Latest Documents

The automotive sector is important across OECD countries in terms of value-added and R&D, but is also heavily affected by the green and the digital transformations. This paper offers a novel and holistic view of the automotive sector and its surrounding ecosystem based on a combination of Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables, patent data, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions, cross-country micro-distributed data and firm-level balance sheet data. It identifies the boundaries of this industrial ecosystem including connected sectors (e.g. upstream and downstream) as well as knowledge and technology providers (e.g. universities or the digital industry). The paper documents emerging trends at the geographical and technological levels and provides a comprehensive assessment of the ecosystem’s changing microstructure, with a growing role of young and digital-intensive companies. Finally, it provides recommendations for effective public policies to support the automotive ecosystem, with a focus on innovation, competition and the growth of young firms.

Policy makers are increasingly grappling with the stability implications of global value chains (GVCs), as widespread supply shortages following the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian Federation’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine have disrupted the economic recovery and contributed to high inflation. This paper provides a tool to assess vulnerabilities in GVCs by drawing a detailed map of dependencies based on new indicators constructed from the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output tables. The key findings are as follows. First, GVC dependencies increase with both the size of foreign exposures and the length of foreign value chains. Second, in some industries, such as the automotive and ICT industries, vulnerabilities from high GVC dependence are amplified by high geographic concentration of suppliers or buyers. Third, the People’s Republic of China is the most critical choke point in GVCs across a broad range of industries, both as a dominant supplier and as a dominant buyer.

The transition to climate neutrality requires cost reductions in existing clean technologies to enable rapid deployment on a large scale, as well as the development of emerging technologies such as green hydrogen. This policy paper argues that science, technology, innovation, and industrial (STI&I) policies focusing on developing and deploying low-carbon technologies are crucial to achieving carbon neutrality. It notes however that the current level of innovation is insufficient to meet the net-zero challenge due to a policy emphasis on deployment rather than research and development (R&D) support. The paper explores the rationale for more ambitious STI&I policies targeted at R&D for climate neutrality and provides policy recommendations for an effective innovation policy for net-zero, including its interaction with the broader climate policy package.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming economies and promising new opportunities for productivity, growth, and resilience. Countries are responding with national AI strategies to capitalise on these transformations. However, no country today has data on, or a targeted plan for, national AI compute capacity. This policy blind-spot may jeopardise domestic economic goals. This report provides the first blueprint for policy makers to help assess and plan for the national AI compute capacity needed to enable productivity gains and capture AI’s full economic potential. It provides guidance for policy makers on how to develop a national AI compute plan along three dimensions: capacity (availability and use), effectiveness (people, policy, innovation, access), and resilience (security, sovereignty, sustainability). The report also defines AI compute, takes stock of indicators, datasets, and proxies for measuring national AI compute capacity, and identifies obstacles to measuring and benchmarking national AI compute capacity across countries.

This report presents research and findings on accountability and risk in AI systems by providing an overview of how risk-management frameworks and the AI system lifecycle can be integrated to promote trustworthy AI. It also explores processes and technical attributes that can facilitate the implementation of values-based principles for trustworthy AI and identifies tools and mechanisms to define, assess, treat, and govern risks at each stage of the AI system lifecycle. This report leverages OECD frameworks – including the OECD AI Principles, the AI system lifecycle, and the OECD framework for classifying AI systems – and recognised risk-management and due-diligence frameworks like the ISO 31000 risk-management framework, the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct, and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI risk-management framework.

Widespread supply disruptions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian Federation’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine have raised concerns among policy makers that globalised value chains expose domestic production to shocks from abroad. This paper uses new indicators of global value chain dependencies and exogenous pandemic shocks to econometrically estimate the effects of supply disruptions abroad on domestic output. The results suggest that the adverse effects of supply disruptions are particularly large when concentration of supplying countries and supplying firms is high. Counterfactual simulations of the econometric model suggest that diversification of suppliers would have sizeable benefits in terms of shielding domestic production against country-specific supply shocks, with partial onshoring of production having only small additional benefits. Technological innovation that reduces foreign dependencies, such as the substitution of renewable energies for fossil fuels, can have similar benefits as diversification.

Accurate measurement of shipbuilding capacity is critical to inform market stakeholders of excess capacity issues. This report presents several approaches to improve the estimates of shipbuilding capacity. It shows how the use of average production would allow for smoothening the proxy of capacity in the yard-by-yard production approach. It discusses how firm level indicators, such as productivity, can also be considered. An analysis of productivity developments for a sample of shipbuilding firms shows that their productivity evolves in function of the market situation which, therefore, should be taken into account in the proxies of capacity based on yard production. Finally, the report studies how mergers and acquisitions of shipbuilding firms may impact capacity.