Publications & Documents

The frequency and severity of extreme wildfires are on the rise in the United States, causing unprecedented disruption and increasingly challenging the country’s capacity to contain losses and damages. These challenges are set to keep growing in the context of climate change, highlighting the need to scale up wildfire prevention and climate change adaptation. This paper provides an overview of the United States’ wildfire policies and practices and assesses the extent to which wildfire management in the country is evolving to adapt to growing wildfire risk under climate change.

Artificial intelligence will have profound impacts across health systems, transforming health care, public health, and research. Responsible AI can accelerate efforts toward health systems being more resilient, sustainable, equitable, and person-centred. This paper provides an overview of the background and current state of artificial intelligence in health, perspectives on opportunities, risks, and barriers to success. The paper proposes several areas to be explored for policy makers to advance the future of responsible AI in health that is adaptable to change, respects individuals, champions equity, and achieves better health outcomes for all. The areas to be explored relate to trust, capacity building, evaluation, and collaboration. This recognises that the primary forces that are needed to unlock the value from artificial intelligence are people-based and not technical. The OECD is ready to support efforts for co-operative learning and collective action to advance the use of responsible AI in health.

Open government data has become a vital instrument for addressing both longstanding and emerging policy issues. In particular, the recent pandemic and the green transition have underscored the need for governments to ensure access to timely, relevant, and high-quality data to foster resilience and facilitate a comprehensive whole-of-society response. This paper presents the main findings of the fourth edition of the OECD Open, Useful, and Re-usable data (OURdata) Index for 2023, which benchmarks efforts made by governments to design and implement national open government data policies. It encompasses over 670 data points collected from 36 OECD countries and 4 accession countries throughout 2022.

This is the first G7 Gender Equality Implementation Report, prepared under the 2023 Japanese G7 Presidency at the request of G7 Leaders and in consultation with G7 members, as part of the G7 Monitoring and Accountability Mechanism (MAM) (Elmau 2022). The report presents good practices and progress made by the G7 in meeting commitments related to gender equality made during G7 Presidencies since 2017. The report aims to inform future G7 decision-making on gender equality. The report provides an overview of efforts to promote family-friendly policies; reduce gender pay gaps and improve women’s leadership in public and private sectors; promote women’s entrepreneurship; and foster women’s participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The report also discusses efforts to address gender-based violence, as well as policies targeted at global challenges, including supporting gender equality in conflict and fragile settings.

The rapid acceleration in the pace of AI innovation in recent years and the advent of content generating capabilities (Generative AI or GenAI) have increased interest in AI innovation in finance, in part due to the user-friendliness and intuitive interface of GenAI tools. The use of AI in financial markets involving full end-to-end automation without any human intervention remains largely at development phase, but its wider deployment could amplify risks already present in financial markets and give rise to new challenges. This paper presents recent evolutions in AI in finance and potential risks and discusses whether policy makers may need to reinforce policies and strengthen protection against these risks.

As countries seek to draw lessons the COVID-19 crisis and increase their future resilience, evaluations are important tools to understand what worked or not, why and for whom. This report builds on the OECD work on 'government evaluations of COVID-19 responses'. It evaluates Belgium’s responses to the pandemic in terms of risk preparedness, crisis management, as well as public health, education, economic and fiscal, and social and labour market policies. Preserving the country’s resilience in the future will require promoting trust in public institutions and whole-of-government approaches to crisis management, reducing inequalities, and preserving the fiscal balance. The findings and recommendations of this report will provide guidance to public authorities in these efforts.

The 2023 edition of Pensions at a Glance highlights the pension reforms undertaken by OECD countries over the last two years. It includes a special chapter focusing on pension provisions for hazardous or arduous work. It describes existing rules, characterises recent policy trends and assesses the design and functioning of early-retirement rules for hazardous or arduous jobs given changing working conditions and ageing pressure on pension systems. This edition also updates information on the key features of pension provision in OECD and G20 countries and provides projections of retirement income for today’s workers. It offers indicators covering the design of pension systems, pension entitlements, the demographic and economic context in which pension systems operate, incomes and poverty of older people, the finances of retirement income systems and private pensions.

Over the past few decades, economies and technologies have shifted in ways that have made people’s economic prospects more uncertain. This Policy Insights highlights the main findings from On Shaky Ground? Income Instability and Economic Insecurity in Europe, the inaugural report of the OECD Observatory on Social Mobility and Equal Opportunity. It utilises novel techniques to identify the economically insecure, those most vulnerable to income fluctuations, in European OECD countries, and explores the link between income fluctuations, social mobility, and income inequality. It also recommends a range of policies aimed at enhancing social protection timeliness to better support those with highly volatile incomes and at building financial buffers for individuals at risk of economic insecurity.