By Date

The first five years of a child’s life is a period of great opportunity, and risk. The cognitive and social-emotional skills that children develop in these early years have long-lasting impacts on their later outcomes throughout schooling and adulthood. This report sets out the findings from the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study in Estonia. The study assesses children’s skills across both cognitive and social-emotional development, and how these relate to children’s early learning experiences at home and in early childhood education and care. It is enriched by contextual and assessment information from the children’s parents and educators. It provides comparative data on children’s early skills with children from England and the United States, who also participated in the study, to better identify factors that promote or hinder children’s early learning.

The first five years of a child’s life is a period of great opportunity, and risk. The cognitive and social-emotional skills that children develop in these early years have long-lasting impacts on their later outcomes throughout schooling and adulthood. The International Early Learning and Child Well-Being Study was designed to help countries assess their children’s skills and development, to understand how these relate to children’s early learning experiences and well-being. The study provides countries with comparative data on children’s early skills to assist countries to better identify factors that promote or hinder children’s early learning. Three countries participated in this study in 2018: England (United Kingdom), Estonia and the United States. The study directly assessed the emergent literacy and numeracy, self-regulation and social-emotional skills of a representative sample of five-year-old children in registered school and ECEC settings in each participating country. It also collected contextual and assessment information from the children’s parents and teachers. This report sets out the findings from the study as a whole.

Countries need to urgently scale-up and upgrade their adult learning systems to help people adapt to the future world of work. Today, only two in five adults across the EU and OECD participate in education and training in any given year, according to the OECD Survey of Adults Skills. Participation is even lower among disadvantaged adults, such as those with low skill levels or in jobs at high risk of automation. For adult learning systems to be future-ready, governments must increase their efforts to engage more adults in continuous learning throughout their lives. While much has been written about the need for progress, it is less clear how adult learning participation can be increased in practice. Many good ideas struggle to translate into real change on the ground, as they get stuck in the reality of policy implementation. This report aims to understand the factors that make adult learning reforms succeed. It identifies lessons from six countries that have significantly increased participation over the past decades: Austria, Estonia, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and Singapore. To shed light on how these countries achieved this objective, this study looks at the details of reform design, implementation and evaluation.

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the Estonian policy ecosystem in place for social innovation, social entrepreneurship and social enterprises. It identifies the country’s key strengths and challenges and provides policy recommendations to support the development of a stronger policy ecosystem for social entrepreneurship and social enterprises in the country. Key policy issues analysed include: building a culture of social innovation and social entrepreneurship (Section 2); supporting social entrepreneurship through institutional and legal frameworks (Section 3); improving access to finance and to markets to boost social entrepreneurship (Section 4 and 5); and supporting the development of social entrepreneurial skills and capacity (Section 6).

This paper presents and discusses the general findings and key policy messages of the 2019 OECD Open, Useful and Re-usable data (OURdata) Index, and provides a detailed analysis of the results for each pillar and sub-pillar. Additionally, it assesses the main advancements and challenges related to the design and implementation of open government data (OGD) policies in OECD member and partner countries by comparing the results for 2019 with those of the 2017 edition. This policy paper contributes to the OECD work on the digital transformation of the public sector, including digital government and data-driven public sector and open government data.

This profile provides a concise and policy-relevant overview of health and the health system in Estonia as part of the broader series of the State of Health in the EU country profiles. It provides a short synthesis of: the health status in the country; the determinants of health, focussing on behavioural risk factors; the organisation of the health system; and the effectiveness, accessibility and resilience of the health system. This profile is the joint work of the OECD and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, in co-operation with the European Commission.

In the wake of the technological revolution that began in the last decades of the 20th century, labour-market demand for information-processing and other high-level cognitive and interpersonal skills have been growing substantially. Based on the results from the 33 countries and regions that participated in the 1st and 2nd round of the Survey of Adult Skills in 2011-12 and in 2014-15, this report describes adults’ proficiency in three information-processing skills, and examines how proficiency is related to labour-market and social outcomes. It also places special emphasis on the results from the 3rd and final round of the first cycle of PIAAC in 2017-18, which included 6 countries (Ecuador, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Peru and the United States). The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), was designed to provide insights into the availability of some of these key skills in society and how they are used at work and at home. The first survey of its kind, it directly measures proficiency in three information-processing skills: literacy, numeracy and problem-solving in technology-rich environments.