Economie

This paper estimates the data intensity of occupations/sectors (i.e. the share of job postings per occupation/sector related to the production of data) using natural language processing (NLP) on job advertisements in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Online job advertisement data collected by Lightcast provide timely and disaggregated insights into labour demand and skill requirements of different professions. The paper makes three major contributions. First, indicators created from the Lightcast data add to the understanding of digital skills in the labour market. Second, the results may advance the measurement of data assets in national account statistics. Third, the NLP methodology can handle up to 66 languages and can be adapted to measure concepts beyond digital skills. Results provide a ranking of data intensity across occupations, with data analytics activities contributing most to aggregate data intensity shares in all three countries. At the sectoral level, the emerging picture is more heterogeneous across countries. Differences in labour demand primarily explain those variations, with low data-intensive professions contributing most to aggregate data intensity in the United Kingdom. Estimates of investment in data, using a sum of costs approach and sectoral intensity shares, point to lower levels in the United Kingdom and Canada than in the United States.

The United Kingdom is among world leaders in reducing domestic greenhouse gas emissions, and a broad political consensus supports the target to reduce net emissions to zero by 2050. The UK’s strong institutional framework is an inspiration to countries around the world, and the country is pioneering work to embed climate considerations in the financial sector. Achieving carbon neutrality will require policy to match ambition. Emission reductions so far were largely driven by electricity generation, a sector targeted by explicit pricing instruments and a cost efficient renewables auction-design subsidy scheme. Expanding pricing instruments across the economy is an essential building block to reach targets. Such measures will be more effective if complemented by well-designed sectoral regulation and subsidies, and more acceptable if implemented once energy prices have started to come down from historically high levels. Britons are conscious of the need to act. However, winning their acceptance of the needed policies may require targeting carbon revenue to compensate low-income households and investments in green infrastructure and new technologies. A mechanism defusing fears that effective policies undermine competitiveness, preferably internationally agreed, would facilitate effective policies towards emission intensive trade exposed industries.

This paper presents new simulation results for the UK combining macroeconomic simulations in ThreeME, a computable general equilibrium model, with household-level micro-simulations with the aim to provide consistent estimates of macroeconomic and distributional consequences of policy action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. One main and overarching result is that if an economy-wide and significant carbon price is introduced it leads to large emission reductions. Macroeconomic and distributional consequences are very limited in comparison. Redistributing 30% of total tax revenue as a lump-sum transfer to households would ensure that a majority of income deciles in most regions increase their disposable income, with gains notably in the lower part of the income distribution.

Marine data play a crucial role for many scientific disciplines, as well as for very diverse operational services such as fisheries management, environmental planning, marine conservation, weather forecasting, or port management. The information derived from marine data is also increasingly finding its way into a wide and varied range of public policy arenas and private industries. Collecting, distributing and archiving public marine data provide benefits to society at large, however as with all public investments, assessments are needed to provide evidence to decision makers. Based on an original survey of UK marine data users, this paper explores pathways through which marine data are used and transformed into actionable information, creating systematised value chains for the first time. The analysis unveils trends in current marine data uses in the UK and key benefits of data uses. The paper lays the foundations for further OECD work with the marine data community.

The longer run consequences of the pandemic will partly hinge on its impact on high productivity firms, and the ongoing process of labour reallocation from low to high productivity firms. While Schumpeter (1939) proposed that recessions can accelerate this process, the nature of the COVID-19 shock coupled with a policy response that prioritised preservation (over reallocation) raises questions about whether job reallocation remained productivity-enhancing. Using novel, near-real-time data for Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, this paper shows that while labour turnover fell in response to the pandemic, job reallocation remained connected to firm productivity – that is, high productivity firms were more likely to expand and low productivity firms were more likely to contract. The pandemic coincided with a temporary strengthening of the reallocation-productivity link in Australia – but a weakening in New Zealand – which appears related to the design of job retention schemes. Finally, firms that intensively used Apps to manage their business were more resilient, even after controlling for productivity. Thus, while policy partly suppressed creative destruction, the nature of the shock – i.e. one where being online and able to operate remotely were key – favoured high productivity and tech-savvy firms, resulting in a reallocation of labour to such firms. The use of timely, novel data to investigate the allocative effects of the pandemic marks a significant advance, given that the seminal paper on productivity-enhancing reallocation during the Great Recession arrived some six years after Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Covid-19 and the associated restrictions on interaction have led to an unprecedented shock to activity and firms’ balance sheets. To assess the impact, this paper applies a new large-scale firm-level simulation model calibrated to the United Kingdom (UK). The paper specifically examines the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) furlough program and a credit guarantee. The Corporate Sector Agent-Based (CAB) Model (Hillman, Barnes, Wharf and MacDonald, 2021) takes into account: heterogeneity across firms; interactions between firms across a realistic customer-supplier network; and rule-of-thumb behaviour by firms and bankruptcy constraints. The model amplifies the effect of shocks and generates substantial persistence and overshooting, as well as displaying a number of non-linearities. The CAB uses a data-rich approach based on ORBIS firm-level data and the OECD Input-Output tables. Simulations in this paper are calibrated to the observed path of UK output in 2020.

This policy brief discusses recent international policy experiences in developing e-learning and digital business diagnostic tools for entrepreneurs. E-learning tools can develop entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and competences among users and increase their confidence and success in business creation. Business diagnostic tools offer entrepreneurs ways to assess their business management practices against peer companies or good practices, building competence and diffusing good practice. This brief sets out considerations for the successful development and implementation of these tools. It presents eight international cases of tools and discusses the public policy lessons from these international experiences.

This paper examines how local-level policies can strengthen entrepreneurship and innovation in the region of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough in the United Kingdom. It investigates the quality of the local entrepreneurship ecosystem for generating innovative start-ups and scale-ups and the regional conditions for generating positive industry transitions by supporting the strategic sectors of life sciences, information technologies, agri-tech and advanced manufacturing. Key areas of focus are on skills development, entrepreneurship development and knowledge exchange for local economic development. A number of policy recommendations are offered based on the analysis together with international inspiring policy practice examples.

This report provides examples and recommendations to help overcome obstacles to engage low-skilled workers and their employers in skills development. England has implemented impressive measures aimed at helping workers and employers to upskill. Nonetheless, there remains room for improvement. More can be done to identify workers with low basic skills, raise awareness of why improving those skills is important, increase the accessibility to relevant courses, ensure these courses are flexible enough to accommodate adult learners who are already employed, and finally make the provision relevant to career aspirations. This report urges England to establish and promote a vision for raising the skills of low-skilled workers, identify their needs more systematically, and provide targeted guidance and information to them and their employers. It highlights that accessible and flexible adult learning opportunities in the workplace, home, community and by other means such as online and distance learning can better meet the varied needs of low-skilled workers. It also makes the case for the use of contextualised learning approaches, which create connections between basic skills and vocational context, and a more effective use of basic skills in workplaces to maintain, develop and realise the benefits of prior skills investments.