Publications

Health systems in the United Kingdom have, for many years, made the quality of care a highly visible priority, internationally pioneering many tools and policies to assure and improve the quality of care. A key challenge, however, is to understand why, despite being a global leader in quality monitoring and improvement, the United Kingdom does not consistently demonstrate strong performance on international benchmarks of quality. This report reviews the quality of health care in the England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, seeking to highlight best practices, and provides a series of targeted assessments and recommendations for further quality gains in health care. To secure continued quality gains, the four health systems will need to balance top-down approaches to quality management and bottom-up approaches to quality improvement; publish more quality and outcomes data disaggregated by country; and, establish a forum where the key officials and clinical leaders from the four health systems responsible for quality of care can meet on a regular basis to learn from each other’s innovations.

This report examines the nature and extent of support for teacher professionalism using the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013, a survey of teachers and principals in 34 countries and economies around the world. Teacher professionalism is defined as the knowledge, skills, and practices that teachers must have in order to be effective educators.The report focuses on lower secondary teachers (ISCED 2) in different education systems and looks at cross-cultural differences in teacher professionalism. It explores how teacher professionalism is linked to policy-relevant teacher outcomes such as perceived status, satisfaction with profession and school environment or perceived self-efficacy. The publication also tackles equity concerns in teacher professionalism: it examines professionalism support gaps, which are defined as differences in support for teacher professionalism in schools with high levels of disadvantage as compared to those with low-levels of disadvantage. Last but not least, the report presents a number of policy-relevant recommendations to enhance teacher professionalism and equity in access to high-quality teaching in OECD member countries.

This review assesses the Mexican pension system according to the OECD best practices and guidelines, and draws on international experiences and examples to make recommendations on how to improve it. It provides an international perspective on Mexico’s retirement income provision and a short and focused review of the Mexican pension system. The review covers all components of the pension system: public and private pension provision for public and private-sector workers. It provides recommendations, using OECD’s best practices in pension design, on how to improve the Mexican pension system and thus ameliorate the retirement income that people may receive from the pension system.

Urban, demographic and climate trends are increasingly exposing cities to risks of having too little, too much and too polluted water. Facing these challenges requires robust public policies and sound governance frameworks to co-ordinate across multiple scales, authorities, and policy domains. Building on a survey of 48 cities in OECD countries and emerging economies, the report analyses key factors affecting urban water governance, discusses trends in allocating roles and responsibilities across levels of government, and assesses multi-level governance gaps in urban water management. It provides a framework for mitigating territorial and institutional fragmentation and raising the profile of water in the broader sustainable development agenda, focusing in particular on the contribution of metropolitan governance, rural-urban partnerships and stakeholder engagement.

Public Employment Services vary widely across the world in terms of history, structures and capacities, as well as the national labor market context in which they operate. In order to meet the demands of the new world of work, comparability will be crucial to align priorities and adapt methods of operation. This publication provides a wide range of indicators for comparing the operational and institutional characteristics of 73 Public Employment Services in 71 countries around the world. It also provides forward looking analysis on four key issues: matching skills for the life cycle, strategic multichannel service delivery, institutional capacity, and governance mechanisms.

There is no country or economy participating in PISA 2012 that can claim that all of its 15-year-old students have achieved a baseline level of proficiency in mathematics, reading and science. Poor performance at school has long-term consequences, both for the individual and for society as a whole.  Reducing the number of low-performing students is not only a goal in its own right but also an effective way to improve an education system’s overall performance – and equity, since low performers are disproportionately from socio-economically disadvantaged families.Low-performing Students: Why they Fall Behind and How to Help them Succeed examines low performance at school by looking at low performers’ family background, education career and attitudes towards school. The report also analyses the school practices and educational policies that are more strongly associated with poor student performance. Most important, the evidence provided in the report reveals what policy makers, educators, parents and students themselves can do to tackle low performance and succeed in school.

Cette publication fournit aux gouvernements des conseils sur les options politiques qui sont disponibles pour tirer le meilleur parti des opportunités d'investissement privé dans une infrastructures énergétique propre, appuyant sur l'expertise des communautés du climat et de l'investissement, entre autres. Elle propose aux décideurs une liste de questions à prendre en considération, notamment dans les domaines suivants : politique d’investissement, promotion et facilitation de l’investissement, politique de la concurrence, marchés financiers et gouvernance publique. D' autres questions transversales sont également abordées, comme la coopération régionale et le commerce international pour les investissements dans les énergies propres.

The State continues to remain an important shareholder in listed companies worldwide, especially among emerging economies, which rely increasingly on mixed-ownership models. With the benefit of hindsight and more recent examples, this book provides fresh perspectives on the motivation to list state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the process it entails. Drawing from the experiences of five economies (People's Republic of China, India, New Zealand, Poland and Turkey), the book concludes that broadened ownership generally has a positive impact on the governance and performance of these companies. However, country practices show that the act of listing cannot guarantee that these companies are completely averse to State interests; and deviations from sound corporate governance practices, as enshrined in the OECD Guidelines on Corporate Governance of SOEs, can in some cases, raise concerns with regards to non-State shareholder rights, commercial orientation, board independence, conflicting State objectives, transparency, disclosure and more.

This report analyses the institutions and structures that govern labor migration in Asia. It considers the important role of governments and other stakeholders in both labour-destination countries such as Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Singapore, and labour-sending countries such as India, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Key issues are the extent to which these structures provide an orderly process for the movement of people between countries and whether the rights and the welfare of workers are protected. 

This report examines the Netherland’s new Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam-The Hague (MRDH), drawing on lessons from governance reforms in other OECD countries and identifying how the MRDH experience could benefit policy makers beyond Dutch borders. Long in search of ways to strengthen urban areas, the Dutch government has recently undertaken the development of a National Urban Agenda known as Agenda Stad, in parallel to a series of broad institutional reforms. This included abolishing the country’s traditional eight city-regions, which led Rotterdam, The Hague and 21 smaller neighbouring cities to form the Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam-The Hague (Metropoolregio Rotterdam Den Haag, or MRDH). This report analyses the emergence of the MRDH both as a geographical area that spans 23 municipalities in the southern Randstad region and as a new metropolitan authority with transport and economic development responsibilities. One of the challenges the MRDH faces is how to bring the economies of Rotterdam and The Hague closer together while generating growth and well-being.