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Since joining the EU in 2013, Croatia’s macroeconomic performance has improved significantly. At the same time, large demographic and socio-economic disparities across Croatian regions persist. These trends provide the backdrop against which Croatia has reformed its legislative and strategic planning framework for regional development. Such reforms culminated in the adoption of the National Development Strategy 2030, which includes balanced regional development among its main long-term objectives. They have also led to the creation of regional development agencies, and the design of development plans at the county and local levels. This report assesses the extent to which Croatia’s multi-level governance system is supporting its regional development objectives. In particular, it provides an overview of the country’s regional development performance on several demographic, economic and well-being indicators. From there, it considers how the regional development reforms adopted since 2014 affect the ability of national and subnational governments to design, implement, fund, monitor and evaluate place-based regional development plans. Finally, this report provides practical recommendations to help national and subnational policy makers develop and implement strategic frameworks to meet their territorial development objectives and deliver tangible results to communities across the country.

People’s ability to access essential services is key to their labour market and social inclusion. An important dimension of accessibility is physical accessibility, but little cross-country evidence exists on how close people live to the services facilities they need. This paper helps to address this gap, focusing on three types of essential services: Public Employment Services, primary schools and Early Childhood Education and Care. It collects and maps data on the location of these services for a selection of OECD countries and links them with data on population and transport infrastructure. This allows to compute travel times to the nearest service facility and to quantify disparities in accessibility at the regional level. The results highlight substantial inequalities in accessibility of essential services across and within countries. Although large parts of the population can easily reach these services in most countries, some people are relatively underserved. This is particularly the case in non-metropolitan and low-income regions. At the same time, accessibility seems to be associated with the potential demand for these services once accounting for other regional economic and demographic characteristics.

The Eurométropole of Strasbourg (EMS) started its circular journey in 2010 with a focus on waste prevention, followed by the development of its 'Circular Economy Roadmap' in 2019, which aimed to integrate circular economy principles into EMS' public procurement and operations. The EMS is currently in the process of updating the Roadmap to address challenges related to regulation, co-ordination across the 33 municipalities and financing. This case study provides ways forward on how to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy through the OECD 3Ps framework: People and firms, Policies and Places.

In 2020, the Province of Zuid-Holland set up the 'Strategy Circular Zuid-Holland: Accelerating Together', with the commitment of reducing the use of primary raw materials by 50% by 2030 and to reach full circularity by 2050. New challenges in terms of value chain disruptions and increased scarcity of critical materials and opportunities led the province to develop several initiatives and collaborating platforms to advance towards a circular economy. This case study provides ways forward on how to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy through the OECD 3Ps framework: People and firms, Policies and Places.

The Welsh Government is refining its approach to regional development, adopting a regional lens directed to four regions to better allocate resources and address local needs. This OECD Multi-level Governance Study – a follow up to the 2020 OECD report The Future of Regional Development and Public Investment in Wales, United Kingdom – summarises the progress Wales has made to advance this regional lens, and identifies key areas of attention going forward. It synthesises the results of a vision-setting exercise, capacity-building workshops with the national government and regional bodies, and a multi-stakeholder workshop on collaborative working among Welsh regional development actors. This report identifies enablers for the effective use of a regional lens in Wales, including robust regional data, long-term and future-oriented objectives, effective co-ordination across Welsh Government policy areas related to regional development, capacitated regional structures, and trust and collaborative working among levels of government. The report's insights on establishing strategic direction and fostering collaboration among national, regional, and local levels could be valuable for countries exploring ways to optimise regional development policy, including in the face of resource constraints.

The Autonomous Province of Trento (Trentino) is among the most productive regions in Europe, but over the past two decades its productivity growth has stagnated. As a result, the productivity gap of Trentino widened by over 20% compared to regions with the same productivity level in 2000. The benchmarking of productivity drivers in Trentino with those of 'peer' regions points to several policy priorities, including: reviving productivity in tradeable sectors, also through increased internationalisation; increasing the share of the labour force with a tertiary education; and getting more out of public R&D while boosting private sector R&D.

Social impact measurement and management is a particularly helpful practice for social economy entities to understand their contribution to society and potentially improve the achievement of their mission. Impact areas that are particularly important for the social economy, such as economic prosperity and employment, social inclusion and well-being and community, are often the hardest to translate into quantitative metrics. Current social impact measurement and management practices are largely shaped by funders and for-profits with limited focus on the social economy. This guide offers a simple, straightforward approach for social economy entities to measure, manage and ultimately maximise their impact, and to prioritise the use of findings for strategic organisational learning and improvement.

The state of Paraná in Brazil has turned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guiding framework for its territorial development policy since 2016. Building on the recommendations from the OECD report on 'A Territorial Approach to the SDGs in Paraná, Brazil' (2021), the state has continued to leverage the SDGs as a vehicle to address territorial disparities and challenges in a number of policy domains, including agriculture, health, education, economic growth, environmental conservation and public safety. This report assesses the state’s progress on the 2021 OECD recommendations and offers renewed guidance on how to harness the SDGs to tackle the state’s main challenges, including designing a state-wide Sustainable Development Plan and integrating the SDGs in its new 2053 Strategic Vision.