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Mountainous areas are at the forefront of climate change. This working paper presents approaches to strengthening the resilience of human and natural systems in mountainous areas against the impacts of climate change. Chapter 1 provides an overview of climate-related hazards to ecosystems and communities in mountainous areas, especially in developing countries, and their exposure and vulnerability to those hazards. The chapter then examines various ways governments and development co‑operation providers can strengthen the climate resilience of mountain communities and ecosystems. Chapter 2 presents the case of the Indian state of Uttarakhand.
This review was originally published on 23 June 2021 and reflects the situation at that time. This version has been reformatted and lightly edited from the original to be in line with the OECD Journal on Budgeting guidelines.
The second in a series of three papers on cross-border government innovation, this paper focuses on the use of innovative methods by governments to identify and share insights and experiment across borders. It looks at efforts to collect ideas and insights from the front lines to create and promote collective intelligence, as well as to experiment and test across borders. The papers offers findings based on hundreds of cases in countries as well as research and expertise, as well as lessons and recommendations for successful cross-border collaboration and innovation governance.
The first in a series of three reports on cross-border government innovation, this paper discusses at how governments are using new governance mechanisms to connect and collaborate in order to tackle issues that cut across borders between administrative entities or areas. Based on cases provided by countries as well as extensive research, it looks at cross-border governance bodies, networks for cross-border collaboration, and emerging governance system dynamics. It highlights progress made in collaboration and identifies lessons for successful cross-border innovation governance.
The thematic policy brief on Resourcing Higher Education in Denmark is the first in a series of thematic policy briefs produced as part of the OECD's Resourcing Higher Education Project. This project aims to develop a shared knowledge base for OECD member and partner countries on effective policies for higher education resourcing through system-specific and comparative policy analysis. In 2017, Denmark embarked on an ambitious reform of its system for funding higher education institutions, aiming to improve teaching quality, graduates’ transition to the labour market and institutional leadership and profiling. Developed for the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, the thematic policy brief compares the Danish system for funding higher education institutions with systems in peer OECD jurisdictions, focusing on the design of different components of the funding model, the use of performance-related mechanisms elements and mechanisms to promote social inclusion and the regional coverage of the higher education system. The brief identifies policy issues that may warrant further attention as part of a planned future review of the Danish funding system.
While indices tracing the evolutions of regional house prices are increasingly available, this is less the case for similar data on house price levels. And where data on house price levels exist, they are not necessarily consistent with the patterns observed from house price indices. Yet, consistent regional statistics on house price levels are fundamental to assess housing affordability, potential barriers to labour mobility across regions, and for the design of housing policies. This article puts forward a method to compile regional house price levels that are consistent with the evolutions given by quality-adjusted house price indices, representative of the underlying stock of dwellings, and based on the information on house price levels that is available at all dates rather than in a single reference year. This method could be scaled up to different countries. The results obtained with Spanish data show that the decline in house prices following the global financial crisis of 2008-09 initially reduced the dispersion in house prices across Spanish regions, but this dispersion has increased again afterwards, and since 2016, it exceeds the one recorded in 2008. A comparison of price-per-m² to regional-income ratios shows that the relative housing affordability in the region of Madrid deteriorated compared to all other Spanish regions in the last decade. Monitoring whether shifts in housing demand following the COVID-19 pandemic will reverse this trend will be key.
Episodi di siccità sempre più frequenti e gravi minacciano il settore agricolo italiano. Si prevede che il cambiamento climatico accelererà questa tendenza, pertanto il settore deve sviluppare una resilienza nel lungo periodo. A questo fine, saranno necessarie una pianificazione e una preparazione migliore per assorbire l’impatto degli episodi di siccità e per la successiva ripresa, nonché una maggior efficacia in termini di adattamento e trasformazione a fronte di tali eventi. I recenti sviluppi positivi nel paese includono una migliore raccolta dei dati sull’approvvigionamento idrico e sui danni e le perdite subiti dall’agricoltura a causa di rischi naturali, i quali consentono maggiore consapevolezza nella gestione delle risorse idriche e nelle decisioni di investimento; un maggiore impegno verso politiche di prevenzione per la gestione dei rischi; e approcci più partecipativi alla gestione delle risorse idriche. Tuttavia il portafoglio delle politiche agricole al momento sottovaluta gli investimenti per la preparazione ad affrontare le emergenze e per l’adattamento a livello di azienda agricola, prediligendo strumenti che sono mirati ad assorbire gli impatti, come gli strumenti assicurativi. Ulteriori sforzi per sviluppare la resilienza del settore agricolo potrebbero trarre vantaggio da una strategia olistica di gestione dei rischi settoriali nel lungo periodo; una valutazione del bilanciamento tra le spese relative agli strumenti per l’assorbimento degli impatti, e gli investimenti per la misure volte a alla preparazione per la gestione delle catastrofi naturali e alla mitigazione degli impatti; e una considerazione più esplicita della demografia e delle capacità degli agricoltori nell’elaborazione delle politiche.
As education systems face a post-COVID-19 world, we must not lose sight of the importance of teachers’ well-being. Already, prior to the pandemic, teachers were struggling to cope with workload and stress, as shown by the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), one of the first international efforts to capture the well-being of the teaching workforce. Nevertheless, schools and teachers have the tools to improve well-being and reduce stress at the work place.
The goal of this brief is to provide some glimpses into concrete actions that schools and education systems could take to improve teachers’ well-being and job satisfaction.
Motorway crashes kill over 200 people in Korea each year. This report reviews international best practices in motorway safety across ten countries to inform ways to make Korea’s motorways safer. Matching the average safety performance observed across Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom would halve the number of motorway deaths. The report offers recommendations for an action plan to 2030, also taking into account the expected uptake of connected and automated vehicles.
Relying on linked employer-employee datasets from 10 countries, this paper documents that the skills and the diversity of the workforce and of managers – the human side of businesses – account on average for about one third of the labour productivity gap between firms at the productivity “frontier” (the top 10% within each detailed industry) and medium performers at the 40-60 percentile of the productivity distribution. The composition of skills, especially the share of high skills, varies the most along the productivity distribution, but low and medium skilled employees make up a substantial share of the workforce even at the frontier.
High skills show positive but decreasing productivity returns. Moreover, the skill mix of top firms varies markedly across countries, pointing to the role of different strategies pursued by firms in different policy environments. We also find that managerial skills play a particularly important role, also through complementarities with worker skills. Gender and cultural diversity among managers – and to a lesser extent, among workers – is positively related to firm productivity as well. We discuss public policies that can facilitate the catch-up of firms below the frontier through skills and diversity. These cover a wide range of areas, exerting their influence through three main channels: the supply, upgrading and the matching across firms (the SUM) of skills and other human factors.
In line with the EU Public Procurement Directives, the Slovak legislation foresees the use of criteria accounting for quality, environmental benefits or social inclusion in public tenders. However, their use remains limited in practice. This report provides analysis and evidence to help the Slovak authorities design a national strategy to mainstream the use of criteria beyond price in public procurement.
Gender-responsive procurement involves using public procurement opportunities to advance promote gender equality. Mainstreaming gender considerations in public procurement is a key dimension of strategic procurement in which public buying power is harnessed to advance public priorities to improve the well-being of society as a whole. This paper presents how governments and public buyers can use their purchasing power to promote gender equality and encourage suppliers to improve their performance on women’s empowerment. It explores the different ways that gender considerations can be integrated into public procurement policies and processes, and discusses the challenges that both policy makers and procurement practitioners face in promoting gender equality through public procurement.
Nitrogen management policies introduced in the past decades by some OECD countries have succeeded in reducing excess nitrogen use by farmers, but half of global mineral fertiliser use is still lost for crops. While about half of OECD countries have nutrient surpluses of between 25-50 kg N per hectare, a smaller number of countries are still having surpluses of more than 100 kg N per hectare. Since the production and use of mineral fertilisers have a large greenhouse gas footprint and to achieve the deep reductions in emissions as the Paris Agreement aims for, nitrogen management policies could be reinforced and pursued more systematically. The paper identifies significant reduction potential by eliminating the excess use of nitrogen fertilisers and improving efficiency in the use of manure-nitrogen, which could be obtained with a redesign of nitrogen management policies and schemes for public financial support. To underpin such measures a tax on the nitrogen surplus at farm level could play a vital role. Based on the available estimates of environmental externalities of nitrogen, the paper identifies an average rate of EUR 1-2 as a suitable starting point for a tax or penalty on the surplus application of nitrogen. The paper also explores the opportunities for sustainable nutrient management in agriculture with climate mitigation benefits relating to nitrous oxides in particular.
This policy paper aims to improve understanding on how SMEs responded to the COVID-19 crisis and adapted to the new environment, and how different players in their ecosystems are contributing to their digital transition. The first part of the paper sets the scene on the digital transformation of SMEs, by providing an overview of key trends in SME uptake of digital technologies across OECD countries. The second part of the paper focuses on some of the main trends emerging from - or being strongly accelerated by - the COVID-19 crisis, including access to digital infrastructure, e-commerce and teleworking. The third and last section discusses international practices in SME digitalisation policies and presents original evidence from the “rescue” and “recovery” packages launched by OECD governments to face the crisis; as well as case studies and qualitative evidence from private-sector programme provided by partners of the Digital for SMEs Global Initiative (D4SME).
Ce rapport dresse un état des lieux des règles et des procédures mises en œuvre par les 50 principaux services mondiaux de partage de contenus en ligne pour lutter contre les contenus terroristes et extrémistes violents, l’accent étant mis sur la transparence. Il en ressort que seuls cinq des 50 services étudiés publient des rapports de transparence dédiés à ce type de contenus, et qu’ils suivent ce faisant des approches diverses. Ils se fondent sur des définitions différentes du terrorisme et de l’extrémisme violent, ne signalent pas les mêmes types d’informations, s’appuient sur des mesures et des méthodes d’estimation disparates et publient leurs rapports à des fréquences et selon des calendriers distincts. Compte tenu du nombre peu élevé d’entreprises publiant des rapports et de l’hétérogénéité de la teneur, des calendriers et des modalités y afférents, il est impossible d’avoir une vision intersectorielle claire et exhaustive de l’efficacité des mesures prises par les entreprises pour lutter contre les contenus terroristes et extrémistes violents diffusés en ligne, ou des conséquences que ces mesures pourraient avoir sur le respect des droits humains. Cette situation pourrait s’améliorer si les entreprises étaient plus nombreuses à publier des rapports de transparence et y faisaient figurer des informations plus aisément comparables.
Making trade work for all and harnessing popular support for openness to trade depends on consumers benefitting from lower prices and broader product variety. The present study reveals that those benefits depend on competition in services markets, in particular in telecommunication. These findings result from employing an industrial organisation framework to estimate the transmission of prices from the world market to consumers of certain services in local markets (distribution, transport, and financial services). The OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (OECD STRI) is used to explore the relationship between the pass-through rate of input prices to consumer prices and policy measures that capture the openness and strength of competition in services markets. The OECD STRI in telecommunications is found to be associated with a more complete and faster pass-through of prices in all markets studied. The results also illustrate the crucial role played by the internet in allowing for price comparisons that generate competitive pressure on distributors.
Although the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are not integrated explicitly into the main urban development plans of the city of Moscow, the local government has started using them as a checklist to assess the contribution of its sectoral programmes to sustainable development, as well as related strengths and weaknesses. Moscow presents very positive educational results, low unemployment rates and a strong innovation capacity, but challenges exist regarding sustainable consumption and production, affordable housing and air quality. The SDGs provide a framework to address these challenges in an integrated way and to contribute, in particular, to the sustainable transition of its industrial sector, which accounts for 16% of the city’s value added. The SDGs also allow to promote synergies across the three main urban development plans, catalyse needed investments in sustainability and enhance collaboration with the private sector.
This paper provides a descriptive analysis of patterns and trends of worker transitions across European countries and the United States, with an emphasis on differences across socio-economic groups. Understanding labour market transitions is important to gauge the scope of labour market reallocation and scarring effects from the COVID-19 crisis. Results of this work show that labour market transitions vary significantly from one country to another and also within countries from one socio-economic group to another. For instance, women are much more likely than men to move in and out of jobs. This reflects the unequal burden of family-related work, which contributes to the higher propensity of women to drop out of the labour force. Zooming in on labour market transitions over the great financial crisis provides an illustration of the long-lasting effects and scarring risks associated with recessions on labour market transitions, especially for young people entering the labour market. The results of this granular analysis inform the policy debate for an efficient and inclusive recovery. While current priorities vary across countries based on economic and social context, one overarching challenge for the recovery is to facilitate hiring dynamics and to minimise long-term unemployment and scarring risks among vulnerable groups who have been hardest hit and face higher risks of scarring from the recession, in particular young people and women.
Inter-regional migration – the movements of the population from one region to another within the same country – can be an important mechanism of spatial economic adjustment, affecting regional demographic and growth patterns. This paper examines the economic and housing-related factors that affect the decision of people to migrate to another region within the same country, drawing empirical evidence from country-specific gravity models of inter-regional migration for 14 OECD countries. The results suggest that inter-regional migrants move in search of higher income and better employment opportunities, but are discouraged by high housing costs. In particular, house prices are found to be an important barrier to migration, especially in countries having experienced strong increases in the level and cross-regional dispersion of house prices. There is however large heterogeneity across countries in terms of what factors matter the most and in terms of the magnitude of the migration response.
There is no guidance on how to deal with the effects of catastrophic events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, on stated preference survey responses, despite the possible impact such events can have on stated values and survey responses. This paper provides a concise analysis of the likely effects of extreme events on stated preference surveys, focusing on the validity and temporal stability of estimated values, and offers a set of recommendations. These recommendations can also be of use for designing other types of household and individual surveys, beyond economic valuation surveys.