Reports

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.

Understanding current levels of financial literacy and needs is key for the effective development of financial literacy strategies and programmes. This report presents the results of an international survey of financial literacy levels among adults. A total of 39 countries and economies, of which 20 are OECD member countries, participated in this third coordinated measurement exercise using the globally recognized OECD/INFE 2022 Toolkit for Measuring Financial Literacy and Financial Inclusion to measure financial literacy levels among their adult populations. Results provide information about financial literacy levels and cover aspects of financial knowledge, financial behaviour and financial attitudes. In addition, the report provides information on financial inclusion, digital financial literacy levels and levels of financial well-being among adults in the participating countries and economies.

This paper examines the potential role of emerging technologies and innovation in enhancing risk assessment and encouraging policyholder risk reduction, including: an overview of potential applications of new technologies to risk assessment and risk reduction; an assessment of potential challenges to technology adoption (including regulatory challenges), and; set of potential good practices for creating an enabling environment that supports the use of technology in risk assessment and encouraging risk reduction.

The scale of Uzbekistan’s green transition requires a marked increase in private financing to fill the existing spending gap. The outsized role of the state in Uzbekistan’s economy and its underdeveloped domestic capital market act as significant constraints and call for a diversification of sources to finance the green transition. Since 2021, Uzbekistan has made green bonds a central part of its strategy to fill the financing gap and mobilise new sources of capital for its domestic green infrastructure projects. This publication explores the current market and institutional set-up in Uzbekistan, the reforms that have led to recent issuances of both sovereign and corporate thematic bonds, and the remaining barriers to further uptake of the instrument. The report also provides policy recommendations related to the market's institutional set up, Uzbekistan's regulatory framework for debt capital markets and emerging opportunities for further green bond use aimed at key stakeholders, including policy makers and market participants.

Financial markets need clear information and credible metrics to inform climate-related investment and financing decisions. This report explores key challenges and opportunities related to the transparency, specificity and integrity of metrics to support the monitoring of financial institutions’ net-zero commitments. It provides an assessment of metrics put forward in five voluntary frameworks, identifies the type of information and metrics proposed, their common themes and gaps, as well as limitations in underlying methodological guidance that may hinder financial institutions’ ability to report and disclose metrics. The report highlights a need both for continued efforts to develop robust metrics and incentivise improved data disclosure, as well as for international co-operation to reduce fragmentation and provide further transparency on the scope of metrics and underlying methodologies.

Banks and other financial institutions have a central role to play in supporting the net zero transition of the business sector and its millions of SMEs. They are working to integrate climate considerations in various aspects of their operations, including strategy, management and financial products. This calls for the development of new internal capacities and access to SME sustainability data and assessments which are currently difficult to obtain. This policy paper presents the findings of a 2023 survey of public development banks and private financial institutions, conducted by the by the OECD Platform on Financing SMEs for Sustainability. It provides insights on financial institutions' current approaches and plans for the integration of climate considerations in their SME operations. It also provides information on the offer of finance and non-financial support for SMEs’ net zero investments and on related SME climate-related data requirements.

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.

Industry decarbonisation is a cornerstone to reach net-zero emissions by this mid-century. The diversity of industrial activities, processes and products, the complexity of global industrial value chains, and the international competition make industry decarbonisation a challenging objective. Annual investments in low-carbon technologies for industry decarbonisation need to increase by a factor of three to five by 2030 compared to current levels to align industrial emissions with net-zero pathways. This paper analyses available financing solutions to scale up investments at pace, especially in emerging and developing economies where industrial production is growing rapidly whilst available finance is limited. It highlights de-risking and financial instruments and models that can help accelerate investments and draws lessons from twelve financing industry decarbonisation case studies which demonstrate how private capital can be mobilised.

Open finance enables the sharing of, and access to, financial sector data. This paper analyses the benefits, risks and implementation challenges of Open finance and provides policy recommendations for the safe and successful implementation of such data-sharing frameworks in finance. It considers the impacts of providing access to customers’ financial data and how to do this responsibly and safely, with due consideration for data privacy. The paper also discusses other consumer safeguards, notably related to consent and liability. Finally, it considers whether there is a need to support the development of technical infrastructure to promote data interoperability.