Publications

This paper explores the economics of Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on its potential as a new General-Purpose Technology that can significantly influence economic productivity and societal wellbeing. It examines AI's unique capacity for autonomy and self-improvement, which could accelerate innovation and potentially revive sluggish productivity growth across various industries, while also acknowledging the uncertainties surrounding AI's long-term productivity impacts. The paper discusses the concentration of AI development in big tech firms, uneven adoption rates, and broader societal challenges such as inequality, discrimination, and security risks. It calls for a comprehensive policy approach to ensure AI's beneficial development and diffusion, including measures to promote competition, enhance accessibility, and address job displacement and inequality.

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.

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.

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 pandemic has stimulated growing interest in using advanced practice nurses such as Nurse Practitioners (NPs) to address growing primary care needs linked to population ageing and more people living with chronic conditions, although not all countries are moving at the same speed. This OECD Health Working paper reviews recent developments in advance practice nursing (APN) in primary care in OECD countries. It focusses on NPs in those countries that are recognising this category of nurses, but also describes the emergence of other categories of nurses taking on new roles such as family and community nurses in some European countries. In those countries that have achieved decisive breakthroughs in new forms of task sharing between primary care doctors (GPs) and nurses, increasing the number of APNs in primary care is seen as a real opportunity to respond to primary care needs and reduce pressures on GPs and hospitals.

Global trade in plastic waste and scrap declined further (2017-2022) in 2022. The combined trade surplus of OECD Member Countries (i.e. the difference between exports and imports) continued to decrease. Less plastic waste and scrap is being exported by OECD countries to non-OECD countries, however some countries still export substantial volumes to non-OECD countries. Particularly several non-OECD south-east Asian countries remain large export destinations. Trade between OECD countries has increased. The value and composition of plastic waste and scrap exports in 2021 suggests that more high value and easy to recycle plastic waste was traded. Some volume of plastics waste is likely transformed into a 'fuel' via mechanical and chemical processing and subsequently shipped as Processed Engineered Fuel (PEF) or Refuse-Derived Fuels (RDF), broadly categorised under HS 3825. There was an increase in this trade mostly between OECD countries in 2021. The trade regime remains dynamic with new export destinations emerging, which deserve further monitoring.

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.

The blue economy is a major driver of urban and regional development, creating millions of local jobs in water-dependent sectors such as fisheries, tourism, and shipping. However, it can also contribute to carbon emissions and ecosystem degradation, while its reliance on freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems exposes it to the impacts of climate change. As the places where the blue economy takes place, creates value and provides jobs, cities and regions play a key role in unlocking the potential of a resilient blue economy that preserves the ecosystems that sustain it. Building on a global survey of 80+ cities, regions and basins, this report highlights the costs and benefits of the blue economy at subnational level, shedding light on the link between the blue economy and water security. This analysis provides an overview of the multi-level governance of the blue economy and related gaps. It calls on cities and regions to develop resilient, inclusive, sustainable and circular (RISC-proof) blue economies by establishing the right governance conditions related to policy making, policy coherence and policy implementation. The report concludes with a RISC Assessment Framework that offers a self-evaluation tool for subnational governments.

Students are much more than their grades. Beyond performing well in school, students must learn to manage their relationships with others, confront stress, find purpose in what they do, and deal with a series of factors oftentimes beyond their control – all of this, during a particularly sensitive period of their lives. How they do across all these dimensions of life shapes their well-being, which in turn affects their school performance and their life outcomes beyond school. In 2015, PISA broke new ground by including indicators of student well-being alongside traditional measures of academic performance. However, the data on student well-being often remain overshadowed by country and economy scores in mathematics, science, and reading - traditionally considered the primary outputs of PISA. This paper presents a proposal to increase the visibility and policy impact of PISA indicators on well-being, by organising them in thematic areas and presenting them through data visualisations that respond to the needs of different kinds of users. The proposed PISA dashboard on students’ well-being has the potential to offer policy makers, educators, parents, and other stakeholders a comparative perspective on how well schools are fostering the essential foundations for students to lead fulfilling lives.

If test-takers do not engage with the assessment, the reliability of test scores and the validity of inferences about their proficiency may suffer. Test-taker disengagement is particularly likely in low-stakes assessments and, according to prior research, for certain types of students. But levels of engagement may also be related to aspects that test developers can manipulate, such as item characteristics. This paper investigates which item characteristics are associated with two indicators of test-taker disengagement, rapid guessing and breakoffs, in an international assessment of reading. Analyses of data from almost 500 000 students from 67 countries and economies that took part in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that rapid guessing was observed mainly on simple multiple-choice questions. Breakoffs were more likely in the presence of idiosyncratic selected-response formats, such as hot spot or matching tasks. Both rapid guessing and breakoffs were more frequent on tasks involving long and complex texts.