Publications & Documents

Like other Nordic countries Norway has been investing heavily in family policy to enable combining work and family life. Nevertheless, between 2009 and 2022 the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Norway dropped from 2 children to 1.4 children per woman. What is happening, and why? Can Norwegian parents still reconcile work and family commitments? What role do demographic trends play for the future of the Norwegian society? Should we worry? These are some of the questions that this study addresses. It illustrates various aspects of fertility trends, as well as changes in the Norwegian labour market as well as in Norway’s comprehensive system of public family support. The study also looks at social attitudes and how these might be affecting family formation and fertility trends. The final chapter projects demographic, economic, fiscal and social outcomes under different fertility trend scenarios.

The Latvian government established the Housing Affordability Fund in mid-2022, a long-term self-sustaining financing model to channel investment into affordable housing. The fund is now being scaled up to ensure lasting impact on the Latvian housing market. This report identifies options for institutional arrangements, funding and financing opportunities, and operational tools to achieve this aim. It draws on the rich and diverse experiences of four peer countries in establishing and operating revolving fund schemes for affordable housing (Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Slovenia), and also reflects findings from engagement with a range of stakeholders in the Latvian housing sector.

Many Lithuanian households struggle to afford good-quality housing. The housing stock is dominated by owner-occupied, multi-apartment buildings that are energy inefficient and face persistent quality gaps. While average household spending on housing is relatively low, house prices have been rising, and many households cannot afford to move to higher quality homes that better suit their needs. Lithuanian policy makers have stepped up support for housing in recent years, but more actions are needed. This report presents the main features of the Lithuanian housing market, highlights housing challenges that have been amplified by the current economic and geopolitical crises, and assesses current policies to address housing affordability and quality gaps. It proposes a series of recommendations to strengthen the supply of and access to affordable housing, and to support Lithuania’s commitment to make housing policy a priority.

Pay transparency policies are gaining momentum throughout the OECD. Over half of OECD countries require private sector firms to report their gender pay gap statistics regularly to stakeholders like employees, employee representatives, the government, and/or the public. Gender pay gap reporting, equal pay audits and other pay transparency policies help advance gender equality at the workplace, as these measures present up-to-date information on a firm’s gender pay gap, encourage employers to offer equal pay for work of equal value, and give individual workers and their representatives valuable insights to fight for pay equity. This report presents the most thorough stocktaking to date of gender pay gap reporting policies and evaluations across OECD countries, and offers guidance to countries interested in introducing, reforming and monitoring their pay transparency systems to promote equal pay for women and men.

This working paper proposes a methodology to monetise five aspects of employee well-being (wage inequality, being employed, excess working hours, relationships with management and job security) using theoretical and empirical frameworks drawn from welfare economics. Preliminary results highlight a large loss of welfare arising from within-firm wage inequality as well as a strong impact of working conditions on workers’ well-being. On the aggregate, suppressing the negative externalities of the firm linked to excess working hours, tensions with management and job insecurity would yield an increase in social welfare equivalent to a 25% increase in household income, representing many years of economic growth. Greater transparency on company wage distributions and working conditions is necessary to apply these methodologies to real firms.

In recent decades, Colombia has pursued a strategy to encourage gender equality as an important enabler of inclusive growth and national well-being and to promote gender mainstreaming through institutions, policies and tools. This report assesses four main pillars of Colombia’s governance for gender equality, analysing strengths and identifying areas for further improvement. It examines strategic planning for gender equality policy, a whole-of-government approach to promoting gender equality policy, using government tools to achieve gender equality objectives, and an inclusive and gender-sensitive emergency preparedness framework. The report also provides examples of different approaches in OECD Member and Partner countries to closing gender equality gaps. Based on this analysis, the report proposes solutions to help Colombia strengthen gender mainstreaming and gender-sensitive policy making to promote sustainable, inclusive economic growth.

Despite the fundamental importance of childhood, countries tend to invest much less in this area than in old age. Effective child well-being policies can bring high long-term returns on early life investments and public interventions. However, these benefits are not fully understood and thus do not always receive the necessary political attention in public policy making. Mobilising evidence to support effective policies for child well-being is crucial, especially as responsibilities for such policies tend to be fragmented across government departments and levels of government. Therefore, organisations such as knowledge brokers, which help ensure that evidence is shared with those responsible for designing and implementing public policies, have a critical role to play in improving the effectiveness of child well-being policies and practices. They can help make evidence accessible, trustworthy, and understandable, so that it has the greatest impact on policy. This working paper sheds light on the best practices identified for mobilising evidence to enhance the effectiveness of child well-being policies, based on a stocktaking of 81 knowledge broker organisations across 24 countries, complemented by a qualitative survey carried out among senior experts operating at national and international level.

Increasingly more emphasis is placed on damages and risks that people, companies and governments face in the way they affect their well-being as well as material conditions or financial fundamentals. There is, however, still quite a bit of heterogeneity in how countries and companies frame and implement their endeavours, sometimes with no harmonised or unified goals as well as a lack of consistent metrics for assessing their impacts on the environment and society. Common semantics on just transition concepts and a solid understanding of just transition activities by governments and businesses would help assess the scale of the problem. This Policy Insights provides a glimpse at some of the positive practices to encourage others to make the shift and provide a benchmark against which future action could be measured.

This report provides a global assessment and outlook on wildfire risk in the context of climate change. It discusses the drivers behind the growing incidence of extreme wildfires and the attribution effect of climate change. It outlines the environmental, social and economic impacts of wildfires by illustrating the losses and costs observed during recent extreme wildfire events. Building on this, the report presents the findings of a cross-country comparative analysis of how countries’ policies and practices have evolved in recent years in light of observed and projected changes in wildfire risk. The analysis draws on in-depth case studies conducted in Australia, Costa Rica, Greece, Portugal and the United States. The report underlines the urgent need for governments to scale up climate change adaptation efforts to limit future wildfire costs.