Publications & Documents

What are the structural barriers to women's empowerment and inclusive development in Southeast Asia? Building on data from the fifth edition of the SIGI, the SIGI 2024 Regional Report for Southeast Asia: Time to Care provides new evidence-based analysis on the progress and setbacks in eliminating the root causes of gender inequality in 11 countries of the region. It underscores how multiple personal status laws perpetuate gender-based legal discrimination. The analysis also shows that social norms governing gender roles and responsibilities worsened between 2014 and 2022, particularly affecting women’s educational and economic rights. The report explores a critical policy area for the region, the care economy. Stressing the gendered, informal, and unpaid dimensions of care, it draws on social, demographic, educational and economic evidence to forecast a growing demand for care services in Southeast Asian countries. The report advocates for the strategic development of formal care systems as a unique opportunity to accelerate women's economic empowerment, build inclusive societies and strengthen the region's resilience to external shocks – including those induced by climate change. To dismantle the barriers that prevent the emergence and expansion of such a formal care economy, it provides concrete recommendations to policy makers and other stakeholders.

Over 100 million workers in Southeast Asia have jobs that are directly or closely linked to the environment, making them vulnerable to climate change impacts. These same workers likely earn at least 20% lower than the national average and are largely in informal employment. The region’s necessary transition towards greener growth could affect them in several ways: some sectors will create jobs and others will lose jobs or disappear altogether. Understanding the effects of both climate change and green growth policies on jobs and people is thus essential for making the transition in Southeast Asia an inclusive one. The study explores these issues, with emphasis on the potential effects on labour of an energy transition in Indonesia, and of a transition in the region’s agricultural sector, illustrated by a simulated conversion from conventional to organic rice farming.

Several states in West Africa have experienced significant episodes of political violence since the early 2010s. These have included civil wars, religiously motivated terrorism, separatist insurgencies, military coups and communal strife, each of which have local, national and transnational dimensions. Intended to help guide responses to the region’s political challenges, the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC/OECD) created an interactive, spatial tool for policy makers in 2019, the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi). The SCDi monitors political violence at subnational scales. It combines different quantitative dimensions of conflict into a mappable tool that describes the circumstances in each location. The latest enhancement to the SCDi brings two new features to aid the identification of local conflict trends. First, the tool now identifies regions that are newly entering into or exiting from conflict. This allows a more detailed picture of how the geography of conflict is spreading or contracting within and across national borders. Second, the tool now characterises the current conditions in a location as either worsening or improving, based on past conditions at the same location. The SCDi is implemented in SWAC’s new Mapping Territorial Transformations in Africa (MAPTA) platform.

African armed conflicts involve a myriad of state forces, rebel groups and extremist organisations bound by rapidly changing alliances and rivalries. Organisations that were allies one day can fight each other the next and co-operate later still. The objective of this note is to update the pioneer work on conflict networks conducted by the OECD Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC) in the region by using a formal approach to networks known as dynamic social network analysis. Leveraging a dataset of 3 800 actors and 60 000 violent events from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) from 1997-2023, the note monitors how the co-operative and rivalrous ties between violent actors have changed over time, both at the regional and local levels. The growing number of belligerents, increasing density of rivalrous relationships and growing polarisation of the conflict networks observed in this note are extremely worrying for the future of the region. Not only do they make peaceful efforts more difficult than ever, but they also contribute to increasing the number of potential victims among the civilian population.

Chile has made important strides on its environmental agenda in recent years with the passage of the Framework Law on Climate Change, the establishment of the Biodiversity and Protected Areas Service and the ratification of the Escazú Agreement. However, the country has made limited progress in decoupling environmental pressures from economic growth. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise and the country is not on track to reach its legally binding target of net zero by 2050. Chile is well-positioned to achieve its targets for biodiversity, while air pollution remains a serious public health challenge and waste management relies heavily on landfilling. Chile is facing a severe and deepening water crisis that requires concerted action to improve water allocation and water quality, and to strengthen water governance. The review provides 36 recommendations to help Chile improve its environmental performance, with a special focus on water management and policies. This is the third Environmental Performance Review of Chile. It provides an independent, evidence-based evaluation of the country’s environmental performance since the previous review in 2016.

This publication provides comprehensive data on the volume, origin and types of aid and other resource flows to around 140 developing countries.  The data show each country's receipts of official development assistance as well as other official and private funds from members of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, multilateral agencies and other key providers. Key development indicators are given for reference.    Cette publication fournit des données détaillées sur le volume, la provenance and les types d'aide et d'autres apports de ressources attribués à chacun d'environ 140 pays en voie de développement. Les données statistiques couvrent les apports d'aide publique au développement et les autres financements publics et privés fournis à chaque pays bénéficiaire par chacun des membres du Comité d'aide au développement de l'OCDE, par les organismes multilatéraux ainsi que par d'autres fournisseurs.  Des indicateurs socio-économiques de base sont présentés pour information.

As climate change increases exposure to natural disasters, countries need new solutions to mitigate risks of natural hazards. For many in Asia and the Pacific, mobilising existing resources is not enough: they need to consider a grand design of disaster risk financing strategies. Catastrophe bonds (CAT bonds) can be an effective, market-based financing tool for the region. While the global CAT bond market has grown steadily since the 1990s, it remains weakly developed in Asia and the Pacific. Its successful development there requires robust purpose-built legal frameworks; developed general bond markets, especially in local currency; appropriate capacity building; and data-driven pricing models. This report explores each of these conditions along with policy suggestions for fostering them, and discusses the development of multi-country CAT bonds in Asia and the Pacific.