Publications

Despite women’s increased participation in the labour market significantly contributing to past economic growth, persistent gender gaps across OECD labour markets hinder full realization of the potential gains of women’s economic participation. This paper analyses the economic implications of these gaps and evaluates the potential for future growth through greater gender equality in labour market outcomes. Utilising two methodological frameworks, the paper first employs growth accounting to measure the contribution of women's employment to past economic growth. The paper then uses a simplified version of the OECD Long-Term Model in conjunction with projections on future labour force dynamics to estimate the impact of greater gender equality on the labour market. These analyses provide insight into the potentially significant economic benefits of closing persistent gender gaps across OECD countries.

Increasingly, countries are integrating personalised public services to enhance access to, and the experience of those services to significantly improve outcomes for service users. Integrated services are particularly valuable for those with multiple and complex needs who require a range of tailored and, in some cases, specialised supports and services from more than one agency or service provider. Service specialisation can make it difficult for these service users to get the right mix of services and at the right time that best meet their needs. This paper provides a summary of how countries are integrating services to improve the lives and outcomes of care experienced by young people, people with disabilities, and people leaving prison. The paper is intended for policymakers who are seeking new or improved approaches to improving the outcomes of those who rely on personalised services.

The transition towards a green economy, the rapid development of new digital technologies and cultural change are some of the forces disrupting traditional career paths, resulting in more fluid and diversified career trajectories. To benefit from increased longevity, workers will increasingly have to consider job mobility at middle and older ages, changing jobs or careers more frequently than in the past. Making successful career transitions, however, tends to be more difficult for workers at older ages due to health issues, unfamiliarity with relevant technology or a lack of recent job search experience. This may result in a mismatch between the types of jobs they want and the jobs that employers may provide. This report presents evidence on recent trends in career mobility and the consequences for individual workers in terms of pay and other job characteristics. It identifies key employer and public policies that can help facilitate career mobility that results in better employment choices at older ages. This requires overcoming discriminatory views towards older workers, improving job flexibility choices and ensuring that government policy supports voluntary career mobility.

Data on online job postings represents an important source of information for local labour markets. Many countries lack statistics on labour demand that are sufficiently up-to-date and disaggregated across regions, sectors and occupations. Web-scraped data from online job postings can provide further insights on the trends in labour demand and the skills needed across regions, sectors and occupations. This paper assesses the comparability and validity between Lightcast and other data sources for Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden, for the years 2019 to 2022 across regions, sectors and occupations. It concludes with some recommendations for labour market analysts that want to use data on online job postings for assessing labour demand trends.

This paper presents the first international assessment of the Lightcast vacancy data representativeness based on benchmarking against officially reported vacancy data in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The analysis compares distributions in the Lightcast data versus official data across large (TL2) regions, industrial sectors and occupational categories. The analysis shows differences in representativeness across countries and on the three dimensions considered. In general, regional representativeness is considerably better than both occupational and sectoral representativeness.

African armed conflicts involve a myriad of state forces, rebel groups and extremist organisations bound by rapidly changing alliances and rivalries. Organisations that were allies one day can fight each other the next and co-operate later still. The objective of this note is to update the pioneer work on conflict networks conducted by the OECD Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC) in the region by using a formal approach to networks known as dynamic social network analysis. Leveraging a dataset of 3 800 actors and 60 000 violent events from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) from 1997-2023, the note monitors how the co-operative and rivalrous ties between violent actors have changed over time, both at the regional and local levels. The growing number of belligerents, increasing density of rivalrous relationships and growing polarisation of the conflict networks observed in this note are extremely worrying for the future of the region. Not only do they make peaceful efforts more difficult than ever, but they also contribute to increasing the number of potential victims among the civilian population.

Several states in West Africa have experienced significant episodes of political violence since the early 2010s. These have included civil wars, religiously motivated terrorism, separatist insurgencies, military coups and communal strife, each of which have local, national and transnational dimensions. Intended to help guide responses to the region’s political challenges, the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC/OECD) created an interactive, spatial tool for policy makers in 2019, the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi). The SCDi monitors political violence at subnational scales. It combines different quantitative dimensions of conflict into a mappable tool that describes the circumstances in each location. The latest enhancement to the SCDi brings two new features to aid the identification of local conflict trends. First, the tool now identifies regions that are newly entering into or exiting from conflict. This allows a more detailed picture of how the geography of conflict is spreading or contracting within and across national borders. Second, the tool now characterises the current conditions in a location as either worsening or improving, based on past conditions at the same location. The SCDi is implemented in SWAC’s new Mapping Territorial Transformations in Africa (MAPTA) platform.

Since the onset of Russia’s large-scale war against Ukraine, millions of people have been forced to flee their homes in search of a safe haven. This report synthesises the findings of the Survey of Arriving Migrants from Ukraine (SAM-UKR), conducted by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) in collaboration with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), covering prevailing themes of forced displacement from Ukraine. These themes encompass demographics, reasons for departure, experiences along the journey, life in the host country, return intentions, and future aspirations. In addition to presenting survey results, the report draws on over 1 500 personal testimonies provided by respondents to offer a more direct insight into the decision-making process and emotional state of displaced persons, thereby illuminating their struggles, anxieties, hopes, and aspirations resulting from their displacement.

This paper presents a profile of the agency responsible for education evaluation and assessment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: the Education and Training Evaluation Commission (ETEC). It draws on research conducted by the OECD as part of a three-year project to develop the technical capacity of ETEC and benchmark its policies and practices with those of similar agencies in OECD countries. The paper describes ETEC’s mission and structure; its remit, activities and instruments; and the resources it has to fulfil its mandate. In doing so, the paper traces the Commission’s trajectory from its establishment to the present day. It aims to be of interest to education policymakers and researchers in OECD and partner countries, providing information on both the Saudi education system and evaluation and assessment agencies internationally – topics that have received relatively little attention in education literature.

Due to various technical and methodological challenges, PISA has to date offered only limited accommodations for students with special education needs (SEN). As a result, some students are currently excluded from the PISA target population at the sampling stage, and in some countries, exclusion rates are growing as more and more students are recognized as having disabilities that require testing accommodations. This practice in PISA contrasts with testing standards in many countries which call for the inclusion of students with SEN in order to give every student the right to demonstrate their skills and to generate information that represents all students. In order to take stock of the situation in terms of exclusions from PISA and accommodations already offered in national evaluations, we conducted a survey of PISA-participating countries and economies. This paper presents results from this survey and reviews the literature on effective accommodations in order to identify the priority needs to address in PISA, as well as promising accommodations that PISA could integrate to support these needs.