Reports

This document presents the principles of good practice for public communication responses to mis- and disinformation. The Principles aim to help governments counter mis- and disinformation via the public communication function and other policy responses through strengthening domestic and international media and information ecosystems and reinforcing democracy. This document identifies nine common principles underpinning good practices for how governments can engage with partners across citizens, civil society and the private sector, based on evidence and interventions observed around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Despite the increasing adoption of income-based tax incentives for R&D and innovation in the OECD area and beyond, evidence on the availability, design, generosity and actual cost of these incentives remains scarce. This report helps fill this gap by documenting government efforts to provide preferential tax treatment of economic outputs of innovation activities. Drawing on the responses of national contact points to the OECD KNOWINTAX surveys carried out in 2020 and 2021, it presents new evidence on the cost (foregone tax revenues) and uptake of income-based-tax incentives by businesses in 2019, and tracks their distribution by firm size and industry and their evolution over the 2000-2019 period.

AI language models are a key component of natural language processing (NLP), a field of artificial intelligence (AI) focused on enabling computers to understand and generate human language. Language models and other NLP approaches involve developing algorithms and models that can process, analyse and generate natural language text or speech trained on vast amounts of data using techniques ranging from rule-based approaches to statistical models and deep learning. The application of language models is diverse and includes text completion, language translation, chatbots, virtual assistants and speech recognition. This report offers an overview of the AI language model and NLP landscape with current and emerging policy responses from around the world. It explores the basic building blocks of language models from a technical perspective using the OECD Framework for the Classification of AI Systems. The report also presents policy considerations through the lens of the OECD AI Principles.

Digital markets have raised a number of new competition challenges. Ex-post competition policy appears not to be able to address them in their entirety and with the necessary speed. There is considerable consensus, among academics and policy-makers, that ex-ante regulatory policies are needed to avoid competition being stifled in these markets, with a negative impact on productivity and innovation. As a result, major OECD economies are discussing or have approved regulatory proposals with the aim to foster contestability and fair trade in digital markets.

The provision of key health technologies and products such as vaccines and antibiotics is insufficient in purely competitive and volume-based markets, requiring new revenue streams for sustainability. Recent developments in health innovation suggest that innovative collaborative mechanisms can be effective in addressing this issue. In the domains of vaccines and antibiotics, these approaches should incorporate shared research investment, long-term access planning, the provision of manufacturing infrastructure, supply chains, and financial returns. Collaborative approaches such as subscription models could be piloted at the regional level, while other models could be developed to delink innovation, manufacturing, and access from sales volume and revenue. Finally, blended finance instruments from the development field could encourage greater collaboration among established and emerging stakeholders in health innovation. These stakeholders should work together to create, test, access, and implement more collaborative approaches to health innovation to share upfront investments, mitigate risks of failure, and accelerate market access.

This report examines privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), which are digital solutions that allow information to be collected, processed, analysed, and shared while protecting data confidentiality and privacy. The report reviews recent technological advancements and evaluates the effectiveness of different types of PETs, as well as the challenges and opportunities they present. It also outlines current regulatory and policy approaches to PETs to help privacy enforcement authorities and policy makers better understand how they can be used to enhance privacy and data protection, and to improve overall data governance.

Policy makers are increasingly grappling with the stability implications of global value chains (GVCs), as widespread supply shortages following the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian Federation’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine have disrupted the economic recovery and contributed to high inflation. This paper provides a tool to assess vulnerabilities in GVCs by drawing a detailed map of dependencies based on new indicators constructed from the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output tables. The key findings are as follows. First, GVC dependencies increase with both the size of foreign exposures and the length of foreign value chains. Second, in some industries, such as the automotive and ICT industries, vulnerabilities from high GVC dependence are amplified by high geographic concentration of suppliers or buyers. Third, the People’s Republic of China is the most critical choke point in GVCs across a broad range of industries, both as a dominant supplier and as a dominant buyer.

The transition to climate neutrality requires cost reductions in existing clean technologies to enable rapid deployment on a large scale, as well as the development of emerging technologies such as green hydrogen. This policy paper argues that science, technology, innovation, and industrial (STI&I) policies focusing on developing and deploying low-carbon technologies are crucial to achieving carbon neutrality. It notes however that the current level of innovation is insufficient to meet the net-zero challenge due to a policy emphasis on deployment rather than research and development (R&D) support. The paper explores the rationale for more ambitious STI&I policies targeted at R&D for climate neutrality and provides policy recommendations for an effective innovation policy for net-zero, including its interaction with the broader climate policy package.