Combating poverty and social exclusion remain high on the policy agenda in developing countries and within OECD countries. Providing debt-relief and benefits to people in need can help alleviate the worst social and economic hardship, but such policies cannot replace a comprehensive strategy of social development.

To effectively enhance individual and social development policies need to address a wide range of employment, trade and labour standards, health, family, gender-equity, child development and education related issues. Promoting individual development and household autonomy requires incentives to work, a good skill base, and access to affordable good quality health and family services.

Societies are changing and with them the nature of social programmes affecting people at different stages of their life. Now that we can expect to live longer and healthier lives, policy reforms can no longer build on the assumptions that we are only in education at the start of our lives, that we work only in the middle years and that the final 20 or 30 years of life are spent out of work.

Social policy work in the OECD covers a wide array of social, education and health policies implemented in a continuously changing environment of socio-demographic factors, labour markets, and technical progress. The OECD will continue to search for new best practices that suit this changing nature of societies.