Publications

Every four years, each of the 24 members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Development Programme as observers is scrutinised by its peers in the Committee.Five different member countries are peer reviewed each year. The aim is to assess the extent to which the development policies, strategies and activities of the reviewed country meet the standards set by the DAC. Members provide constructive criticism and recommendations based on a report that touches on aid policies, volumes, institutions and field operations. There are no sanctions if the country fails to take the recommendations on board. The exercise is meant to encourage positive change, support mutual learning and raise the overall effectiveness of aid throughout the donor community.

Measuring Innovation: A New Perspective presents new measures and new ways of looking at traditional indicators. It builds on 50 years of indicator development by OECD and goes beyond R&D to describe the broader context in which innovation occurs. It includes some experimental indicators that provide insight into new areas of policy interest. It highlights measurement gaps and proposes directions for advancing the measurement agenda. This publication begins by describing innovation today. It looks at what is driving innovation in firms, and how the scientific and research landscape is being reconfigured by convergence, interdisciplinarity and the new geography of innovation hot spots. It presents broader measures of innovation, for example using new indicators of investment in intangible assets and trademarks.  Human capital is the basic input of innovation, and a series of indicators looks at how well education systems are contributing to the knowledge and research bases. Further series examine how firms transform skills and knowledge, and shed light on the different roles of public and private investment in fostering innovation and reaping its rewards, with concrete examples from major global challenges such as health and climate change.Measuring Innovation is a major step towards evidence-based innovation policy making. It complements traditional 'positioning'-type indicators with ones that show how innovation is, or could be, linked to policy.  It also recognises that much more remains to be done, and points to the  measurement challenges statisticians, researchers and policy makers alike need to address.

Did you ever wonder if education has a role to play in stemming the obesity epidemic sweeping across all OECD countries? Or what the impact of increasing urbanisation might be on our schools, families, and communities? Or whether new technologies really are fundamentally changing the way our children think and learn?Trends Shaping Education examines major trends affecting the future of education and sets the background on upcoming challenges for policy makers and education providers alike. This work does not give conclusive answers: it is not an analytical report nor is it a statistical compendium, and it is certainly not a statement of OECD policy on these different developments. It is instead a stimulus for thinking about major tendencies that have the potential to influence education, and conversely, the potential of education to influence these trends.