Publications

Women’s employment rates and wages are still lagging those of men across OECD countries, with average employment and wage gaps now around 15% and 12% respectively. Gaps narrowed at a relatively modest pace over the past decade, calling for further policy action. A lack of affordable high-quality childcare is often an obstacle to women’s participation in the labour market and notably to working full time. A very unequal sharing of parental leave between parents and challenges upon return to work further hampers women’s careers. Biases in the tax system may discourage women from working in some countries. Women face disadvantage in accessing management positions and entrepreneurship. A range of policies can help reduce gender gaps, including better childcare provision, incentivising parents to better share parental leave, re-skilling and upskilling on return from parental leave, encouraging gender equality within firms, integration programmes for foreign-born women, promoting women entrepreneurship and financial inclusion, and levelling taxation for second earners. Moreover, the multiple dimensions and root causes of gender inequality call for mainstreaming gender across policy domains.

This study analyses the economic effects of the EU's ‘Fit for 55’ climate mitigation policies using the OECD ENV-Linkage model, a dynamic, global Computable General Equilibrium model. The model projects macroeconomic, sectoral, energy and emission trends for the EU, and for the five largest EU economies separately, up to 2035. Policy scenarios combine carbon pricing with regulations to reach the ‘Fit For 55’ emission reduction target in 2030. Additional scenarios analyse i) harmonised carbon pricing across countries and sectors, ii) different forms of revenue recycling from carbon pricing, iii) the effect of the EU’s proposed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism on competitiveness, and iv) the effect of Russia’s war against Ukraine on mitigation costs. Given the short time horizon of the analysis (until 2035), the model does not assess the positive economic benefits associated with fewer climate impacts and extreme climate events. ‘Fit for 55’ policies are projected to lead to a loss of GDP per capita of 2.1% in 2035 compared to the reference scenario (pre-‘Fit for 55’ policies), reflecting increasing production costs on the back of higher carbon pricing. Higher carbon pricing is also projected to lead to a loss of competitiveness in energy-intensive industries. The EU’s proposed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism may only partly mitigate the loss of competitiveness of energy-intensive industries. Harmonising carbon pricing across sectors would help limit the loss to GDP per capita, as a uniform carbon price is lower and allows for directing emission reduction efforts to sectors and countries with the lowest abatement costs. Finally, Russia’s war against Ukraine has not substantially increased the GDP costs of mitigation. Without the war, lower fossil fuel import prices would have led to higher fossil fuel demand, ultimately requiring more stringent mitigation action.

Regional development is rooted in place-based strategic planning and strengthened regional innovation systems. In Romania, the eight Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) are responsible for strategic planning for regional development and delivering innovation support services to regional and local actors. They also manage the public investment funds dedicated to these activities. These are challenging tasks. Many RDAs face difficulties in ensuring that regional and sub-regional development objectives and priorities align, expanding the definition of innovation, and activating their regional innovation ecosystem. Equally difficult is keeping stakeholders engaged and committed to the regional development and innovation agendas. This report synthesises the regional development and innovation challenges facing Romania’s RDAs and potential activities to overcome these in three areas – strategic planning and performance measurement, finance and implementation, and communication and stakeholder engagement. It also offers insights and recommendations for higher-levels bodies to further support RDAs through guidance, facilitating peer-exchange, and actively engaging the RDAs in regional development decision making.

The provision of high-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) is widely seen as a strategy to promote a more equitable and inclusive society due to its potential to give all children, and especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, a strong basis for early development and well-being. This requires approaches that address the needs of the increasingly diverse populations of children participating in ECEC. A first step in this direction is to assess the prevalence of different dimensions of diversity (e.g., socio-economic disadvantage, special education needs, different first language, and refugee status) across ECEC centres, and the extent to which the quality of ECEC varies between more and less diverse centres. This working paper uses data from the TALIS Starting Strong 2018 survey to examine these questions in the nine participating countries, and to derive policy pointers to ensure that ECEC systems promote equity and inclusion in response to the diversity of children’s needs.

Multifactor productivity is a comprehensive measure of productivity where the underlying production function accounts for multiple factor inputs, traditionally labour and produced capital. While single-factor productivity is intuitively simple, such measure offers a biased picture of the economy because it attributes all variation in output growth to a single factor input (e.g. consumption of fossil fuels or material resources) while the role of other factors is ignored. Multifactor productivity aims at addressing this shortcoming, and as such it is a valuable component of the OECD set of Green Growth headline indicators. This paper presents further progress in measuring the EAMFP and related growth accounting indicators in 52 countries for 1996-2018. An important novelty is the inclusion of renewable natural resources such as land, timber and fisheries, and ecosystem services such as coastal and watershed protection. Exploratory results on accounting for renewable energy resources are also included.

This paper resents a measurement framework aiming to support the collection of comprehensive and internationally comparable quantitative and qualitative information on governmental innovation support programmes and instruments. It proposes a taxonomic system with definitions, classifications and reporting conventions aligned with OECD and other international standards. The framework is intended to support future OECD measurement efforts in this area and the analysis of innovation support portfolios within and across countries.

The Mitigation Work Programme (MWP) was established at COP26 to urgently enhance mitigation ambition and implementation in this critical decade. This paper explores how the MWP could build on and amplify relevant existing efforts, within and outside the UNFCCC, to trigger the rapid scale up of mitigation efforts required to keep the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement within reach. As a multilateral platform backed by the legitimacy and convening power of the UNFCCC, the MWP could help to raise awareness of available tools and solutions, build momentum behind relevant ongoing mitigation-related initiatives without being prescriptive, and deliver more effective, targeted mitigation efforts across all fronts in the near-term. This paper also outlines potential options for the annual decision on the MWP which provides an important opportunity to maintain attention on the need to urgently scale up mitigation efforts and encourages learning-by-doing. The annual MWP decision could be structured around different mutually supportive elements including lessons learned from the MWP’s first year, follow-up from MWP activities and related mitigation commitments at previous COPs, synergies with other UNFCCC processes, and how to complement the global stocktake.

The Climate Action Monitor is a key publication of the International Programme for Action on Climate (IPAC). It provides a synthesis of climate action and progress towards net-zero targets for 51 OECD and OECD partner countries. This year's edition presents a summary of information on greenhouse gas emissions, an assessment of climate-related hazards and recent trends in climate action. Directed towards policymakers and practitioners, the findings suggest that without increased ambition and a significant expansion in national climate action, countries will not be able to meet the net-zero challenge.

Upper secondary education in Lithuania stands out internationally with one of the highest attainment rates across OECD countries. Yet the country and its young people receive relatively modest returns in terms of learning outcomes for the country's high rates of upper secondary completion. To address this issue, Lithuania is currently undertaking a series of reforms at the upper secondary education level. This report explores how Lithuania, and its young people can achieve higher returns on its investment in upper secondary education and provides Lithuania with policy recommendations to help improve it by strengthening vocational education pathways and by consolidating upper secondary certification.

This report analyses current trends of adaptation finance provided and mobilised by developed countries for developing countries. It explores potential action areas for international providers to scale up funding for climate change adaptation, including by unlocking the potential of the private sector. The analysis is anchored in the context of the USD 100 billion climate finance goal, initially set for 2020 and extended to 2025, while also providing insights to the broader and longer-term objective of supporting developing countries’ ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change.