Publications & Documents

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 shipping industry is essential for international trade, but it is also an important source of CO2 emissions. To make progress towards climate targets, countries need to monitor CO2 emissions from vessels owned by their ship operator companies. However, most shipping activity takes place outside national borders, making it more difficult to monitor than activity taking place within countries. The OECD’s experimental database on OECD.stat provides a new source of data for CO2 emissions from global shipping, which is available monthly in near real time. This data will help national statistics producers to compile their Air Emission Accounts (AEAs) for the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA). This Working Paper presents some initial results from the new data source and describes how they were produced. The method is based on granular and timely ship-level data provided by the United Nations Global Platform, and it uses a bottom-up estimation approach to produce results broken down by country and type of ship.

Trade in value added (TiVA) indicators are increasingly used to monitor countries’ integration into global supply chains. However, they are published with a significant lag - often two or three years - which reduces their relevance for monitoring recent economic developments. This paper aims to provide more timely insights into the international fragmentation of production by exploring new ways of nowcasting five TiVA indicators for the years 2021 and 2022 covering a panel of 41 economies at the economy-wide level and for 24 industry sectors. The analysis relies on a range of models, including Gradient boosted trees (GBM), and other machine-learning techniques, in a panel setting, uses a wide range of explanatory variables capturing domestic business cycles and global economic developments and corrects for publication lags to produce nowcasts in quasi-real time conditions. Resulting nowcasting algorithms significantly improve compared to the benchmark model and exhibit relatively low prediction errors at a one- and two-year horizon, although model performance varies across countries and sectors.

The Handbook on Measuring Digital Trade sets out a conceptual and measurement framework for digital trade which aligns with the broader standards for macro-economic statistics. It aims to help statistical compilers to address policymakers’ needs for statistical evidence on digital trade. It includes extensive compilation guidance, drawing upon substantive inputs and case studies from both developed and developing economies and covering a variety of survey and non-survey sources. A reporting template is also proposed to support compilers in the production and dissemination of digital trade statistics.

Over the past few years, the global economy has suffered profound shocks that have had a marked impact on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs. While government support protected SMEs from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, new threats have emerged. Rising geopolitical tensions and global financial risks, high inflation, tightening monetary and fiscal policies, labour shortages, high trade barriers and slowing integration into global value chains all contribute to a more challenging business environment for SMEs. Meanwhile, there is an urgent need to accelerate the contribution of SMEs and entrepreneurship to the green and digital transitions and help them navigate a changing international trade and investment landscape. Against this background, the OECD SME and Entrepreneurship Outlook 2023 provides new evidence on recent trends in SME performance, changing business conditions, and policy implications. It reflects on the broad underlying theme of SME integration into a series of networks, including global production and supply-chain networks and the role of women led-businesses in international trade, knowledge and innovation networks, and skill ecosystems, as well as the main policies in place to ensure SMEs can integrate these networks and benefit from the ongoing transformations they go through. The report also contains statistical country profiles that benchmark the 38 OECD across a set of indicators.

The System of Environmental Economic Accounting Central Framework (SEEA CF) was adopted in 2012. In one decade, it has expanded to 92 countries, including most OECD countries. However, there is still work to be done by national statistics producers to increase the use of SEEA statistics. This paper focuses on the SEEA stocks and flows accounts, providing examples of where they are already used to support public policy making in high-priority areas such as climate change, environmental sustainability, the circular economy, and management of ecosystems and freshwater, as well as feeding into indicators, dashboards and other frameworks. Although these examples show that SEEA statistics are already informing public policy making in many countries, there are still important 'influence gaps'. The second part of this paper discusses why these gaps exist and what can be done about them.

Effective welfare policies need to consider interactions among economic, social and environmental outcomes. This paper, prepared to support Finance track discussions during Japan’s 2023 Presidency of the G7, describes a variety of national and international initiatives to improve the measurement of multidimensional welfare and well-being 'beyond GDP'. For example, the 2025 System of National Accounts (SNA) will provide greater visibility to the digital economy and free digital services, unpaid household activities, and the depletion of natural capital. More than two-thirds of OECD countries have also developed national frameworks, development plans or surveys with a multidimensional well-being focus, spanning a broad range of economic, social and environmental outcomes and inequalities that matter to people’s well-being and its sustainability. Some G7 and OECD economies have started using this evidence to inform budgeting, enhance policy appraisal and evaluation tools (including cost-benefit analysis), and to guide government performance management frameworks and inclusive growth strategies.