Publications

This report responds to the request by G7 Leaders at the Schloss Elmau Summit in June 2015, for the OECD to develop policy guidance on resource efficiency. Establishing a resource efficient economy is a major environmental, development and macroeconomic challenge today. Improving resource efficiency by putting in place policies that implement the principles of reduce, reuse, recycle (the 3Rs) is crucial to improving resource use, security and competitiveness while diminishing the associated environmental impacts.

This review is the first in a new series on the skills and labour market integration of immigrants and their children. With 16% of its population born abroad, Sweden has one of the larger immigrant populations among the European OECD countries. Estimates suggest that about half of the foreign-born population originally came to Sweden as refugees or as the family of refugees and Sweden has been the OECD country that has had by far the largest inflows of asylum seekers relative to its population. In all OECD countries, humanitarian migrants and their families face greater challenges to integrate into the labour market than other groups. It is thus not surprising that immigrant versus native-born differences are larger than elsewhere, which also must be seen in the context of high skills and labour market participation among the native-born. For both genders, employment disparities are particularly pronounced among the low-educated, among whom immigrants are heavily overrepresented. These immigrants face particular challenges related to the paucity of low-skilled jobs in Sweden, and policy needs to acknowledge that their integration pathway tends to be a long one. Against this backdrop, Sweden has highly developed and longstanding integration policies that mainly aim at upskilling immigrants while temporarily lowering the cost of hiring, while other tools that work more strongly with the social partners and the civil society are less well developed and need strengthening.

Effective tax systems are a critical building block for increased domestic resources in developing countries, essential for sustainable development and for promoting self-reliance, good governance, growth and stability. This report begins with an overview of the current tax capacity building landscape, highlighting key initiatives and recent developments that have emerged in response to developing country needs. It then examines how tax administrations, as well as international and regional organisations, are supporting and delivering capacity building assistance to developing countries, and it offers guidance both in relation to G20 priorities and more generally. The report is based on a mapping exercise and a survey of members of the OECD’s Forum on Tax Administration (FTA), drawing on the insights and expertise of a nine-country task team led by the FTA commissioners of Canada and China and supported by the FTA Secretariat.

This report looks at effective e-service provision by tax administrations, summarising eight critical areas, and explores big data management and portals, as well as natural systems, in detail. It highlights key opportunities in these areas, looking at how these emerging technologies can be best used by tax administrations. It also provides practical examples of how tax administrations have begun to utilise these technologies and delivers a maturity matrix for the two areas to assist strategic and operational decision making by tax administrations. Finally, it sets out conclusions, recommendations and next steps.This report has been prepared by the Forum on Tax Administration’s E-services and Digital Delivery Programme. The work was initiated by the FTA Bureau as part of its 2015/16 work programme and was led by the Federal Tax Service of Russia (FTS).  With tax administrations clear that e-service options can improve taxpayer compliance levels and participation while at the same time lowering their cost of operation; but with available options many and varied, and with the cost of implementation high,  the FTA has over the last five years provided a wide range of guidance in the deployment of effective e-services. 

This report highlights the key opportunities and challenges in establishing, operating, or improving advanced analytics functions in tax administrations. The report provides practical examples of how administrations are currently utilising advanced analytics, and discusses key topics, including organisational arrangements, governance, management and data. The report also discusses how administrations are utilising analytics to improve their operations and deliver better outcomes to taxpayers. Finally, it sets out conclusions, recommendations and next steps. 
This report has been prepared by the Forum on Tax Administration’s Advanced Analytics Programme. The work was initiated by the FTA Bureau following the biennial conference on Advanced Analytics hosted by the Irish Revenue Commissioners in March 2015. That workshop identified member country interest in undertaking work to identify member experience in analytics delivery and share information on both the technologies and tools they were using. 

The landscape of tax services, traditionally provided by parties such as tax advisors, accountants and other tax practitioners, is changing, thanks to new technologies and services such as online accounting and filing, mobile devices, and machine-to-machine communication. This may lead to more integrated tax systems, in which taxation is part of the day-to-day operations of SMEs. This report provides an overview of relevant technological and business developments and new service solutions. It also explores how these influence SMEs, tax service providers and tax administrations – and the way that they co-operate. Tax administrations can adopt different types of network strategies for co-operating with tax service providers. The report identifies four basic network strategies. In countries without an established tax service provider infrastructure, such as developing and emerging economies, leveraging new technologies (such as online services and mobile payment) may create new possibilities for providing infrastructure that is both beneficial for SMEs and promotes tax compliance.

This report outlines the essential features of a Tax Control Framework (TCF) and addresses revenue bodies’ expectations of TCFs. It includes a discussion of the issue of materiality, as it is important to understand the relationship between what is material for the purposes of systems of control, such as the external audit of a multinational enterprise’s accounts, and what is material in terms of the tax liabilities arising from that enterprise’s activities in a particular country. It also discusses how revenue bodies could approach the task of testing the soundness of a TCF in any particular case and finally, sets out conclusions, recommendations and next steps.

This review assesses the overall investment climate in the Philippines, looking at investment policy, investment promotion and facilitation, competition policy, infrastructure investment and responsible business conduct. The Review documents successful reform episodes over the past 25 years in the Philippines, assesses their impact and suggests areas for further reforms. It looks at how to raise investment levels by both foreign and domestic enterprises and at how to ensure that such investment contributes to sustainable and inclusive growth. The current macroeconomic situation in the Philippines is favourable, remittances are high, the business process outsource industry is booming, and the new Competition Act will help to make the domestic market more competitive. The Review argues for one further reform push to ease the many restrictions on foreign investors in the Philippines so as to provide an investment climate where all firms can invest and grow.

Ce rapport est le troisième examen environnemental des Pays-Bas. Il évalue les progrès accomplis par les Pays-Bas en termes de développement durable et de croissance verte, avec un accent particulier sur la mobilité durable et la gestion des déchets et des matières. Les examens environnementaux de l’OCDE sont des évaluations indépendantes des progrès accomplis par les pays pour tenir leurs engagements environnementaux nationaux et internationaux. Ces examens ont pour objectif de favoriser les échanges de bonnes pratiques et l’apprentissage entre pairs, d’aider les gouvernements à rendre compte de leurs politiques auprès des autres pays et de l’opinion publique et d’améliorer la performance environnementale, individuelle et collective, des pays. Les analyses s’appuient sur un large éventail de données économiques et environnementales et contiennent également des recommandations de politique publique. Au cours de chaque cycle d’examens environnementaux, l’OCDE passe en revue l’ensemble de ses pays membres ainsi que certains pays partenaires. Les derniers pays examinés sont la Pologne (2015), l’Espagne (2015) et le Brésil (2015).

This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the innovation policy of Luxembourg. It is the second such OECD review of Luxembourg's innovation system, following an earlier review published in 2007. Since that time, the system has undergone profound change, notably a rapid expansion in the scale and scope of public sector research, which offers new opportunities for Luxembourg, but also new challenges for innovation policy. The review focuses on the role of government and includes concrete recommendations on how to improve policies that affect innovation and R&D performance.