Publications & Documents

This report explores how governments in Latin America and the Caribbean can use digital technology and data to foster responsiveness, resilience and proactiveness in the public sector. This report looks at governance frameworks, digital government capabilities, data-driven public sector, public service design and delivery, and digital innovation in the public sector. It identifies trends, challenges, strengths, and opportunities for cross-border collaboration and provides policy recommendations to achieve an efficient and sustainable digital transformation of governments across the region.

Africa is undergoing an unprecedented urban and climate transition; yet, given the right conditions, compact urban forms can encourage greater sustainability, resilience and liveability in the coming decades. Using novel techniques and newly available data, this report fills in existing data gaps by producing measures of compactness for 5 625 urban agglomerations, along with other urban form attributes. Even though urbanisation is often unplanned and uncoordinated, a promising trend has emerged: very large cities (of over 4 million inhabitants) are more compact, discounting the population effect, on average, than larger (1 million to 4 million inhabitants) and intermediate cities (50 000 to 1 million inhabitants). Moreover, less compact agglomerations tend to have smaller buildings, flat, low skylines, less complete centres (reflecting a less optimal use of space) and polycentric patterns (i.e. multiple centres, rather than a single, monocentric city). This report analyses the consequences of less compact agglomerations for sustainability and liveability. The disadvantages include higher energy demand, less accessibility to services and opportunities, less walkable urban landscapes and greater car dependency, in addition to higher outdoor air pollution. It also considers the potential trade-offs with resilience; for example, compactness can lead to a loss of green space and an increase of urban heat island effects. The report offers opportunities in the coming years to single out potential areas of action for resilience, as well as for monitoring and evaluating progress.

This Policy Guidance is a product of the Development Assistance Committee’s multi-year programme of work on Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) in oil commodity trading. It proposes a set of relevant, feasible actions for providers of official development assistance (ODA) to respond to IFFs in oil commodity trading. The aim is to enhance the mobilisation of domestic resources for the benefit of populations living in oil-producing developing countries, and enable integrity in their energy transition, particularly in carbon trade.

The 'Miracle on the River Han' catapulted Korea from developing country to a prosperous economy, driven in part by advancements in science, technology, and innovation. Being the second-highest R&D spender among OECD economies, Korea excels in key technologies, including semiconductors, 6G, and ICT infrastructure. Despite this remarkable progress, disparities remain between SMEs and chaebols, manufacturing and services, ICT and non-ICT industries, and urban and rural areas. Korea also grapples with societal and economic vulnerabilities, including an aging population, a significant carbon footprint, limited renewable energy use, and pronounced gender inequality. To further seize opportunities for equitable and inclusive growth, Korea must foster a shared national vision to develop science, technology, and innovation to address societal issues, enhance R&D policy implementation, promote excellent research, further internationalise, and broaden technology diffusion.

The Sahel and West Africa region is facing a serious food and nutrition security crisis with high rates of acute malnutrition, combined with high rates of malnourishment and over-nourishment – the 'triple burden of malnutrition'. Poor-quality diets are the root of all forms of malnutrition, as well as common non-communicable diseases, and are responsible for an estimated one in five adult deaths globally. The high cost of food is a key barrier to accessing a healthy diet. Even before the recent global inflation in food prices, West Africa’s food prices were 30%-40% higher than other regions in the world of comparable income levels. The paper analyses the costs of healthy diets in 17 countries in the Sahel and West Africa and which food groups drive up costs. The observed high cross-country variability in costs and cost composition points to a need for more targeted and nutrition-sensitive food system policies as well as the need to invest in better food price data and monitoring capacities.

What are the root causes of gender inequality? Building on the fifth edition of the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), the SIGI 2023 Global Report provides a global outlook of discriminatory social institutions, the fundamental causes of gender inequality. It reveals how formal and informal laws, social norms and practices limit women’s and girls’ rights and opportunities in all aspects of their lives. Globally, 40% of them continue to live in countries where gender-based discrimination is assessed as high or very high. The report stresses how discriminatory social institutions curtail women’s and adolescents’ fundamental access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. It also sheds light on the gendered impacts of climate change and underlines how women can play a pivotal role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. To accelerate efforts aimed at achieving SDG 5 and eliminating the underlying and structural factors that hamper women’s empowerment, the report offers concrete policy actions. It calls for a gender-transformative approach to leverage crises and challenges into windows of opportunity to establish women and men as agents of change.

By 2050, the global population living in cities is projected to reach 5 billion, growing from 3.5 billion in 2015. Massive investment in infrastructure will be needed to accommodate this growth, and to adapt infrastructure to climate change and benefit from the digital transition. This report explores three ways to meet this challenge. Firstly, it outlines how new forms of urban planning can help to mobilise private finance for inclusive, resilient and sustainable urban investment. Secondly, it explores how leveraging private investment can help to strengthen cities capacity to support needed investment in a tighter fiscal environment. Finally, it considers the potential opportunities and challenges for mobilising sustainable finance – green, social and sustainable bonds and loans, sustainability-linked bonds and catastrophe bonds – for infrastructure investment by City Governments. The report also includes 17 short case studies from 12 countries that demonstrate innovative practices for creating the Cities of Tomorrow.

This report is the third focused assessment of tax and development issues produced for G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors. It takes stock of progress by developing countries in the context of their engagement with the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework, an international collaboration of over 140 countries and jurisdictions working together to tackle tax avoidance, improve the coherence of international tax rules and ensure a more transparent tax environment. Building on the 2022 Roadmap on Developing Countries and International Tax, the report refines and focuses on the range of actions to be undertaken in support of developing countries’ key international tax priorities, including, in particular, the internationally agreed standards on Country-by-Country reporting and the Global Anti-Base Erosion (GloBE) Rules which will put in place a global minimum tax for large multinational enterprises.

Located in the mid-Atlantic, the archipelagos of the Azores is an autonomous region of Portugal and an European Union Outermost Region. Once central to global trade routes, the Azores are aspiring to regain a prominent international role by leveraging their unique geographical, natural and historical attributes. To that end, this Production Transformation Policy Review (PTPR) Spotlight identifies priority actions in several areas, including scientific research and collaborations, the ocean economy, agro-food and renewable-energy value chains. It shows the importance for EU Outermost Regions, as well as for Small Island Developing States (SIDS), of building resilient international ties. It benefited from an extensive peer review process involving public and private stakeholders from Brazil, Iceland and the United States.