Publications & Documents

Strengthening linkages between foreign direct investment (FDI) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is important to boost productivity and innovation across countries and regions in the OECD and beyond. This policy toolkit offers policy advice to national and subnational governments on how to increase knowledge and technology benefits from FDI on domestic SMEs and the local economy. It presents a conceptual framework for understanding the main enabling conditions and diffusion channels of FDI-SME linkages and spillovers, and a set of diagnostic tools to assess the spillover potential. It also provides an assessment tool for policy and institutional frameworks enabling FDI-SME linkages. This toolkit benefits from insights of a pilot mapping of policy initiatives across the 27 EU Member States, which are described in the second part of the report.

Building on many data sources and country examples on women’s employment in the social and solidarity economy (SSE) the report: i) analyses women’s employment in the SSE, ii) explores challenges to gender equality in the SSE and, iii) provides policy recommendations to recognise women’s work and leadership in the SSE and in the wider economy. It also suggests ways to foster their participation in high-growth sectors within the SSE, such as technology-intensive and green sectors.

Sociotechnical systems in areas like energy, agrifood and mobility need to transform rapidly to become more sustainable and resilient. Science, technology and innovation (STI) have essential roles in these transformations, but governments must be more ambitious and act with greater urgency in their STI policies to meet these challenges. They should design policy portfolios that enable transformative innovation and new markets to emerge, challenge existing fossil-based systems, and create windows of opportunity for low-carbon technologies to break through. This calls for larger investments but also greater directionality in research and innovation, for example, through mission-oriented policies, to help direct and compress the innovation cycle for low-carbon technologies. International co-operation will be essential, but rising geopolitical tensions, including strategic competition in key emerging technologies, could make this difficult. OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2023 explores these and other key issues and trends that present STI with a new operating environment to which it must adapt.

The 'OECD Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs Scoreboard: 2023 Highlights' document SME and entrepreneurship financing trends, conditions and policy developments. The report provides official data on SME financing in close to 50 countries, including indicators on debt, equity, asset-based finance and financing conditions. Data for 2021 are complemented by available information for 2022, along with demand-side information and recent developments in public policy and private initiatives to support SME finance. Findings reveal that most economies showed the beginnings of a dynamic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis in 2021. However, data available for 2022 point to a deterioration in a number of SME finance indicators, due to high inflation and rising interest rates, exacerbated by the effects of Russia's war against Ukraine. These factors are impacting the accessibility and cost of debt finance for SMEs, and foreshadow a slowdown in lending. Likewise, equity finance showed a significant decline in 2022. In this context, governments should continue to foster the diversification of SME financing instruments and channels to enable them to build resilience and undertake crucial investments, such as those in digitalisation and greening.

The automotive sector is important across OECD countries in terms of value-added and R&D, but is also heavily affected by the green and the digital transformations. This paper offers a novel and holistic view of the automotive sector and its surrounding ecosystem based on a combination of Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables, patent data, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions, cross-country micro-distributed data and firm-level balance sheet data. It identifies the boundaries of this industrial ecosystem including connected sectors (e.g. upstream and downstream) as well as knowledge and technology providers (e.g. universities or the digital industry). The paper documents emerging trends at the geographical and technological levels and provides a comprehensive assessment of the ecosystem’s changing microstructure, with a growing role of young and digital-intensive companies. Finally, it provides recommendations for effective public policies to support the automotive ecosystem, with a focus on innovation, competition and the growth of young firms.

Policy makers are increasingly grappling with the stability implications of global value chains (GVCs), as widespread supply shortages following the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian Federation’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine have disrupted the economic recovery and contributed to high inflation. This paper provides a tool to assess vulnerabilities in GVCs by drawing a detailed map of dependencies based on new indicators constructed from the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output tables. The key findings are as follows. First, GVC dependencies increase with both the size of foreign exposures and the length of foreign value chains. Second, in some industries, such as the automotive and ICT industries, vulnerabilities from high GVC dependence are amplified by high geographic concentration of suppliers or buyers. Third, the People’s Republic of China is the most critical choke point in GVCs across a broad range of industries, both as a dominant supplier and as a dominant buyer.

The transition to climate neutrality requires cost reductions in existing clean technologies to enable rapid deployment on a large scale, as well as the development of emerging technologies such as green hydrogen. This policy paper argues that science, technology, innovation, and industrial (STI&I) policies focusing on developing and deploying low-carbon technologies are crucial to achieving carbon neutrality. It notes however that the current level of innovation is insufficient to meet the net-zero challenge due to a policy emphasis on deployment rather than research and development (R&D) support. The paper explores the rationale for more ambitious STI&I policies targeted at R&D for climate neutrality and provides policy recommendations for an effective innovation policy for net-zero, including its interaction with the broader climate policy package.