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Regional development policy is a priority of Colombia’s government. The country has experienced sustained economic growth over the past decade; yet several territories still lack development opportunities. To promote growth in all regions the government has engaged in a series of reforms. For instance, it started allocating royalty payments generated by hydrocarbon resources to all departments and most municipalities, including those that are not endowed with natural resources. The reform also promotes better multilevel governance and represents a good policy practice for countries seeking to link natural resource development with regional development.

To support the current efforts of Colombia’s government, this report illustrates policy recommendations to help national authorities adopting a territorial approach to inclusive economic development. In particular, the OECD recommends to: a) improve the quantity and quality of regional statistics and formulate urban and rural taxonomies that help tailor policies to places; b) involve territorial constituencies in the design of policy interventions and allocate to them more implementation responsibilities within the framework of the National Development Plan; c) promote coordination among subnational bodies to scale up investment in territories to avoid that public investment – and royalty payments – gets dispersed in a myriad of small-scale projects.

The Missing Entrepreneurs 2014 is the second edition in a series of annual reports that provide data and policy analysis on inclusive entrepreneurship, and on its barriers, by target social groups across the European Union. Inclusive entrepreneurship involves business start-ups and self-employment activities that contribute to economic growth and social inclusion - notably of youth, women, seniors, immigrants and the unemployed. In addition to inspiring policy practices, this issue contains special thematic chapters on entrepreneurship by ethnic minorities, pro-entrepreneurship welfare support systems and support for entrepreneurship from unemployment.

This report examines Korea's urban policies and offers customised policy recommendations based on the OECD publication, Compact City Policies (2012). Some Korean policies, such as urban regeneration, new town development or multi-modal transfering centers, have implicitly implemented compact city polices to a certain degree. However, there are still issues - including urban sprawl, unbalanced socio-economic levels and environmental challenges - which can be threats to urban competitiveness. An appropriate set of compact city polices, such as environmental friendly urban regeneration, mixed land use, polices to offset the side effects of compact development, strong management of transport demands, and governance enforcement, can accelerate Korean cities' sustainable development.

This publication highlights new evidence on policies to support job creation, bringing together the latest research on labour market, entrepreneurship and local economic development policy to help governments support job creation in the recovery. It  also includes  a set of country pages featuring, among other things, new data on skills supply and demand at the level of smaller OECD regions (TL3).

This publication is the first in a series to take this integrative approach, and it is designed to be user friendly and accessible to all government officials, academics, practitioners and civil society with an interest in local economic development and job creation.

This review underlines some important points of strength with respect to Italian SMEs and entrepreneurship, notably for medium-sized firms that very often excel in their market niches, have a strong propensity to business collaboration, as well as favourable access to finance. The review also looks at the challenges that lie ahead for Italy, hard hit by the global economic crisis, notably among micro and small firms. Recovery will mean, among other things, removing barriers to business growth, streamlining the complexity of the Italian tax system, and opening the business environment to competition, foreign direct investment and equity financing, as well as improving training and workforce skills.

This report looks at rural policy in Chile, examining the main trends in rural regions, policies and governance arrangements. It highlights the need to establish a national rural policy framework in Chile, in order to better coordinate the wide range of national policies and programmes currently targeting rural areas. It also investigates the evolving role of "rural" in development, highlighting the need to design rural policies in a strategic way so that complementarities with urban policy can be realised as the country develops.