Publications

Chile has made important strides on its environmental agenda in recent years with the passage of the Framework Law on Climate Change, the establishment of the Biodiversity and Protected Areas Service and the ratification of the Escazú Agreement. However, the country has made limited progress in decoupling environmental pressures from economic growth. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise and the country is not on track to reach its legally binding target of net zero by 2050. Chile is well-positioned to achieve its targets for biodiversity, while air pollution remains a serious public health challenge and waste management relies heavily on landfilling. Chile is facing a severe and deepening water crisis that requires concerted action to improve water allocation and water quality, and to strengthen water governance. The review provides 36 recommendations to help Chile improve its environmental performance, with a special focus on water management and policies. This is the third Environmental Performance Review of Chile. It provides an independent, evidence-based evaluation of the country’s environmental performance since the previous review in 2016.

The Global Debt Report examines sovereign and corporate debt markets, providing insights into current market conditions and associated policy considerations, including possible financial stability risks. This first edition consolidates the Sovereign Borrowing Outlook, previously a separate OECD publication, and introduces new chapters on corporate bond markets and sustainable bonds. Chapter 1 provides an overview of sovereign borrowing globally and an outlook for OECD countries, with a focus on the impact of recent developments in funding conditions and changes to the investor base. Chapter 2 explores global corporate bond market dynamics, build-up of risks and vulnerabilities and the impact of a changing macrofinancial landscape. Chapter 3 looks at trends in global sustainable bond markets and discusses policy considerations such as the sustainability premium, the roles of service providers and market liquidity.

The 2024 edition of the OECD Competition Trends report highlights worldwide competition enforcement trends during the calendar year 2022 based on 77 jurisdictions. Similar to previous editions, this year’s report compares different geographic regions and identifies trends over time. Analyses focus on competition authorities’ resources and their enforcement activity in cartels, abuse of dominance cases, mergers, and advocacy activity. Moreover, this year’s edition includes a special chapter on merger control, which provides for the first time a disaggregate analysis of the participating jurisdictions. It also contains an analysis of all merger prohibition cases between 2015 and 2022.

Demographic change brings complex challenges to the economic, social, and environmental systems of cities, with its asymmetric, overlapping, and compounded impacts across people and places. This paper analyses the main demographic trends and challenges in cities across OECD countries, with a focus on G7 cities. It disentangles trends and challenges across three distinct, yet interrelated, dynamics: i) ageing population and decreasing household size in cities (for instance, the number of older adults in cities increased by 2.4% per year in G7 countries between 2008 and 2018), ii) city population growth or decline (for instance, 20% of cities across OECD countries experienced population decline between 2001 and 2021), and iii) spatial segregation within cities (for instance, commuting zones of metropolitan areas are ageing faster than inner cities). Based on the evidence-based analyses, the paper provides policy insights to address the impacts of demographic change and to build more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient cities and urban systems, with city-specific examples. Preliminary findings from the paper served as input to the G7 Ministerial Meeting on Sustainable Urban Development (7-9 July 2023, Takamatsu, Japan) under the G7 Japanese Presidency.

In November 2023, OECD member countries approved a revised version of the Organisation’s definition of an AI system. This document contains proposed clarifications to the definition of an AI system contained in the 2019 OECD Recommendation on AI (the 'AI Principles') to support their continued relevance and technical soundness. The goal of the definition of an AI system in the OECD Recommendation is to articulate what is considered to be an AI system, for purposes of the recommendation.

Rising disinformation has far-reaching consequences in many policy areas ranging from public health to national security. It can cast doubt on factual evidence, jeopardise the implementation of public policies and undermine people's trust in the integrity of democratic institutions. This report explores how to respond to these challenges and reinforce democracy. It presents an analytical framework to guide countries in the design of policies, looking at three complementary dimensions: implementing policies to enhance the transparency, accountability, and plurality of information sources; fostering societal resilience to disinformation; and upgrading governance measures and public institutions to uphold the integrity of the information space.

Since 2014, the Flemish government has undertaken a series of reforms of its budgetary system, including the implementation of performance-informed budgeting, which includes both the implementation of spending reviews and performance budgeting. The aim of the reforms is to better integrate policy development and resource allocation and improve the accountability and transparency of the Flemish public sector. This report takes stock of performance-informed budgeting practices in Flanders. It provides an assessment of their key strengths and highlights where improvements can be made. Finally, it includes recommendations to further strengthen the approach to performance-informed budgeting in Flanders.

Romania’s education system is at a turning point. In 2023, the government passed a new law on school education that sets out significant changes to how schooling is provided, governed and resourced. These changes come at a critical time for the country’s development. While Romania is one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies, its education outcomes remain among the lowest in the European Union. The measures in the new law are crucial for ensuring quality education, fostering economic growth and enhancing inclusivity. This policy perspective offers recommendations on how to take forward planned reforms. It focuses on four specific sets of policies that will be instrumental in improving school quality and equity: school evaluation and support; resources for education; the teaching profession; and the data and monitoring system. At the centre of these are proposals to make teaching a highly skilled and rewarding profession by better connecting performance, promotion and pay, and progressively strengthening schools’ pedagogical leadership through developmental school evaluations and support. At a strategic level, Romania will need a step change in how education policies are funded and evaluated. This implies more strategic planning and budgeting to align resources with long-term policy priorities, and much-expanded analytical capacities to monitor and evaluate implementation and outcomes and hold institutions accountable.

This working paper provides a granular overview of investments into low-carbon infrastructure, both in the real economy and financial market. The descriptive analysis shows that there is room to scale up cross-border infrastructure investment and to shift investment into low-carbon assets. Specifically, low-carbon cross-border investment can be increased by shifting infrastructure investments, that currently flow into the financial economy, to the real economy and by incentivising the use of financing instruments, i.e., securitised products, that bundle projects and meet different liquidity tastes of investors. The analysis also highlights the important role of foreign direct investment (FDI) into infrastructure from foreign real economy companies.