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Publications & Documents


  • 15-April-2021

    English

    Policies for a climate-neutral industry - Lessons from the Netherlands

    This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of the policy instruments adopted by the Netherlands to reach carbon neutrality in its manufacturing sector by 2050. The analysis illustrates the strength of combining a strong commitment to raising carbon prices with ambitious technology support, uncovers the pervasiveness of competitiveness provisions, and highlights the trade-off between short-term emissions cuts and longer-term technology shift. The Netherlands’ carbon levy sets an ambitious price trajectory to 2030, but is tempered by extensive preferential treatment to energy-intensive users, yielding a highly unequal carbon price across firms and sectors. The country’s technology support focuses on the cost-effective deployment of low-carbon options, which ensures least-cost decarbonisation in the short run but favours relatively mature technologies. The paper offers recommendations for policy adjustments to reach the country’s carbon neutrality objective, including the gradual removal of exemptions, enhanced support for emerging technologies and greater visibility over future infrastructure plans.
  • 25-March-2021

    English

    Funding and financing of local government public investment - A framework and application to five OECD Countries

    The bulk of government investment is done at the local level in OECD countries, representing on average 41% of total public investment. Most studies on subnational government debt focus on the regional or state level, and very few studies analyse public investment specifically by local governments. This paper aims at filling this gap, presenting a framework to analyse the key factors, which affect the capacity of local governments to fund and finance public investment, and illustrates the framework with five case studies: Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands and New Zealand.
  • 16-March-2021

    English

    Towards COVID-19 recovery and greater resilience in Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    This paper aims to provide guidance to the Zuid-Holland province (The Netherlands) and its partners on developing their post-COVID 19 Joint Growth Agenda. It draws on broader OECD analysis of cities’ policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis, the OECD Principles on Urban Policy and the OECD Territorial Review of the Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam-The Hague (2016).
  • 10-December-2020

    English

    Green growth in countries and territories

    There are now 47 Adherents to the 2009 OECD Declaration on Green Growth. Romania has joined Costa Rica, Colombia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Morocco, Peru, Tunisia, as well as OECD members in having adhered to the Declaration.

  • 17-November-2020

    English

    The impact of COVID-19 on SME financing - A special edition of the OECD Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs Scoreboard

    The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on SME access to finance. In particular, the sudden drop in revenues created acute liquidity shortages, threatening the survival of many viable businesses. The report documents an increase in demand for bank lending in the first half of 2020, and a steady supply of credit thanks to government interventions. On the other hand, other sources of finance declined, in particular early-stage equity. This paper, a special edition of Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs, focuses on the impacts of COVID-19 on SME access to finance, along with government policy responses. It reveals that the pre-crisis financing environment was broadly favourable for SMEs and entrepreneurs, who benefited from low interest rates, loose credit standards and an increasingly diverse offer of financing instruments. It documents the unprecedented scope and scale of the policy responses undertaken by governments world-wide, and details their key characteristics, and outlines the principal issues and policy challenges for the next phases of the pandemic, such as the over-indebtedness of SMEs and the need to continue to foster a diverse range of financing instruments for SMEs.
  • 2-October-2020

    English

    International Compendium of Entrepreneurship Policies

    It is increasingly understood that entrepreneurship plays a critical role in economic growth and well-being. But which policies can governments develop to release its benefits? This publication offers guidance and inspiration. It identifies the range of entrepreneurship policies being pursued internationally, the problems the policies seek to solve and how they are designed and implemented. The focus is on how to create a broad base of start-ups with the potential for sustainability and growth by building a pipeline of new entrepreneurs, supporting start-ups to overcome barriers in areas such as skills, finance and innovation and stimulating vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems. The publication examines the rationale for entrepreneurship policy, presents a typology of policy approaches and highlights principles for policy success. The points are illustrated by 16 case studies of inspiring practice policies from 12 OECD countries. These cases span policies for regulations and taxation, entrepreneurship education and training, advice and coaching, access to finance, internationalisation, innovation, and holistic packages for ecosystem building. Helpful summary tables guide readers to the information that will respond to their questions. The publication will give readers an overview of key entrepreneurship policy interventions and tips on entrepreneurship policy success.
  • 24-June-2020

    English, PDF, 863kb

    Over the Rainbow? The Road to LGBTI Inclusion - How does the Netherlands compare?

    This note provides a comprehensive overview of the extent to which laws in the Netherlands and OECD countries ensure equal treatment of LGBTI people, and of the complementary policies that could help foster LGBTI inclusion.

  • 14-April-2020

    English

    Synthesising good practices in fiscal federalism - Key recommendations from 15 years of country surveys

    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.
  • 31-March-2020

    English

    The Circular Economy in Groningen, the Netherlands

    The City of Groningen is the biggest urban centre of a prevalently rural region and hosts the youngest population in the Netherlands. The presence of renowned universities, the high number of students and a fast growing start-up scene alongside a vibrant business and innovation environment, make Groningen a knowledge hub for the region. Since the Dutch national cabinet decided to phase out natural gas production by 2022, Groningen has intensified its regional leading role in the energy transition aiming to become energy neutral by 2035, according to which the energy demand is met entirely by renewables. In 2018, the Municipal Council took the unanimous decision of making the circular economy a priority for the city, identifying three priority areas: public procurement, waste and knowledge. This case study presents the state of the art of the circular economy in Groningen, the main challenges for designing a circular economy strategy and the ways forward for the city’s circular transition.
  • 13-March-2020

    English

    Increasing Adult Learning Participation - Learning from Successful Reforms

    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.
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