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The 'OECD Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs Scoreboard: 2023 Highlights' document SME and entrepreneurship financing trends, conditions and policy developments. The report provides official data on SME financing in close to 50 countries, including indicators on debt, equity, asset-based finance and financing conditions. Data for 2021 are complemented by available information for 2022, along with demand-side information and recent developments in public policy and private initiatives to support SME finance. Findings reveal that most economies showed the beginnings of a dynamic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis in 2021. However, data available for 2022 point to a deterioration in a number of SME finance indicators, due to high inflation and rising interest rates, exacerbated by the effects of Russia's war against Ukraine. These factors are impacting the accessibility and cost of debt finance for SMEs, and foreshadow a slowdown in lending. Likewise, equity finance showed a significant decline in 2022. In this context, governments should continue to foster the diversification of SME financing instruments and channels to enable them to build resilience and undertake crucial investments, such as those in digitalisation and greening.

This report highlights worldwide competition enforcement trends using the unique OECD CompStats database that includes 34 variables covering competition authority resources, cartels, abuse of dominance, mergers, and advocacy. This report presents comparisons between geographic regions and trends over time, allowing jurisdictions to understand how their data compares to peers and the broader competition community. This edition focuses on the main developments in global competition enforcement in 2021, and contributes to continuously improving competition law and policy around the world.

Open banking allows users to access financial information and services through consent-based data portability. This paper brings together the views of private and public experts from a wide variety of countries to explore opportunities and challenges of open banking for financial regulation, privacy protection, and competition. It discusses the different approaches taken by jurisdictions across the globe, and the importance of regulation and standards. While open banking empowers users in sharing and re-using their data across digital services, online platforms, sectors and borders, uncertainty in the interactions with data protection and privacy regimes remains challenging. This paper informs OECD work to consider how cross-sectoral cooperation between financial, competition and data protection authorities could help further open banking.

This paper explores potential influences on the ability and willingness to save for retirement, in order to uncover how asset-backed pension systems could be more inclusive of diverse populations. This paper illustrates the type of analysis that countries could conduct to better understand what factors may explain lower participation from certain individuals beyond labour market drivers, by looking at the views, attitudes and expectations of individuals across socio-economic characteristics on a sample of adults from the United Kingdom.

This report examines how to promote sustainable infrastructure investment. It discusses data needs for infrastructure investment and the current environment, social and governance (ESG) approaches before offering policy recommendations to help ensure that investors are better equipped to make investment decisions related to infrastructure assets. The report explores legal and regulatory barriers to quality infrastructure investment, and considers how governments can help infrastructure actors promote quality infrastructure projects, ensure project objectives and reporting correspond with investor expectations, and how to mobilise funding and financing for inclusive and quality infrastructure investment in both regions and cities.

Data sharing arrangements are evolving from open banking to open finance. This next stage of the evolution builds upon existing frameworks to expand data access and data source sharing beyond payment/transaction data, while also including other areas of financial activity (e.g. insurance). This paper analyses the different types of data sharing frameworks currently available in OECD and non-OECD member countries. It examines the specific rules and conditions of such frameworks around data access and sharing, consumer safeguards, and operational and technical specifications. It also discusses learnings from existing frameworks on the impact that such arrangements have had on customers and financial markets.

This paper analyses the efforts made by the governments of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to attract sustainable investment and how they can further promote investment benefits for social and environmental objectives. It uses the OECD’s flagship tools on investment and responsible business conduct, and builds on the OECD’s strong collaboration on investment with ASEAN. Aiming to help ASEAN Member States in their efforts to implement the sustainable investment component of the ASEAN Comprehensive Recovery Framework, this paper provides indicators to measure the sustainability impacts of foreign direct investment, benchmarks investment policy reforms and investment promotion priorities, and suggests ways to enable responsible business conduct and policy initiatives to foster green investment.

This paper discusses the sensitivity of capital and multifactor productivity (MFP) measurement to asset depreciation patterns and initial capital stock estimates. Applying the same depreciation rates in the US as in other G7 countries would reduce the US net investment rate and net capital stock by up to one third and increase US GDP by up to 0.5%. Capital and MFP growth would be less affected. Estimating initial capital stocks often involves assuming constant investment growth, but this leads to unreliable results. Relying on average K/Y ratios across countries works well for the US, but this might not be the case for other countries due to the international dispersion in K/Y ratios. Two main recommendations for statistical agencies emerge from this analysis. First, they should regularly review asset depreciation patterns to ensure that measured differences across countries are well justified. Second, they should backcast investment series as much as possible before relying on stationarity assumptions to estimate initial capital stocks.