Publications & Documents

This report adds two perspectives on informality. First, it disassembles the mechanics of the deleterious links between informal employment, low-paying work and low skills. It shows that informal employment is highly persistent, and that the vulnerability of informal workers is passed on to their children in the absence of adequate education, skills and social protection policy. Second, the report underscores the double burden of informality and low-paying work that a large share of workers in developing and emerging economies carry, and as such calls for policy solutions that go beyond the formalisation agenda and embrace the goal of social justice.

In recent years, provision of relevant up-skilling and re-skilling opportunities for adults has become a necessity due to global megatrends affecting labour markets. As a result, countries are looking to strengthen these opportunities throughout the life course. The successful deployment of these initiatives requires a coherent set of policies, with quality assurance being critically important. This paper provides an overview of quality assurance mechanisms from the perspective of the 38 OECD member countries. It proposes a framework to characterise and compare the governance, processes and outcomes of these mechanisms. The paper's contribution is to facilitate understanding of quality assurance across OECD countries, presenting a visual cross-country mapping that classifies existing mechanisms.

The rapid acceleration in the pace of AI innovation in recent years and the advent of content generating capabilities (Generative AI or GenAI) have increased interest in AI innovation in finance, in part due to the user-friendliness and intuitive interface of GenAI tools. The use of AI in financial markets involving full end-to-end automation without any human intervention remains largely at development phase, but its wider deployment could amplify risks already present in financial markets and give rise to new challenges. This paper presents recent evolutions in AI in finance and potential risks and discusses whether policy makers may need to reinforce policies and strengthen protection against these risks.

As countries seek to draw lessons the COVID-19 crisis and increase their future resilience, evaluations are important tools to understand what worked or not, why and for whom. This report builds on the OECD work on 'government evaluations of COVID-19 responses'. It evaluates Belgium’s responses to the pandemic in terms of risk preparedness, crisis management, as well as public health, education, economic and fiscal, and social and labour market policies. Preserving the country’s resilience in the future will require promoting trust in public institutions and whole-of-government approaches to crisis management, reducing inequalities, and preserving the fiscal balance. The findings and recommendations of this report will provide guidance to public authorities in these efforts.

The Missing Entrepreneurs 2023 is the seventh edition in a series of biennial reports examining how government policies can release untapped entrepreneurial potential from under-represented parts of the population of impactful entrepreneurs, including women, youth, seniors, the unemployed, immigrants and people with disabilities. It offers comparative data on the entrepreneurship activities and the barriers faced by each group across OECD and European Union countries. It takes a deep dive into the effectiveness of youth entrepreneurship schemes and the design of welfare bridge schemes for business creation by job seekers. It also contains country profiles for each of the 27 EU Member States showing the major recent trends in diversity in entrepreneurship and the current state and evolution of policy for each country.

One in seven working age adults identifies as having a disability in OECD countries. Many of them are excluded from meaningful work and have low levels of income and social engagement. Governments can help create an environment that supports social and labour market integration for people with disability. This report reviews the effectiveness of the social protection system for people with disability in Italy and summarises the results of a pilot carried out in four regions testing an alternative disability assessment. The current assessment process can sometimes deny services to people in need of support while being generous to people with significant health problems but who are not experiencing severe disability. A disability assessment that takes medical and functional aspects into account helps to direct services and resources to those most in need and to harmonise access to disability support across the country. Implementing disability reform has proved to be difficult in Italy in the past decade. This report provides evidence that reform can improve outcomes for people with disability.

People with disability face persisting difficulties in the labour market. There are concerns that AI, if managed poorly, could further exacerbate these challenges. Yet, AI also has the potential to create more inclusive and accommodating environments and might help remove some of the barriers faced by people with disability in the labour market. Building on interviews with more than 70 stakeholders, this report explores the potential of AI to foster employment for people with disability, accounting for both the transformative possibilities of AI-powered solutions and the risks attached to the increased use of AI for people with disability. It also identifies obstacles hindering the use of AI and discusses what governments could do to avoid the risks and seize the opportunities of using AI to support people with disability in the labour market.

Two out of five OECD countries contract out some of the job brokerage and counselling functions of publicly financed employment services using outcome-based payment models. This paper examines several important aspects related to the design and implementation of such outsourcing. First, innovative payment models can improve incentives for external providers to offer training and more effective services for hard-to-place clients. Second, providing forward guidance to providers and accounting for contingencies can mitigate their risks, e.g. of being underpaid relative to expenses incurred, thus lowering service costs. Third, letting individuals choose a provider can result in services that are better tailored and foster ongoing competition between providers. Finally, automating data exchange can, somewhat paradoxically, improve data privacy and data protection while enabling new payment models. These and related findings are discussed with country examples based on desk research and interviews with stakeholders in several OECD countries. The paper builds on work conducted in the project 'Reforming the Swedish Public Employment Service', which was carried out with funding from the European Union via the Technical Support Instrument and was implemented by the OECD in cooperation with the European Commission's Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support.