Publications & Documents

This paper addresses the current and emerging uses and impacts of robots, the mid-term future of robotics and the role of policy. Progress in robotics will help to make life easier, richer and healthier. Wider robot use will help raise labour productivity. As science and engineering progress, robots will become more central to crisis response, from helping combat infectious diseases to maintaining critical infrastructure. Governments can accelerate and orient the development and uptake of socially valuable robots, for instance by: supporting cross-disciplinary R&D, facilitating research commercialisation, helping small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) understand the opportunities for investment in robots, supporting platforms that highlight robot solutions in healthcare and other sectors, embedding robotics engineering in high school curricula, tailoring training for workers with vocational-level mechanical skills, supporting data development useful to robotics, ensuring flexible regulation conducive to innovation, strengthening digital connectivity, and raising awareness of the importance of robotics.

The COVID-19 crisis created a sudden need for businesses and their employees to take up or increase working from home. By facilitating teleworking, digital technologies have been crucial in allowing economic activities to endure and in enabling a significant portion of individuals to continue earning income. This paper brings together information on how teleworking has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, it looks at which businesses and individuals have been able to leverage it to keep working. It also presents the definitions and survey vehicles underlying the statistics presented.

As countries weather the COVID-19 health emergency, high-quality connectivity, more than ever, is essential to ensure that economic activities can continue in a remote manner. However, important disparities in terms of connectivity persist, aggravating the consequences of the health emergency. Therefore, policies aiming to reduce connectivity divides are of paramount importance. This report explores policies and regulations in OECD countries that have proven successful to work towards closing connectivity divides. It offers a roadmap to policy makers on the overarching policies and regulatory measures to expand connectivity, as well as the tailored approaches to extend broadband networks in rural and remote areas.

Digital technologies offer unique opportunities to strengthen health systems. However, the digital infrastructure only provide the tools, which on their own cannot transform the health systems, but need to be put to productive use by health workers. This report discusses how to engage and empower the health workforce to make the most of the digital revolution. While many health workers already use some digital tools and perceive the benefits that they bring to them and to patients, many also question the value digital technologies produce in health care or complain about technology getting in the way of work. Moreover, health workers often report not having sufficient opportunities for the up-skilling required to fully use new technologies or that the legal, financial, and organisational aspects of work – designed in the pre-digital era – do not enable them to reap the full benefits of these new technologies. Health workers and patients also demand appropriate safeguards against possible lack of transparency or threats to data privacy.

This benchmarking report explores the degree to which the world’s top 50 online content-sharing services’ approaches to terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC) online have evolved since a first report in 2020. This new edition finds there has been tangible progress: 11 services have issued TVEC-specific transparency reports over the past year (6 more than in 2020); and the 5 services that already issued such reports now provide additional information. However, transparency reports expressly addressing TVEC remain uncommon and services continue to use different metrics, definitions and reporting frequencies. It remains difficult to gain an industry-wide perspective on the efficacy of companies’ measures to combat TVEC online and how they may affect human rights. Meanwhile, there is a growing risk of regulatory fragmentation due to unco-ordinated transparency requirements across jurisdictions. There is an urgent need for increased, and more comparable, TVEC reporting.

The crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has been unlike any other the world has experienced, requiring social distancing and restrictions on mobility, and rendering some economic activity impossible. This publication explores and compares the characteristics that have affected the ability of firms, workers and consumers to maintain production, employment and consumption during the COVID-19 crisis, across industries and countries. It takes an analytical forward-looking perspective, considering a broad collection of indicators and evidence to guide policies. The aspects covered centre around topics of business dynamics; productivity; innovation and digital technologies; interconnectedness; inclusiveness; and skills. The report incorporates both a short-term perspective – analysing the supply restrictions and lockdowns that have characterised containment responses – and a medium- to long-term view, focusing on changes in demand that have arisen through recessionary effects and changes in preferences. The purpose of this publication is to provide insights to policy makers in three ways. First, by providing an overview of the different channels through which the crisis has affected firms differently across industries; then, by identifying country characteristics which may mediate these channels and mitigate or amplify the impacts of this and future shocks on the economy; and finally, by exploring systematic differences in the impact across population subgroups and the implications for policy.