Browse by: "2018"

Les processus et critères d’admission influent tous deux sur les taux de participation dans l’enseignement tertiaire. Les systèmes d’admission centralisés peuvent améliorer l’efficacité du processus d’admission, mais limiter le nombre de candidatures et de propositions faites aux candidats ; les critères de performance minimale et les frais de scolarité constituent des obstacles à l’accès aux études tertiaires, même lorsque des ajustements sont faits pour des groupes spécifiques ou des raisons d’équité. Cet aperçu des régimes d’admission dans l’enseignement tertiaire permet une meilleure analyse des implications de ces différentes politiques dans différents cadres, et donc une meilleure compréhension des facteurs les plus décisifs en termes de retombées.

This paper presents the methodological process and results of the OECD 2017 Open-Useful-Reusable Government data Index (OURdata Index). It is meant to present the methodology and outline the data collection and verification process; discuss key findings of the composite indicators including overall country scores and scores by pillars and sub-pillars; and show the outcomes of different statistical tests to assess the robustness of the results, including tests to evaluate the sensitivity of the indicators to various weighting schemes. The paper highlights the relevance of the Index to support the design and monitoring of open government data policies and practices leading to socio-economic outcomes and to the improved performance and efficiency of public sector organisations.

Women, youth and seniors face barriers to economic inclusion in Canada, with considerable scope to improve their labour market outcomes. There has been no progress in shrinking the gender employment gap since 2009, and women, particularly mothers, continue to earn significantly less than men, in part due to a large gap in unpaid childcare responsibilities. Outside the province of Québec, low (but increasing) rates of government support for childcare should be expanded considerably, as should fathers’ low take-up of parental leave. Skills development should be prioritised to arrest declining skills among youth and weak wage growth among young males with low educational attainment. Fragmented labour market information needs to be consolidated to address wage penalties associated with the widespread prevalence of qualifications mismatch. Growth in old-age poverty should be tackled through further increases in basic pension payments over time. Linking changes in the age of eligibility for public pensions to life expectancy would boost growth by increasing employment of older Canadians still willing and able to work. For all three groups, well-targeted expansions of in-work tax benefits and active labour market spending have the potential to increase employment.

This paper describes a method for parameterising fan charts around GDP growth forecasts of the major OECD economies as well as the aggregate OECD. The degree of uncertainty – reflecting the overall spread of the fan chart – is based on past forecast errors, but the skew – reflecting whether risks are tilted to the downside – is derived from a probit model-based assessment of the probability of a future downturn.
This approach is applied to each of the G7 countries separately, with combinations of variables found to be useful in predicting future downturns at different horizons up to 8 quarters: at short horizons of 2-4 quarters, a flattening or inverted yield curve slope, recent sharp falls in house prices, share prices or credit; at longer horizons of 6-8 quarters, sustained strong growth in house prices, share prices and credit; and at all horizons, a tight labour market and rapid growth in OECD-wide (or in some cases euro-wide) house prices, share prices or credit. The in-sample fit of the probit models appears reasonably good for all G7 countries.
The predicted probabilities from the probit models provide a graduated assessment of downturn risk, which is reflected in the degree of skew in the fan chart. Fan charts computed on an out-of-sample basis around pre-crisis OECD forecasts published in June 2008 encompass the extreme outturns associated with the Global Financial Crisis for five of the G7 countries. A weakness of the approach is that, although it predicts a clear majority of past downturns, it will not predict atypical downturns. For example, in the current conjuncture, it is unlikely that current concerns about risks associated with Brexit, an escalation of trade tensions or spillovers from emerging markets would be picked up by the models. At the same time, a severe downturn triggered by such atypical events might be more severe if more typical risk factors are also high.

L’offre et la demande de travailleurs diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire contribuent à déterminer leur avantage salarial. L’essor de l’enseignement tertiaire s’est accompagné de la diminution de l’avantage salarial des actifs occupés diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire, plus jeunes comme plus âgés, dans nombre de pays membres ou partenaires de l’OCDE. Les actifs occupés diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire bénéficient de l’avantage le plus marqué dans les pays où le pourcentage de diplômés de ce niveau d’enseignement est faible. Les actifs occupés diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire plus âgés bénéficient à la fois de leur rareté relative dans leur génération et de leur expérience professionnelle plus longue, qui leur permettent de bénéficier d’un avantage salarial plus important que leurs homologues plus jeunes. Il est difficile de savoir si les jeunes actifs occupés qui sont diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire bénéficieront, avec le temps, du même avantage salarial que celui dont jouit actuellement la génération plus âgée. Toutefois, l’obtention d’un diplôme dans le cadre institutionnel n’est pas le seul gage de meilleurs revenus : l’élévation du niveau de compétences a des retombées financières positives, quel que soit le niveau de formation.

Canada’s immigration policy aims to promote economic development by selecting immigrants
with high levels of human capital, to reunite families and to respond to foreign crises and offer
protection to endangered people. Economic-class immigrants, who are selected for their skills,
are by far the largest group. The immigration system has been highly successful and is well run.
Outcomes are monitored and policies adjusted to ensure that the system’s objectives are met. A
problematic development, both from the point of view of immigrants’ well-being and increasing
productivity, is that their initial earnings in Canada relative to the native-born fell sharply in
recent decades to levels that are too low to catch up with those of the comparable native-born
within immigrants’ working lives. Important causes of the fall include weaker official language
skills and a decline in returns to pre-immigration labour market experience. Canada has
responded by modifying its immigration policy over the years to select immigrants with better
earnings prospects, most recently with the introduction in 2015 of the Express Entry system. It
has also developed a range of settlement programmes and initiatives to facilitate integration.
This chapter looks at options for further adjusting the system to enhance the benefits it
generates.

The present report analyses the extent to which capital markets have provided capital to SMEs since the GFC, focusing on three kinds of financial instruments that have proven especially important in providing finance to SMEs undergoing major transitions during the past few years: Private Equity; Private Debt; and Collective Investment Vehicles.

This report reviews government support measures for domestic air connectivity in Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, Sweden and the United States. It analyses different approaches to providing regional connectivity in terms of their effectiveness in reaching government policy goals as well as value-for-money considerations. The study was commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Department for Transport.

Cross-country differences in the measurement of labour input contribute to observed productivity gaps across countries. In most countries, labour force surveys (LFS) form a primary source of information for employment related statistics, such as persons employed, employees and hours worked. However, because the coverage of LFS does not fully align with the coverage of activities used to estimate GDP, additional adjustments relying on complementary sources, such as administrative or business statistics, are often applied to bridge conceptual differences, and in many countries, the use of these sources is often preferred to LFS data. Evidence from the 2018 OECD/Eurostat national accounts labour input survey shows that the adjustments made to align measures of labour input with the corresponding measures of production according to the domestic concept, vary considerably across countries, with many countries making no adjustments, in particular, for the measurement of hours worked. This paper demonstrates that countries making no adjustments to average hours worked measures extracted from the original source, such as self-reported hours actually worked in the LFS, appear to systematically over-estimate labour input and, so, under-estimate labour productivity levels. To illustrate the size of this bias, for this group of countries, the paper adopts a simplified component method that introduces a series of explicit adjustments on working time using information available in LFS and complementary sources. The results point to a reduction in relative productivity gaps of around 10 percentage points in many countries compared to current estimates. Although future releases of OECD productivity (levels) statistics will incorporate these changes, it is important to stress that these estimates will only be used as a stop-gap while countries making no, or minimal adjustments, work to leverage all available data sources to produce average hours worked estimates that align with the national accounts domestic concept and that address self-reporting bias; which is the paper’s principal recommendation for those countries that currently make no or only partial adjustments. Indeed, many EU member states, coordinated by Eurostat, are already moving in this direction, with ESA 2010 derogations set to expire by 2020.

Les médiateurs font office de défenseur des droits des citoyens et d’intermédiaire entre les citoyens et l’administration publique. Leur raison d’être a beau être est ancrée dans l’idée même de gouvernement ouvert, leur rôle de vecteur potentiel de promotion de l’ouverture au sein de l’administration publique est sous-évalué ou sous-exploité. S’appuyant sur une étude menée auprès de 94 médiateurs, ce rapport se penche sur leur rôle dans les politiques publiques et les pratiques en matière de gouvernement ouvert. Il propose également des recommandations quant à la manière dont les médiateurs peuvent, compte tenu de leurs rapports privilégiés avec les citoyens et les pouvoirs publics, mieux promouvoir la transparence, l’intégrité, la redevabilité et la participation des parties prenantes, renforcer leur rôle dans les stratégies et les initiatives nationales de gouvernement ouvert, et s’enraciner dans un État véritablement ouvert.

Ombudsman institutions (OIs) act as the guardians of citizens’ rights and as a mediator between citizens and the public administration. While the very existence of such institutions is rooted in the notion of open government, the role they can play in promoting openness throughout the public administration has not been adequately recognized or exploited. Based on a survey of 94 OIs, this report examines the role they play in open government policies and practices. It also provides recommendations on how, given their privileged contact with both people and governments, OIs can better promote transparency, integrity, accountability, and stakeholder participation; how their role in national open government strategies and initiatives can be strengthened; and how they can be at the heart of a truly open state.

A co-ordinated policy response is needed to ensure that new and existing infrastructure networks are resilient to climate change. This Policy Paper outlines a framework for achieving this based on the experiences in OECD and G20 countries. It shows how governments and businesses can collaborate to mobilise investment for climate-resilient infrastructure.

This article reviews the empirical literature combining economic and environmental performance data at the micro-level, i.e. firm- or facility-level. The literature has generally found a positive and statistically significant correlation between economic performance, as measured by stock market returns, and environmental performance, as measured by emissions of pollutants or adoption of international environmental standards. The main reason for this finding seems to be that firms that reduce their material and energy costs experience both better economic performance and lower emissions. There is also evidence that greener firms are able to attract more productive employees and face smaller costs of capital, and that the introduction of green products enhances firms’ profitability.
Only a small and recent literature analyses the joint causal impact of environmental regulations on environmental and economic performance. Interestingly, this literature shows that environmental regulations tend to improve environmental performance while not weakening economic performance. However, the evidence so far is limited to a handful of environmental regulations that are not extremely stringent, so the result cannot be easily generalized. More research is needed to assess the joint effects of environmental regulations on environmental and economic performance, to explore the heterogeneity of these effects across sectors, countries and types of policies, and to understand which policy designs allow improving environmental quality while not altering the economic performance of regulated businesses.

This paper investigates the joint impact of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), Europe’s main climate change policy, on carbon emissions and economic performance of regulated companies. The impact on emissions is analysed using installation-level carbon emissions from national Polluting Emissions Registries from France, Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom complemented with data from the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR). The impact on firm performance is analysed using firm-level data for all countries covered by the EU ETS. A matching methodology exploiting installation-level inclusion criteria combined with difference-in-differences is used to estimate the policy’s causal impact on installations’ emissions and on firms’ revenue, assets, profits and employment. We find that the EU ETS has induced carbon emission reductions in the order of -10% between 2005 and 2012, but had no negative impact on the economic performance of regulated firms. These results demonstrate that concerns that the EU ETS would come at a cost in terms of competitiveness have been vastly overplayed. In fact, we even find that the EU ETS led to an increase in regulated firms’ revenues and fixed assets. We explore various explanations for these findings.

Dans les pays de l’OCDE, le pourcentage de diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire augmente, tandis que celui des moins instruits recule. Bien qu’ils n’aient jamais été aussi nombreux, les diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire continuent d’obtenir de bons résultats sur le marché du travail. Ce constat confirme que la demande du marché du travail suit dans l’ensemble le rythme de l’élévation du niveau de formation. L’avantage dont bénéficient les diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire sur le marché du travail par rapport aux diplômés du deuxième cycle de l’enseignement secondaire ou de l’enseignement post-secondaire non tertiaire n’a reculé que dans environ un quart des pays de l’OCDE au cours des 20 dernières années, signe potentiel d’un ralentissement de la demande de diplômés de l’enseignement tertiaire. Les pays doivent en outre s’attaquer au problème des piètres perspectives d’emploi des jeunes hommes et des jeunes femmes non diplômés du deuxième cycle de l’enseignement secondaire.

À l’instar du marché du travail, certains domaines d’études présentent de forts déséquilibres entre les sexes. La plupart des diplômés à l’issue d’une formation dans le domaine de l’éducation sont des femmes, tandis que c’est l’inverse qui s’observe dans les domaines de l’ingénierie, des industries de transformation et de la construction. Dans tous les domaines d’études dont les données sont disponibles, les hommes ont un taux d’emploi supérieur à celui des femmes, avec un écart plus marqué dans ceux à prédominance masculine tels que les STIM. Il est nécessaire de mieux comprendre les préférences des garçons et des filles pour les différents domaines d’études, car leurs compétences ne permettent pas d’expliquer à elles seules leurs choix: malgré l’obtention de scores similaires à ceux des garçons à l’évaluation PISA de sciences, les filles restent en retrait dans les domaines scientifiques.

This report identifies proven measures that decrease road freight’s CO2 emissions. Goods transport by road consumes around 50% of all diesel fuel and accounts for 80% of the global net increase in diesel use since 2000. Projections see road freight activity at least doubling to 2050, offsetting efficiency gains and increasing road freight CO2 emissions. The report highlights policy areas that need adjustment for effective decarbonisation of road freight and points to fields where more robust evidence through further research is needed. It collects insights held at a workshop organised by the International Transport Forum in June 2018 in Paris and features the results of a survey among experts.