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The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has an unprecedented ambition, but also confronts countries with an enormous challenge given the complex and integrated nature of the Agenda with its 17 Goals, underpinned by 169 Targets. To assist national governments with their implementation, the OECD has developed a unique methodology allowing comparison of progress across SDG goals and targets, and also over time. Based on the Global indicator framework for the Sustainable Development Goals and leveraging UN and OECD data, this report provides a high-level assessment of OECD Member countries’ performance across the Goals and Targets of the 2030 Agenda. The report evaluates the distance that OECD countries need to travel to meet SDG targets for which data is currently available, but it goes one step further and deepens the analysis by identifying long-term trends, considering also how these trends may be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. By providing a high-level overview of countries’ strengths and weaknesses in performance across the SDGs, it aims to support Member countries in navigating the SDGs and in setting their own priorities for action within the broad 2030 Agenda.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems are in a period of rapid development and offer significant potential for the promotion of health and well-being. At the same time, they raise a range of unique ethical, legal, and policy questions, and few BCI-specific rules exist in a fragmented regulatory landscape. This report aims to help develop a responsible and anticipatory governance approach to promote innovation while shaping the trajectory of technology through a set of mechanisms, including (i) soft law, (ii) standardisation and ethics-by-design approaches, (iii) corporate self-governance, and (iv) participatory experiments for upstream governance.

Governments can use artificial intelligence (AI) to design better policies and make better and more targeted decisions, enhance communication and engagement with citizens, and improve the speed and quality of public services. The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is seeking to leverage the immense potential of AI to promote the digital transformation of the public sector. The OECD, in collaboration with CAF, Development Bank of Latin America, prepared this report to help national governments in the LAC region understand the current regional baseline of activities and capacities for AI in the public sector; to identify specific approaches and actions they can take to enhance their ability to use this emerging technology for efficient, effective and responsive governments; and to collaborate across borders in pursuit of a regional vision for AI in the public sector. This report incorporates a stocktaking of each country’s strategies and commitments around AI in the public sector, including their alignment with the OECD AI Principles. It also includes an analysis of efforts to build key governance capacities and put in place critical enablers for AI in the public sector. It concludes with a series of recommendations for governments in the LAC region.

This paper examines the current development of hydrogen technology in the manufacturing sector and the industrial policies enacted to support it across countries. In addition to continued R&D efforts, governments can already lay the ground for the deployment of green hydrogen by implementing five types of policies: 1) supporting R&D and demonstration for green hydrogen to bring down the cost of electrolysers and make them competitive; 2) increasing the supply of renewable electricity; 3) reducing the cost gap between green hydrogen and brown technologies through a comprehensive policy package, such as carbon pricing and the phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies; 4) reducing uncertainty, for instance by promoting international standardisation, hydrogen infrastructure, and sound regulatory standards; and 5) considering blue hydrogen as a short-term option to facilitate the transition to green hydrogen.

As artificial intelligence (AI) integrates all sectors at a rapid pace, different AI systems bring different benefits and risks. In comparing virtual assistants, self-driving vehicles and video recommendations for children, it is easy to see that the benefits and risks of each are very different. Their specificities will require different approaches to policy making and governance. To help policy makers, regulators, legislators and others characterise AI systems deployed in specific contexts, the OECD has developed a user-friendly tool to evaluate AI systems from a policy perspective. It can be applied to the widest range of AI systems across the following dimensions: People & Planet; Economic Context; Data & Input; AI model; and Task & Output. Each of the framework's dimensions has a subset of properties and attributes to define and assess policy implications and to guide an innovative and trustworthy approach to AI as outlined in the OECD AI Principles.

This Open and Connected Government Review of Thailand, the first of its kind, assesses Thailand’s efforts to build a government that is closer and more responsive to its citizens by using digitalisation, data and stakeholder participation to drive national development. In line with OECD good practices, the Recommendations of the Council on Digital Government Strategies (2014) and on Open Government (2017), and the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework, the review looks at institutional and legal governance, digital talent and skills, public service provision and the strategic use of technologies and data in the Thai government. The review provides policy recommendations to help the government of Thailand fully benefit from openness and digitalisation to build an inclusive, responsive, citizen- and data-driven public administration.

The paper empirically assesses the effect of climate policy stringency on innovation and economic performance, both directly on regulated sectors and indirectly through supply chain relationships. The analysis is based on a combination of firm- and sector-level data, covering 19 countries and the period from 1990 to 2015. The paper shows that climate policies are effective at inducing innovation in low-carbon technologies in directly regulated sectors. It does not find evidence that climate policies induce significant innovation along the supply chain. In addition, there is no evidence that climate policies – through the channel of clean innovation – either harm or improve the economic performance of regulated firms. This supports the evidence that past climate policies have not been major burdens on firms’ competitiveness, and that clean innovation may enable firms to compensate for the potential costs implied by new environmental regulations.

This paper exploits natural language processing techniques to detect explicit labour-saving goals in inventive efforts in robotics and assess their relevance for different occupational profiles and the impact on employment levels. The analysis relies on patents published by the European Patent Office between 1978 and 2019 and firm-level data from ORBIS® IP. It investigates innovative actors engaged in labour-saving technologies and their economic environment (identity, location, industry), and identifies technological fields and associated occupations which are particularly exposed to them. Labour-saving patents are concentrated in Japan, the United States, and Italy, and seem to affect low-skilled and blue-collar jobs, along with highly cognitive and specialised professions. A preliminary analysis does not find an appreciable negative effect on employment shares in OECD countries over the past decade, but further research to econometrically investigate the relationship between labour-saving technological developments and employment would be helpful.