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1. Essential Reading
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The Active Social Policy Agenda - This document outlines the key points of the Active Social Policy Agenda. It also contains key charts illustrating the main challenges that social policy makers face today.
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How active social policy can benefit us all: economic growth has resulted in huge improvements in the social conditions of millions of OECD citizens over the past 50 years. Sustaining the pace of economic growth will remain critical for these improvements in social conditions to continue in the future. But economic growth alone is not enough. Also important is the existence of well-functioning institutions, in particular those devoted to providing social protection to families and individuals. This document builds on the experiences of OECD countries over the past two decades, arguing that social protection is as important as ever for attaining a broad range of social goals.
2. Further Reading
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Society at a Glance: OECD Social Indicators 2005
This OECD's biannual compendium of indicators provides a statistical snapshot of social well-being in OECD countries, and allows users to analyse interlinked social issues in the context of a more complete representation of a country's social characteristics, covering such topics as self-sufficiency (employment, working mothers, unemployment benefits, educational attainment), equity (poverty, income inequality, social spending), health (life expectancy, mortality, health care expenditure), and cohesion (social isolation, teenage births, suicides)
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OECD Policy Briefs:
3. Other Social Policy related reading
3.1. Family-friendly policies: Babies and Bosses - Reconciling work and Family Life - Juggling the balance between work and family is a challenge for both parents and policy makers. The series "Babies and Bosses" reviews policies in OECD countries to support parents in their choices of work and childcare options and recommends a range of measures.
3.2. Social Expenditure database (SOCX) 1980-2001 - This database has been developed in order to serve a growing need for indicators of social policy. It includes reliable and internationally comparable statistics on public and mandatory private social expenditure at programme level. SOCX provides a unique tool for monitoring trends in aggregate social expenditure and analysing changes in its composition. It covers 30 OECD countries for the period 1980-2001. The main social policy areas are as follows: Old age, Survivors, Incapacity-related benefits, Health, Family, Active labor market programmes, Unemployment, Housing, and Other social policy areas.
3.3. Benefits and Wages 2004 - This report provides detailed descriptions of all cash benefits available to those in and out of work as well as the taxes they were liable to pay in 28 OECD countries during both 2001 and 2002. Total household incomes and their components are calculated for a range of family types and employment situations. The results allow detailed cross-country comparisons of the characteristics of individual policy instruments as well as their combined impact on household incomes. They are used to examine financial incentives to work, either part-time or full-time, as well as the extent to which social benefits prevent income poverty.
3.4. Taxing Wages: 2003/2004 - This publication provides unique information on income tax paid by workers and social security contributions levied on employees and their employers in OECD countries. In addition, this annual publication specifies family benefits paid as cash transfers. Amounts of taxes and benefits are detailed program by program, for eight household types which differ by income level and household composition. Results reported include the marginal and effective tax burden for one- and two-earner families, and total labour costs of employers...
3.5. OECD Recommendation on Core Principles of Occupational Pension Regulation - More efficient regulation and management of company pension schemes are needed if today’s employees are to enjoy adequate retirement pensions tomorrow. OECD governments have agreed on six Core Principles of Occupational Pension Regulation to assist in meeting those objectives.
4. For other information on social-related work at the OECD, please visit the following Web pages:
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Well-designed social protection can be an asset that is critical for sustaining social development.
