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Over the past decade Austria has undertaken a carefully-considered and ambitious series of modern budgeting reforms. Evaluation of the budget reforms was purposely built into the reform process. The budget law provides for an external evaluation no later than 2017. To meet these obligations, Austria’s Federal Ministry of Finance (Bundesministerium für Finanzen, BMF) set in place a comprehensive evaluation process in three parts during 2017. A first review conducted by the IMF focused on fiscal transparency. This second review, carried out by the OECD, covers budgetary management, performance budgeting and related issues. A third review by the Alpen- Adria University is focused on the financial management and reporting system including accrual accounting; as well as preparation of a synthesis report drawing upon the three stand-alone studies. The external evaluation exercises come after an internal evaluation conducted by the BMF which has considered several of these topics; some reforms have already been implemented, or are now underway, on foot of that internal review.
JEL codes: H50, H61, H83
Keywords: Budget reforms, performance, impact assessment, financial management, transparency, cash and accruals financial reporting
During the last two decades, France introduced a series of far-reaching reforms intended to bring about greater transparency towards Parliament, autonomy and flexibility to public managers, and rigor in to fiscal policy making.
Europe’s economy is finally growing robustly. These positive developments provide an opportunity to renew efforts to meet the long-term challenges facing the European Union (EU). The EU’s record on reducing regional income disparities is mixed and this explains some of citizens’ discontent with the European project. Reforming cohesion policy by focusing spending more on items with long-term growth benefits and clear spillovers across borders, including human capital and infrastructure investment could further support income convergence. Higher co-funding rates and less burdensome administration of the cohesion and structural funds could encourage greater spending effectiveness. Sustained improvements in living standards are held back by weak productivity and investment in many countries. Reviving the single market project, by removing remaining barriers in services, energy, digital and transport can help to spur long-term growth. Deepening the single market and faster adoption of digital technologies will create new jobs but put at risk others, perhaps in lagging regions. The EU can help lagging regions catch up by reforming cohesion policy and facilitating firm creation through the removal of barriers across the single market. It can also support better those who lose out from globalisation and are displaced by technological change by making access to the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund easier and broadening its scope not only to help workers displaced by globalisation or an economic crisis, but also due to other reasons such as automation.
This Working Paper relates to the 2018 OECD Economic Survey of the European Union.
(http://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-european-union-and-euro-area.htm)
A transition finance country pilot was initiated by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in partnership with the government of Cabo Verde. The study aims to capture the challenges facing Cabo Verde following graduation from Least Developed Country (LDC) to Lower Middle Income Category (LMIC), including the shifting financing for sustainable development landscape, the mounting risk of debt distress and the economic and environmental vulnerabilities as a Small Island Developing States (SIDS). In line with the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA), the pilot study proposes a new “ABC” approach targeted to assess all available sources of financing (ODA, OOF, private investment, domestic resources, and remittances), identify emerging SDG financing gaps and promote better alignment of resources with national financing for sustainable development strategies.
Equity is a fundamental value and guiding principle of education policy and practice, but it is not necessarily actualised in schools and education systems around the world. There are large variations across PISA-participating countries and economies in the magnitude of the difference that socio-economic status makes in students’ learning, well-being and post-secondary educational attainment. This suggests that policy and practice have a key role to play in reducing socio-economic inequalities in education.
Equity does not mean that all students obtain equal education outcomes, but rather that differences in students’ outcomes are unrelated to their background or to economic and social circumstances over which the students have no control. Equity in education means that students of different socio-economic status achieve similar levels of academic performance, and of social and emotional well-being, and that they are equally likely to earn desirable post-secondary education credentials, such as university degrees, that will make it easier for them to succeed in the labour market and realise their goals as adult members of society. Education systems need to determine how individual students learn best and tailor learning opportunities to meet their needs.
The newly released PISA report, Equity in Education: Breaking Down Barriers to Social Mobility, shows that narrowing the differences related to socio-economic status in what students near the end of compulsory schooling can do with what they have learned could offer more opportunities for children and young people born into disadvantaged families to move up the socio-economic ladder.
Services employ an ever-increasing share of workers in all OECD countries. This trend is likely to continue as it reflects deep structural forces, such as increasing consumption of services with rising incomes and population ageing and the growing role of intangible assets. Services are very diverse, but overall tend to have weaker productivity levels and growth rates than manufacturing. As a result, the shift to services entails a moderate but persistent drag on productivity growth. Still, there are reasons to hope for a pick-up in service productivity in the future, including thanks to new technologies (e.g. digital platforms, artificial intelligence). This concerns both “knowledge intensive” services (e.g. information and communication) and less knowledge intensive ones (e.g. personal transport). Harnessing this productivity potential requires adjusting policies to foster innovation and efficient use of new technologies, enhance competitive forces by reducing information asymmetries, barriers to entry and switching costs, and increase the tradability of services within countries and across borders.
It is well-known that there are large disparities in academic achievement between children of different socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. This study examines the evolution of disparities in literacy skills between adults of different SES backgrounds. It compares countries’ patterns in the evolution of disparities in literacy by SES background as cohorts age and asks which patterns of educational and labour force participation predict a narrowing rather than a widening of these disparities. Since there is no international longitudinal study of skills across the entire adult life span, this study uses three cross-sectional international adult studies (International Adult Literacy Survey, Adult Literacy and Lifeskills and Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) and matches birth years to create synthetic cohorts. Results indicate that there is large cross-national variation in the evolution of skills disparities associated with SES background. Disparities in literacy proficiency tend to widen when SES disparities in high school completion, professional and blue-collar employment increase. Disparities narrow when workers exit the labour force, a finding that is explained by the large inequalities in the employment experiences of individuals from different SES backgrounds, measured by differences in use of literacy skills at work. These results help to explain cross-national variation in the evolution of skills disparities by SES background, which has implications for policies aimed at closing skills gaps over the life course.
United States
Virginia Uranium, Inc. v. Warren, 848 F.3d 590 (4th Cir. 2017)
United States v. Energy Solutions, Inc.; Rockwell Holdco, Inc.; Andrews County Holdings, Inc.; and Waste Control Specialists, LLC. (D. Del. June 21, 2017)
Cooper v. Tokyo Electric Power Company, No. 15-56426 (9th Cir. 2017)
Germany
Judgement of the Federal Constitutional Court of 6 December 2016
Japan
District court decisions on lawsuits related to state liability following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident
United States
Natural Resources Defense Council v. NRC (DC Cir. 2018)
Virginia Uranium, Inc. v. Warren, 848 F.3d 590 (4th Cir. 2017)
France
Conseil d’État decision, 22 February 2016, EDF v. Republic and Canton of Geneva relative to the Bugey nuclear power plant (No. 373516)
United States
Brodsky v. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 650 Fed.Appx. 804 (2nd Cir. 2016
The present report is a case study on crowdfunding as a finance instrument for SMEs and entrepreneurs. The report aims to examine the characteristics, diffusion and uptake by new firms and existing SMEs, assessing its effectiveness in supporting innovative or potentially high-growth firms to overcome financial constraints; to evaluate what contextual factors can improve or hamper SME access to crowdfunding opportunities; to illustrate policy experiences and programme outcomes; and to identify good practices that promote the broader use of this financing technique.
This paper investigates why central governments in some countries (especially the UK and Austria) have moved from a cash budgeting system to accrual budgeting, while others (particularly Belgium and Portugal) continue to use cash budgeting, given that both groups of countries share that their financial reporting system have become accruals-based. Our research shows that the two countries opting for a complete change to accruals emphasise the importance of consistency of the entire accounting system and the imperative to inform also about resource consumption in the budget. In sharp contrast, the two countries deciding for a partial change and for staying with cash budgeting argue that a clear and unambiguous view at cash spending is authoritative for their budgeting concept and that political decision makers would not accept an accrualbased budget. The change process in all four countries was influenced by several contextual factors, such as cash-accounting legacies and previous NPM-reforms. We conclude that stakeholders in government show more reluctance when deciding on a budgeting concept than about a financial reporting change which is perceived as less essential. We also conclude that the less ambitious reform mode (cash-based budgeting with accrual financial reporting) takes more implementation time than the more ambitious reform mode (accruals for budgeting and reporting).
JEL codes: H61, H83, M41
Keywords: cash budgeting, accrual budgeting, international comparison
Accessibility has become a fashionable concept both in the research and policy arena. There has been a growing interest and attention on accessibility measures and on the potential of accessibility‑based planning as means to invert the growing unsustainability of urban settlement and mobility patterns. Regardless of the potential advantages, current practice has revealed a number of challenges facing accessibility planning and research. This paper presents a reflection on two of these challenges: lack of implementation and conceptual ambiguity of accessibility measures in planning practice. After presenting the main arguments for each challenge, the paper explains how they create risks in the context of sustainable development, namely, by creating biased understandings which prevent authorities and practitioners from shifting away from the traditional “predict and provide” paradigm for transport planning. At the end of each reflection, the paper suggests a research and policy agenda to overcome the challenges supported by the institutionalisation of accessibility planning.
We estimate dynamic factor models for two sub-samples between 1995 and 2017 for up to 42 advanced and emerging-market economies to investigate changes in the contribution of global and regional factors to fluctuations in real GDP per capita growth, inflation, 10-year government bond yields and equity prices. The combined average contribution of global and regional factors in explaining fluctuations of GDP growth and inflation increased between 1995-2006 and 2007-17. In contrast, for financial variables, the role of country-specific factors strengthened between these two periods. The general findings are robust to alternative specifications of the lag structure, data frequency and the country composition of the largest region. Country-specific factors explain a higher share of variation of financial variables in emerging-market economies compared with advanced economies. For all variables, there is large cross-country heterogeneity regarding the level of contributions of specific factors and their evolution over time.