Reports

The note provides a preliminary inventory of the policy responses adopted by the Italian regions to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter 1 focuses on the repercussions on the Italian economy. Chapter 2 provides an overview of national policy responses. Chapter 3 explains the role regions play within Italy’s institutional setting regarding economic development, particularly SME policy. Chapter 4 provides a regional deep dive on the measures put in place by the regions to support SMEs during the pandemic. Chapter 5 provides a summary of the main findings. This working document will be periodically updated and enriched with further analytical insights in the coming weeks.

The design of intergovernmental fiscal relations can help to ensure that tax and spending powers are assigned in a way to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Decentralisation can enable sub-central governments to provide better public services for households and firms, while it can also make intergovernmental frameworks more complex, harming equity. The challenges of fiscal federalism are multi-faceted and involve difficult trade-offs. This synthesis paper consolidates much of the OECD’s work on fiscal federalism over the past 15 years, with a particular focus on OECD Economic Surveys. The paper identifies a range of good practices on the design of country policies and institutions related strengthening fiscal capacity delineating responsibilities across evels of government and improving intergovernmental co-ordination.

Under Action 14, countries have committed to implement a minimum standard to strengthen the effectiveness and efficiency of the mutual agreement procedure (MAP). The MAP is included in Article 25 of the OECD Model Tax Convention and commits countries to endeavour to resolve disputes related to the interpretation and application of tax treaties. The Action 14 Minimum Standard has been translated into specific terms of reference and a methodology for the peer review and monitoring process. The peer review process is conducted in two stages. Stage 1 assesses countries against the terms of reference of the minimum standard according to an agreed schedule of review. Stage 2 focuses on monitoring the follow-up of any recommendations resulting from jurisdictions' stage 1 peer review report. This report reflects the outcome of the stage 2 peer monitoring of the implementation of the Action 14 Minimum Standard by Italy.

Countries need to urgently scale-up and upgrade their adult learning systems to help people adapt to the future world of work. Today, only two in five adults across the EU and OECD participate in education and training in any given year, according to the OECD Survey of Adults Skills. Participation is even lower among disadvantaged adults, such as those with low skill levels or in jobs at high risk of automation. For adult learning systems to be future-ready, governments must increase their efforts to engage more adults in continuous learning throughout their lives. While much has been written about the need for progress, it is less clear how adult learning participation can be increased in practice. Many good ideas struggle to translate into real change on the ground, as they get stuck in the reality of policy implementation. This report aims to understand the factors that make adult learning reforms succeed. It identifies lessons from six countries that have significantly increased participation over the past decades: Austria, Estonia, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and Singapore. To shed light on how these countries achieved this objective, this study looks at the details of reform design, implementation and evaluation.

This paper presents and discusses the general findings and key policy messages of the 2019 OECD Open, Useful and Re-usable data (OURdata) Index, and provides a detailed analysis of the results for each pillar and sub-pillar. Additionally, it assesses the main advancements and challenges related to the design and implementation of open government data (OGD) policies in OECD member and partner countries by comparing the results for 2019 with those of the 2017 edition. This policy paper contributes to the OECD work on the digital transformation of the public sector, including digital government and data-driven public sector and open government data.

Universities’ entrepreneurship and innovative practices are burgeoning all over Italy. Some of these practices resonate at the international level while others have a local impact. Italian higher education faces some important challenges and actions need to be taken to unleash its full potential. Promoting the entrepreneurial and innovation agenda can help Italy improve the overall performance of the higher education system, and of individual universities, in all regions. The government has started providing a strategic support to engagement, which could catalyse Italy’s innovation capacity, human capital endowment, and well-being. This review illustrates policy actions promoting the entrepreneurial and innovative activities in the Italian Higher Education System, and focuses on 11 case study universities. It discusses strategies and practices adopted by Italian higher education institutions to innovate, engage, and generate value for the society and the economy. This review is part of a series of national reports implementing the HEinnovate framework. HEinnovate is a guiding framework that the OECD and the European Commission have developed to promote the 'entrepreneurial and innovation agenda' in higher education.

This profile provides a concise and policy-relevant overview of health and the health system in Italy as part of the broader series of the State of Health in the EU country profiles. It provides a short synthesis of: the health status in the country; the determinants of health, focussing on behavioural risk factors; the organisation of the health system; and the effectiveness, accessibility and resilience of the health system. This profile is the joint work of the OECD and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, in co-operation with the European Commission.

The OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) conducts periodic reviews of the individual development co-operation efforts of DAC members. The policies and programmes of each DAC member are critically examined approximately once every five years. DAC peer reviews assess the performance of a given member, not just that of its development co-operation agency, and examine both policy and implementation. They take an integrated, system-wide perspective on the development co-operation and humanitarian assistance activities of the member under review. Italy is strongly committed to multilateralism, and it uses its convening power as well as expertise in co-operation to make the country a leading voice on issues such as agriculture and cultural heritage. The country’s commitment to leaving no one behind is particularly apparent through the focus on gender and disability. However, the country would benefit from reversing the recent decline in official development assistance (ODA), building a stronger and better-skilled workforce, forming a coherent, whole-of-government approach to migration and development, and creating a system to manage for results.

This edition of the Reader’s Companion accompanies Skills Matter: Additional Results from the Survey of Adult Skills that reports the results from the 39 countries and regions that participated in the 3 rounds of data collection in the first cycle of PIAAC, with a particular focus on the 6 countries that participated in the third round of the study (Ecuador, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Peru and the United States). It describes the design and methodology of the survey and its relationship to other international assessments of young students and adults. The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), was designed to provide insights into the availability of some key skills in society and how they are used at work and at home. The first survey of its kind, it directly measures proficiency in several information-processing skills – namely literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments.