Publications

Les Perspectives agricoles de l’OCDE et de la FAO 2024-2033 contiennent une évaluation consensuelle de ce que pourrait être l’évolution, sur les dix ans à venir, des marchés des produits agricoles, halieutiques et aquacoles. L’édition de cette année met au jour des tendances majeures. Les économies émergentes exerceront une influence déterminante sur le paysage de l’agriculture mondiale, notamment l’Inde qui devrait ravir à la Chine sa place de premier plan. Pour autant, l’apport calorique dans les pays à faible revenu ne progresserait que de 4 %, d’après les projections. L’intensité des émissions de gaz à effet de serre d’origine agricole devrait diminuer, même si les émissions directes de l’agriculture augmenteront sans doute de quelque 5 %. Néanmoins, à supposer que les pertes et gaspillages alimentaires diminuent de moitié, d’ici à 2030, ces émissions pourraient baisser de 4 % à l’échelle mondiale, et le nombre de personnes sous-alimentées de 153 millions d’individus. Le bon fonctionnement des marchés internationaux de produits agricoles demeurera essentiel à la sécurité alimentaire mondiale et à la subsistance des populations rurales. Compte tenu des évolutions attendues, les prix internationaux de référence réels devraient rester en léger recul tout au long de la décennie, si tant est que des facteurs environnementaux, sociaux, géopolitiques ou économiques ne viennent pas modifier sensiblement ces projections. On trouvera de plus amples informations à l’adresse suivante : www.agri-outlook.org/fr/.

Egypt is a rapidly growing emerging economy and a demographic heavyweight on the African continent. High population growth, land-use change, pollution and climate change are increasingly putting pressure on the natural environment, including on its rich biodiversity. Egypt has achieved relative decoupling of greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth, though it needs to further mainstream climate action across sectors and progressively raise ambition. As one of the world’s most water-stressed countries, greater use of economic instruments would help address scarcity and improve water quality. As part of Egypt’s Vision 2030, the government is committed to turning environmental challenges into opportunities. It has taken steps to move towards more sustainable waste management and address air pollution, which remains a health concern. Egypt has significant potential to accelerate its clean energy transition. While environmental information and data have improved overall, public participation in environmental decision making needs to be further enhanced. This is the first Green Growth Policy Review of Egypt. It examines progress towards sustainable development and green growth over the past decade. The 40 recommendations aim to help Egypt improve its environmental performance, giving a special focus to building climate-smart, resilient and inclusive cities.

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) could play a pivotal role in the pursuit of climate objectives. SMEs have a significant carbon footprint on aggregate, but they can also contribute to reaching net zero through their innovations and commitment to the use of environmentally friendly practices. This study develops a novel metric to identify environmental engagement, also referred to as 'greening'. The study harnesses the power of machine-learning and analyses the content of over one million websites of firms from 15 OECD countries encompassing about 10 billion words. Greening is identified based on firms’ self-declared information about products or processes on their websites. The resulting indicator is then evaluated considering firms’ characteristics. The results show that: (1) About one-third of SMEs are environmentally engaged, albeit with considerable variations across countries; (2) Greening SMEs are more productive, pay higher wages and their sales grow faster than non-greening SMEs; (3) Solar energy is the most cited action among greening SMEs, followed by recycling and energy efficiency, (4) Sectors with higher greenhouse gas emission reduction over the past decade also display higher levels of environmental engagement.

Japan has historically been among the OECD countries with the lowest migration flows relative to its population. However, the situation has changed significantly in the past few years. To counteract the impact of rapid population ageing on the labour market, Japan has introduced major policy changes in the governance of recruitment from abroad. This review examines the role of labour migration policy in the specific context of Japan and identifies policy directions for the future. Covering labour migration at all skill levels, the review assesses how the long-standing migration channels for international students and high-skilled migrants fare in attracting and retaining international talent. It also reviews the main channels for low to medium skill trades, including the recently introduced Specified Skilled Worker Programme.

This paper presents a technical assessment of nature-related risks within the Hungarian economy and financial system. The study draws upon the OECD Supervisory Framework to (i) prioritise various nature-related risks by conducting an impact and dependency assessment, identifying key economic sectors, and pinpointing the critical natural capital assets that are most crucial to the financial system; (ii) assess the direct and indirect economic impact of three exploratory scenarios on possible acute nature-related shocks using input-output analysis; (iii) explore the different financial risk channels through which economic risks stemming from nature-related losses may be transmitted within the Hungarian financial system; and (iv) provide supervisory recommendations based on the results.

Data portability enhances access to and sharing of data across digital services and platforms. It can empower users to play a more active role in the re-use of their data and can help stimulate competition and innovation by fostering interoperability while reducing switching costs and lock-in effects. However, the effectiveness of data portability in enhancing competition depends on the terms and conditions of data transfer and the extent to which competitors can make use of the data effectively. Additionally, there are potential downsides: data portability measures may unintentionally stifle competition in fast-evolving markets where interoperability requirements may disproportionately burden SMEs and start-ups. Data portability can also increase digital security and privacy risks by enabling data transfers to multiple destinations. This note presents the following five dimensions essential for designing and implementing data portability frameworks: sectoral scope; beneficiaries; type of data; legal obligations; and operational modality.

Ensuring equality for LGBTI+ individuals is a human rights imperative, but it also makes a lot of economic sense. Inclusion enables LGBTI+ individuals to achieve their full employment and labour productivity potential, benefitting not only their economic and social well-being, but also society as a whole. Yet, robust evidence supporting the economic case for greater LGBTI+ equality is still scarce due to challenges in accurately measuring the size and life situation of the LGBTI+ population. This report bridges this gap by using a unique set of microdata from the United States. The report begins with an overview of the share of US adults identifying as LGBTI+, their geographic distribution and key demographics. It then evaluates the extent to which LGBTI+ Americans face discrimination, assessing how this population fares, including in the labour market. Finally, utilising the OECD long-term model, the report quantifies the potential increase in GDP resulting from closing the unexplained LGBTI+ gaps in employment and labour productivity. The findings highlight significant economic gains, although they capture only a portion of the potential benefits. Notably, the broader societal impacts, such as the advancement of women's empowerment through the disruption of heteronormative standards, are not quantified.

False and misleading content online poses significant risks to the well-being of people and society, but a lack of cross-country comparable evidence persists. This paper contributes to the literature by presenting the OECD Truth Quest Survey methodology and key findings. This survey assesses whether some types of content are more easily distinguishable as false and misleading than others and whether the theme plays any role in its detection. It provides evidence about whether AI-generated content is easier to identify than human-generated content as well as insights into the effects of AI labelling. It further presents information on people’s behaviour as they interact with false and misleading content and their perceptions about their ability to detect it. The cross-country comparable data from the survey will help policy makers better design media literacy strategies, programmes and related policies to address the negative effects of such content.

Earth's orbits are polluted by more than 100 million debris objects that pose a collision threat to satellites and other spacecraft. The risk of perturbing highly valuable space-based services critical to life on Earth, such as weather monitoring and disaster management, is making debris mitigation an urgent policy challenge. This book provides the latest findings from the OECD project on the economics of space sustainability, which aims to improve decision makers’ understanding of the societal value of space infrastructure and costs of space debris. It provides comprehensive evidence on the growth of space debris, presents methods to evaluate and quantify the value of the satellites at risk and discusses ways to ensure a more sustainable use of the orbital environment. It notably includes case studies from Italy, Japan and Korea on the socio-economic value of different types of space infrastructure and discusses the feasibility and optimal design of fiscal measures and voluntary environmental rating schemes to change operator behaviour. This work is informed by contributions from researchers worldwide involved in the OECD project.

This paper applies Machine learning techniques to Google Trends data to provide real-time estimates of national average subjective well-being among 38 OECD countries since 2010. We make extensive usage of large custom micro databases to enhance the training of models on carefully pre-processed Google Trends data. We find that the best one-year-ahead prediction is obtained from a meta-learner that combines the predictions drawn from an Elastic Net with and without interactions, from a Gradient-Boosted Tree and from a Multi-layer Perceptron. As a result, across 38 countries over the 2010-2020 period, the out-of-sample prediction of average subjective well-being reaches an R2 of 0.830.