The Autonomous Province of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, has embraced the 2030 Agenda through a sustainability pact including its sustainable development strategy "Everyday for Future". The strategy defines seven fields of action that were derived from the SDGs framework to promote sustainability across policy areas such as the conservation of the natural environment, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, competitiveness and social justice. The SDGs offer a clear framework to tackle the province’s main territorial development challenges, such as climate change, the transition to sustainable agriculture, mobility, tourism, and affordable housing. This report provides guidance on how to harness the implementation of the SDGs to address these challenges through concrete measures across the seven fields of action, identify and manage synergies and trade-offs between sectoral policies and, in turn, help the province implement Everyday for Future.

The use of tax incentives that provide preferential tax treatment to the incomes arising from research and development (R&D) and innovation activities, such as intellectual property regimes, has accelerated over the last two decades. The globalisation of R&D together with the greater mobility of intangible income may have contributed to the rise in such incentives to attract and retain R&D and innovation activity while preventing the transfer of taxable base to other countries. This paper documents the changes to the availability and design of income-based tax incentives from 2000 onwards for 48 countries, including all OECD countries and EU countries. Building on this, the paper analyses trends in the generosity of income-based tax support over time by building indicators of effective tax rates that can provide insights into the impact of Action 5 of the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project.

The EU’s ambitious Green Deal aims at achieving net zero emissions by 2050. The EU is starting from a relatively good position. It has successfully reduced greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade. But further efforts are needed to reach the net zero target. These include an extension of emission trading to agriculture and the phase-out of generous subsidies for fossil fuels. Such efforts should be complemented by additional measures to shift to clean energy, notably more integrated electricity markets and deeper capital markets that provide the necessary investment in new technologies. Accelerating the green transition will also involve costs for displaced workers. Bolstering workers’ mobility and training will help improve labour reallocation and reduce transition costs.

Over half of Korea’s population lives in the Seoul Metropolitan Area. This report looks at how the region’s transport system and land uses serve different socio-economic groups and offers insights for reducing inequalities in access. Are services and opportunities equally accessible to all residents of the Seoul Metropolitan Area? Which factors influence accessibility gaps? How can transport planning and decision making take into account accessibility and equity considerations?tr

Climate change presents a major social, economic and political challenge for the Slovak Republic. The majority of municipal administrations are unaware of the potential climate risks they face today and in the coming years. Identifying risks posed by climate change and its inevitable impacts is an essential part of developing adaptation policies. While national adaptation policies have historically been formulated in an ad hoc manner, an evidence-based approach that relies on data is increasingly informing policy decisions. This paper provides an overview of the country’s adaptation policy context and presents a methodology – and the results of its application – for measuring climate change risks with respect to heat, drought and extreme precipitation. The results aim to inform future budget allocation decisions for climate change adaptation.

Automation of vehicles and in the workplace is transforming the transport industry. This report investigates the impacts of automation on the workforce in urban transport. It explores ways to help the labour market transition towards automated technologies without social disruptions. The report also examines how algorithms could improve employment opportunities and job quality in the transport industry.

This paper shows that climate-related forced displacement is insufficiently addressed in two fundamental commitments made towards the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) between 2015 and 2023: National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). It describes the important role NAPs and NDCs play in prioritising the tackling of certain aspects of climate change adaptation, identifies gaps on forced displacement, and proposes ways of adding it among their policy objectives, and of mobilising finance to reach them.

High employment growth has sustained Israel’s high GDP growth in recent decades, but demographic change and labour market duality put future growth at risk. Policy action is required to stimulate employment and raise labour productivity, especially among population groups with weaker labour market outcomes. A particular concern is closing employment gaps of Haredim and Arab Israelis and ensuring gender equality in the workplace, which would simultaneously improve opportunities for all Israelis and the aggregate labour productivity of the economy. This will require setting appropriate work incentives and providing better support for working parents; improving skills at all stages of the learning cycle; as well as increasing mobility and improving reallocation towards high-productivity jobs and firms, in particular in the high-tech sector.

In the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring the safety of health care services remains a serious, ongoing challenge. This once-in-a-century global health crisis exposed the vulnerability of healthcare delivery systems and the subsequent risks of patient harm. Given the scale of the occurrence and costs of preventable patient safety events, intervention and investment are still relatively modest. Good patient safety governance focuses on what leaders and policy makers can do to improve system performance and reduce the financial burden of avoidable care. Moreover, it is essential in driving progress in improving safety outcomes. This report examines how patient safety governance mechanisms in OECD countries have withstood the test of COVID-19 and provides recommendations for countries in further improving patient safety governance and strengthening health system resilience.