Innovation is key to green growth. It helps decouple growth from natural capital depletion and contributes to economic growth and job creation. Business is the driver of innovation, but governments need to provide clear and stable market signals, e.g. through carbon pricing. This book explores policy actions for the deployment of new technologies and innovations as they emerge: investment in research and development, support for commercialisation, strengthening markets and fostering technology diffusion. Competition will be essential to bring out the best solutions.
This report considers the potential of marine biotechnology to contribute to economic and social prosperity by making use of recent advances in science and technology. It discusses scientific and technological tools at the centre of a renewed interest in marine biotechnology, contributing to a new bioeconomy sector in many countries, and offering potential new solutions to global challenges. It also examines how these advances are improving our understanding of marine life and facilitating access to, and study of, marine organisms and ecosystems, and it considers the largely untapped potential of these bioresources.
This promise is considered alongside the challenges associated with the development of these resources which exist with complex ecosystems and fluidly distributed in a vast, largely shared environment. The report makes the case for a new global framework for the sustainable development of marine biotechnology and identifies some areas that will benefit from focused attention as governments develop policies to support it. In addition to this prospective view, this report identifies some early policy lessons learned by the governments which are leading attempts to benefit from bioresources.
This publication examines the critical issues surrounding water security (water shortage, water excess, inadequate water quality, the resilience of freshwater systems), providing a rationale for a risk-based approach and the management of trade-offs between water and other (sectoral and environmental) policies.
The report sets out a three-step process to "know", "target" and "manage" water risks: (1) appraising the risks, (2) judging the tolerability and acceptability of risks and weighing risk-risk trade-offs, and (3) calibrating appropriate responses.
The publication provides policy analysis and guidance on the use of market-based instruments and the complex links between water security and other policy objectives, such as food security, energy security, climate mitigation and biodiversity protection.
Climate-related disasters have inflicted increasingly high losses on developing countries, and with climate change, these losses are likely to worsen. Improving country resilience against climate risks is therefore vital for achieving poverty reduction and economic development goals.
This report discusses the current state of knowledge on how to build climate resilience in developing countries. It argues that climate-resilient development requires moving beyond the climate-proofing of existing development pathways, to consider economic development objectives and resilience priorities in parallel. Achieving this will require political vision and a clear understanding of the relation between climate and development, as well as an adapted institutional set-up, financing arrangements, and progress monitoring and evaluation. The report also discusses two priorities for climate-resilient development: disaster risk management and the involvement of the private sector.
The report builds on a growing volume of country experiences on building climate resilience into national development planning. Two country case studies, Ethiopia and Colombia, are discussed in detail.
This report sets out the challenge for freshwater in a changing climate and provides policy guidance on how to navigate this new "waterscape". It highlights the range of expected changes in the water cycle and the challenge of making practical, on-site adaptation decisions for water. It offers policymakers a risk-based approach to better "know", "target" and "manage" water risks and proposes policy guidelines to prioritise action and improve the efficiency, timeliness and equity of adaptation responses.
The report also highlights general trends and good practices drawn from the OECD Survey of Policies on Water and Climate Change Adaptation, covering all 34 member countries and the European Commission. Individual country profiles are available, which provide a snapshot of the challenges posed by climate change for freshwater and the emerging policy responses (on-line only).
Finally, the report highlights the benefits of well-designed economic instruments (e.g. insurance schemes, water trading, water pricing), ecosystem-based approaches and `real options' approaches to financing. These approaches can improve the flexibility of water policy and investment, reducing the cost of adjusting to changing conditions.
Ce rapport est le troisième examen des performances environnementales de l'Italie. Il évalue les progrès vers le développement durable et la croissance verte, et met l'accent sur les politiques qui favorisent une gestion plus efficace et efficiente de l'eau et la lutte contre le changement climatique.
In many OECD countries, governments have invested large amounts of public money to support renewable energy (RE) development and are requiring significant quantities of it to be sold by energy providers. But what are the economic impacts of these policies on the rural regions where deployment takes place? How can RE bring the greatest benefit to host regions? These are some of the questions explored by this study. Drawing on case studies in 16 regions within 10 countries, the research finds that while RE indeed represents an opportunity for stimulating economic growth in rural communities, its development benefits are not automatic. Realising them requires a complex and flexible policy framework and a long-term strategy, as well as a realistic appreciation of the potential gains from RE deployment. Making a positive connection between RE development and local economic growth will require more coherent strategies, the right set of local conditions, and a place-based approach to deployment.
The National Accounts of OECD Countries, Financial Balance Sheets includes financial stocks (both financial assets and liabilities), by institutional sector (non-financial corporations, financial corporations, general government, households and non-profit institutions serving households, total economy and rest of the world) and by financial instrument.
The data in this publication are also available in database format on the OECD iLibrary under the title OECD National Accounts Statistics: Financial Balance Sheets (http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/na-fbs-data-en).
Base erosion constitutes a serious risk to tax revenues, tax sovereignty and tax fairness for many countries. While there are many ways in which domestic tax bases can be eroded, a significant source of base erosion is profit shifting. This report presents the studies and data available regarding the existence and magnitude of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), and contains an overview of global developments that have an impact on corporate tax matters and identifies the key principles that underlie the taxation of cross-border activities, as well as the BEPS opportunities these principles may create. The report concludes that current rules provide opportunities to associate more profits with legal constructs and intangible rights and obligations, and to legally shift risk intra-group, with the result of reducing the share of profits associated with substantive operations. The report recommends the development of an action plan to address BEPS issues in a comprehensive manner.
This study analyses the promotion of collective action for agri-environmental public goods and addresses externalities by reviewing the experience of various OECD member countries. Twenty-five cases from
13 countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) are examined. The study shows that collective action should be given serious consideration as a means of addressing many agricultural and natural resource issues, and in some cases collective action should be actively promoted.
This twentieth edition of the Agricultural Outlook, and the tenth prepared jointly with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), provides market projections to 2023 for major agricultural commodities, biofuels and fish across 41 countries and 12 regions: OECD member countries (European Union as a region), key non-OECD agricultural producers (such as India, China, Brazil, Russian Federation and Argentina) and groups of smaller non-OECD economies in a more aggregated form. This edition includes a special focus on India.
This is the 18th edition of the Agricultural Outlook and the eighth prepared jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). It brings together the commodity, policy and country expertise of both organisations, and input from collaborating member countries. The report provides world market trends for biofuels, cereals, oilseeds, sugar, meats, fish and dairy products over the 2012-2021 period and contains an evaluation of recent developments, and key issues and uncertainties in those commodity markets. A jointly-developed modelling system, based on the OECD's AGLINK and on the FAO's COSIMO models, facilitates consistency in the projections. This edition includes a special feature on the challenge of increasing agricultural productivity growth in a sustainable manner.
Many fisheries around the world are characterised by excessive fishing effort, low productivity and inadequate profitability. Considerable benefits can be made from rebuilding such fisheries. This publication analyses the issues and challenges governments face as they develop and implement plans to rebuild fisheries. The focus is on the economic and institutional issues and builds on evidence from OECD fisheries.
This Monitoring and Evaluation report of agricultural policies covers OECD member countries and a range of emerging economies which are key players on agro-food markets: Brazil, China, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Africa and Ukraine. This edition shows that after a historical low reached in 2011 the support increased slightly in 2012. In the longer term perspective the OECD estimations of support confirm the downward trend in support to farmers, while in some emerging economies the support is increasing although from a lower base.
This report is a unique source of up-to-date estimates of support to agriculture in the OECD area and is complemented by individual chapters on agricultural policy developments in OECD countries and selected emerging economies. Supplementary information is available at www.oecd.org/agriculture/PSE.
In all OECD countries, digital media and connectedness are integral to the lives of today's learners. It is often claimed that these learners are "new millennium learners", or "digital natives", who have different expectations about education. This book contributes to the debate about the effects of technology attachment and connectedness on today's learners, and their expectations about teaching.
The book sets out to answer the following questions: Can the claim that today's students are "new millenium learners" or "digital natives be sustained empirically? Is there consistent research evidence demonstrating the effects of technology on cognitive development, social values, and learning expectations? What are the implications for educational policy and practice?
More than five million new cases of cancer are diagnosed every year in OECD countries. Mortality rates are declining, but not as fast as for other big killers such as heart disease, and cancer survival rates show almost a four-fold difference across countries. In short, many countries are not doing as well as they could in the fight against cancer.
Cancer Care: Assuring Quality to Improve Survival surveys the policy trends in cancer care over recent years and looks at survival rates to identify the why some countries are doing better than others. It sets out what governments should do to reduce the burden of cancer in their countries. As well as an adequate level of resourcing, a comprehensive national cancer control plan appears critical, emphasising initiatives such as early detection and fast-track treatment pathways. Countries also need better data, particularly for patients' experiences of care, in order to provide high quality, continuously improving cancer care.
With more than two-thirds of the world's poor living in rural areas, higher rural incomes are a pre-requisite for sustained poverty reduction and reduced hunger. This volume sets out a strategy for raising rural incomes which emphasises the creation of diversified rural economies with opportunities within and outside agriculture. Agricultural policies need to be integrated within an overall mix of policies and institutional reforms that facilitate, rather than impede, structural change. By investing in public goods, such as infrastructure and agricultural research, and by building effective social safety nets, governments can limit the role of less efficient policies such as price controls and input subsidies.
At a time when ever more information is available about the quality of health care, the challenge for policy makers is to better understand the policies and approaches that sit behind the numbers. This book examines whether care in Israel is safe, effective and responsive to patients' needs. It examines what works and what does not work, both to benchmark the efforts of countries and to provide advice on reforms to improve quality of health care.
The Development Co-operation Report is the key annual reference document for statistics and analysis on trends in international aid. This year, the Development Co-operation Report 2012 seeks to provide insights into how to address today's sustainable development challenges, with a focus on inclusiveness and good governance to ensure that our finite resources are equitably distributed, now and in the future.
Sharing finite resources among a growing number people - and consumers - is a critical challenge. It is in this spirit that J. Brian Atwood, Chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), invited several intellectual leaders on the challenges of inclusive, sustainable development to contribute to this year's report.
This report addresses multilevel governance challenges in water policy in the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) and identifies good practices for co-ordinating water across ministries, between levels of government, and across local and regional actors. Based on the OECD Multilevel Governance Framework and a survey on water governance, the report i) maps the allocation of roles and responsibilities in 13 LAC countries' water policy at central government and sub-national level; ii) identifies the main coordination "gaps" in terms of territorial and institutional fragmentation, funding mismatch, information asymmetry, accountability, objectives and capacity, and iii) provides a range of mechanisms to improve water governance at all levels and foster capacity-building.
This report addresses the increasingly important interactions of variable renewables and dispatchable energy technologies, such as nuclear power, in terms of their effects on electricity systems. These effects add costs to the production of electricity, which are not usually transparent. The report recommends that decision-makers should take into account such system costs and internalise them according to a "generator pays" principle, which is currently not the case. Analysing data from six OECD/NEA countries, the study finds that including the system costs of variable renewables at the level of the electricity grid increases the total costs of electricity supply by up to one-third, depending on technology, country and penetration levels. In addition, it concludes that, unless the current market subsidies for renewables are altered, dispatchable technologies will increasingly not be replaced as they reach their end of life and consequently security of supply will suffer. This implies that significant changes in management and cost allocation will be needed to generate the flexibility required for an economically viable coexistence of nuclear energy and renewables in increasingly decarbonised electricity systems.
The accelerator-driven system (ADS) is a potential transmutation system option as part of partitioning and transmutation strategies for radioactive waste in advanced nuclear fuel cycles. These proceedings contain all the technical papers presented at the workshop on Technology and Components of Accelerator-driven Systems held on 15-17 March 2010 in Karlsruhe, Germany. The workshop provided experts with a forum to present and discuss state-of-the-art developments in the field of ADS and neutron sources. It included a special session on the EUROTRANS as well as four technical sessions covering current ADS experiments and test facilities, accelerators, neutron sources and subcritical systems.
This first review of Slovenia's environmental conditions and policies evaluates progress in sustainable development, improving natural resource management, integrating environmental and economic policies, and strengthening international co-operation. It addresses green growth, environmental management, climate change and air pollution, and waste management issues.
This Review, undertaken in close co-operation with the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture, assesses the performance of Indonesian agriculture over the last two decades, evaluates Indonesian agricultural policy reforms and provides recommendations to address key challenges in the future. The evaluation is based on the OECD Committee for Agriculture's approach that agriculture policy should be evidence-based and carefully designed and implemented to support productivity, competitiveness and sustainability, while avoiding unnecessary distortions to production decisions and to trade. Conducted in partnership with the OECD Investment Committee, the Review comprises a special chapter highlighting key challenges to be addressed to attract sustainable investment in agriculture, drawing from the OECD Policy Framework for Investment in Agriculture.
