Reports

Subnational governments in Asia and the Pacific are key providers of the public services and infrastructure required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Given this role, it is essential that policymakers and development partners understand and support the effective functioning of multi-level governance structures and subnational government finances across the region. This joint OECD-ADB report provides a comprehensive overview of subnational governments across Asia and the Pacific. It covers over 467,000 subnational governments from 26 countries, which represent 53% of the world’s population and 40% of global GDP. On average in 2020, subnational governments in the region accounted for 29% of total public expenditure (8.8% of GDP), 35% of total public revenue (8.5% of GDP) and 38% of public investment (2% of GDP). Harnessing unique data from the 3rd edition of the OECD-UCLG World Observatory on Subnational Government Finance and Investment, the analysis highlights how decentralisation and territorial reforms have reconfigured the structures and finances of subnational governments in the region. It covers a range of topics including fiscal rules, financial management capacity, priority-based budgeting, asset management and the use of public-private partnerships.

Green hydrogen, produced from water and renewable power through the electrolysis process, can play a crucial role in the low-carbon transition to achieve the net-zero emission targets. Currently, the production cost of green hydrogen is not competitive when compared to hydrogen produced from natural gas. High capital costs are a major factor constraining its cost-competitiveness. This working paper utilises financial market data to address the knowledge gap concerning the range of Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) for green hydrogen projects. It also conducts a survey among investors and financiers to identify key risk factors contributing to the high WACC. The key risks that have been identified include offtaker risks, lack of credible offtakers, price uncertainty of green hydrogen, and the absence of hydrogen trading markets. These risks are closely connected to the available risk mitigation strategies and tools. The paper summarises key risk mitigation strategies identified through case studies of lighthouse green hydrogen projects that have either reached or are nearly point of reaching financial investment decisions.

The re-opening of Samoa’s borders in late-2022 kickstarted the country’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. This offers an opportunity to rebuild sustainably its tourism, maritime transport, and fisheries sectors. Samoa’s ocean resources can also augment its resilience to future shocks such as climate change. Through an analysis of Samoa’s economic trends and environmental pressures, institutional set-up and policy tools, as well as financing landscape, this report identifies opportunities and challenges for Samoa’s ocean economy to drive sustainable and resilient development. The Samoa Ocean Strategy offers a blueprint for such a pursuit, but there remain gaps and impediments. To address them, the report provides several cross-cutting and sector-specific policy recommendations to accelerate Samoa’s transition to a sustainable ocean economy.

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.

This report explores evidence-based action areas to increase and accelerate the mobilisation of private finance for climate action in developing countries, and the role of international public finance providers in doing so. It draws on best-available data to provide disaggregated analysis of the sectoral, geographic and other features of private finance mobilised by public climate finance and presents key economy-wide, sector-specific, and institutional challenges to private finance mobilisation. 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 related to mobilising private finance for climate action in developing countries more broadly.

This report presents aggregate trends of annual climate finance provided and mobilised by developed countries for developing countries for the period 2013-2021. It includes breakdowns by climate theme, sector, financial instrument and recipient country grouping for the period 2016-2021. The report also provides key recommendations for international providers to increase financing towards adaptation and more effectively mobilise private finance for climate action, which are both important policy priorities and current bottlenecks. The recommendations in this report draw from two OECD publications on scaling up private climate finance and adaptation finance.

At a time when global trade is under pressure and countries increasingly turn to regional integration to support their development, this Spotlight is a timely read for policy makers and business leaders in Africa and beyond. It shows how harnessing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) can support industrialisation in Egypt, and more widely in Africa, by tapping the full potential of regional supply chains, including renewable energies, pharmaceuticals, logistics and creative industries. This report builds on and enriches the Production Transformation Policy Review of Egypt: Embracing Change, Achieving Prosperity.

This paper exploits the information available in the OECD Key Indicators of Informality based on Individuals and their Household (KIIBIH) to shed light on several elements that could help inform national strategies for the extension of social protection to workers in the informal economy. It provides an assessment of current social protection coverage of informal workers throughout a large sample of developing and emerging economies and proposes a statistical framework to examine country-specific data, upon which a strategy for extending social protection to informal workers could be articulated. While the paper does not intend to provide detailed country-level recommendations, it highlights a number of important findings and policy directions as regards the way to extend non-contributory and contributory schemes to informal workers.

The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) conducts peer reviews of individual members once every five to six years. Reviews seek to improve the quality and effectiveness of members’ development co-operation, highlighting good practices and recommending improvements. The Czech Republic’s (Czechia) official development assistance remained stable on average at 0.14% of gross national income since 2016 and jumped to 0.36% in 2022 primarily due to the costs of hosting Ukrainian refugees. Czechia is recognised for its strong support to democratic transition and human rights. Its long-term 2018-2030 strategy ensures predictability and provides for flexibility. The report highlights efforts to engage with the European Union and its members, and identifies opportunities for building institutional learning processes. As the Czech development co-operation continues making progress towards established DAC standards, this peer review provides a set of recommendations to strengthen its institutional set-up to accelerate progress towards a more cohesive portfolio that explicitly addresses poverty and/or inequality, and to build better partnerships with local CSOs and the private sector.

This annual publication compiles comparable tax revenue and non-tax revenue statistics for 33 countries in Africa: Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Togo, Tunisia and Uganda. The report extends the well-established methodology on the classification of public revenues set out in the OECD Interpretative Guide to African countries, thereby enabling comparison of tax levels and tax structures not only across the continent but also with the OECD, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia and the Pacific. Data on African countries presented in this publication are also included in the OECD’s Global Revenue Statistics database, which is a fundamental reference for analysis of domestic resource mobilisation. This edition includes a special feature on the VAT Digital Toolkit for Africa. The publication is jointly undertaken by the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, the OECD Development Centre, the African Union Commission (AUC) and the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF), with the financial support of the European Union. SPECIAL FEATURE: VAT DIGITAL TOOLKIT FOR AFRICA