Publications & Documents

Good policy making for child well-being calls for government ministries, agencies and other service providers to better collaborate and focus on a small number of key child well-being issues. 'Integrated policy making for child well-being: Common approaches and challenges ahead' takes stock of OECD countries’ recent initiatives to strengthen the integration of child well-being policies. It documents OECD countries’ experiences of implementing integrated policy plans for child well-being and child-specific policy tools, specifically child indicator sets, child impact assessments and child budgeting. It lays out the challenges facing countries as they work to push the child well-being policy agenda forward and discusses what countries can do to become more effective. Pursuing efforts to strengthen the integration of child well-being policies is costly. Accordingly, it’s important for countries to proactively consider the arising challenges and to look at options to overcome or avoid altogether the common pitfalls.

This report provides an overview of gender budgeting practices across OECD countries, based on the 2022 OECD Survey on Gender Budgeting as well as trends from surveys conducted in 2016 and 2018. It takes stock of countries’ progress in developing an effective and sustainable gender budgeting approach and discusses challenges and plans for the further development of gender budgeting. Country case studies highlight gender budgeting in practice. The report also presents the 2022 OECD Gender Budgeting Index, which compares the implementation of gender budgeting across five key areas: 1) institutional and strategic arrangements; 2) methods and tools; 3) enabling environment; 4) accountability and transparency; and 5) impact.

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are laying the groundwork for extensive and rapid transformations in society. Understanding the relationship between AI capabilities and human skills is essential to ensure policy responsiveness to ongoing and incoming changes. The OECD has tracked how well AI systems fare on tasks from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), comparing AI performance to that of 15-year-old students in the test’s core domains of reading, mathematics and science. Tests were conducted using the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) family of large language models (LLMs), the AI behind ChatGPT, which took the world by storm after its public release in late 2022. Results show that both GPT versions outperform average student performance in reading and science. In addition, we observe rapid advances in mathematics where AI capabilities are quickly catching up with those of students. In November 2022, GPT-3.5 could answer 35% of a set of PISA mathematics tasks, a level of performance significantly below that of humans, who answer 51% of the tasks successfully on average. However, by March 2023, GPT-4 answered 40% of the tasks successfully. Policy implications of these results are discussed in this paper.

This study provides an in-depth examination of the fiscal and governance decentralisation of long-term care (LTC) across OECD countries, offering projections of future fiscal burdens of LTC spending across levels of government. With rapid population ageing and a decrease in the supply of informal care, LTC spending has increased significantly. The paper introduces a novel methodology to estimate LTC expenditures across different government levels, including central and subnational governments. By analysing country cases, it explores the responsibilities assigned to each government level and the implications for service delivery and intergovernmental coordination. The study also discusses the overall anticipated increase of LTC expenditure to 2.3% of GDP by 2040, identifying the most impacted countries. This research contributes to our understanding of LTC systems, highlights the challenges of increasing LTC costs and provides insights for optimising governance and fiscal expenditure.

Lithuania is one of the fastest-ageing countries in Europe. Its working-age population is not only ageing, but also expected to decline significantly, giving rise to considerable economic, labour market, social and public governance challenges. The inclusion of older persons has improved in many areas in the past two decades. Yet, many Lithuanians aged 55 and over continue to lag in fully engaging in society relative to younger people and their peers in neighbouring countries. This report takes a holistic approach to analyse Active Ageing policies in Lithuania in three dimensions: labour market inclusion, social policies, and participation in public and political life. It provides tailored policy recommendations to improve the well-being of older people in Lithuania in terms of better employment and lifelong learning outcomes, stronger integration in society, and participation in democratic institutions and processes.

Flanders experienced large inflows of immigrants over the past decade, coming from an increasingly diverse range of countries, with growth rates outpacing the Netherlands, France and Germany, as well as Belgium as a whole. While integration outcomes have improved in recent years, some of the core indicators remain unfavourable in international comparison, especially for non-EU immigrant women, refugees, and youth with migrant parents. Against this backdrop, Flanders has developed a comprehensive integration policy. This review, the fourth in the series Working Together for Integration, provides an in-depth analysis of the Flemish integration system, highlighting its strengths, weaknesses, and potential areas for improvement. Earlier reviews in this series looked at integration in Sweden (2016), Finland (2018) and Norway (2022).

This report presents an in-depth cross-country analysis of how long-term care workers fare along the different dimensions of job quality. In the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the applause for care workers was a clear expression of the strong recognition of their hard work and exposure to risks in their job. However, as the applause faded after the peak of the crisis, questions have re-emerged about how to improve the working conditions of long-term care workers in a sustainable way. Over the coming decades, the demand for these workers will increase substantially. Several countries are already facing shortages as the large baby-boom generation joins the older population. To go Beyond Applause, a comprehensive policy strategy is needed to tackle poor working conditions and insufficient social recognition of long-term care work, attract workers in the sector and avoid labour shortages reaching unacceptable levels. Such a strategy should cover several dimensions, with different priorities across countries depending on their specific context, including: direct interventions to raise wages and increase staff requirements; increasing public financing and fostering the leading role by governments; supporting collective bargaining and social dialogue; strengthening training; increasing use of new technologies; and, strengthening health prevention policies.

Despite strong economic performance and significant governance reforms over the past few decades, Lithuania has a higher share of its population at-risk-of poverty than other EU countries (21.4% in 2020 compared to an EU average of 16.3%), with some people more at risk than others, particularly people with multiple and complex needs in vulnerable situations who tend to rely more on public services. The provision of personalised services is fundamental to addressing the needs of people in vulnerable situations and to improving their well-being. This report is part of a joint project between the OECD and the European Commission to develop a more integrated approach to personalised services for people with disabilities, young people leaving care, and people leaving prison in Lithuania and to increase the involvement of non-governmental organisations in the design and delivery of those services. The report provides an analysis and assessment of the governance arrangements and NGO involvement in Lithuanian public service provision, the associated operating models and information technology (IT) infrastructure of employment and social services; and service design and delivery methods for the three groups. Finally, the report proposes recommendations to deliver effective, well-integrated public services to people in vulnerable situations in Lithuania.

Governments at all levels are looking for new and innovative ways to include individuals in vulnerable situations such as youth, migrants, persons with disabilities and families facing multiple challenges, in the labour market and in society more generally. This paper explores integration of employment services with other services (e.g. social, health and housing) at the local level as one promising way for governments to provide more effective support that is holistic and person-centred and be more efficient in public spending. The paper analyses different forms of local service integration, the possible benefits, and the particular roles subnational governments can play in service integration reforms – ranging from national public employment service-led reforms to more locally driven reforms. The paper also analyses the barriers to service integration and proposes future work to strengthen local service integration.