Latest Documents

The SME Policy Index: Eastern Partner Countries 2024 – Building resilience in challenging times is a unique benchmarking tool to assess and monitor progress in the design and implementation of SME policies against EU and international best practice. It embraces the priorities laid out in the European Union’s SME Strategy for a sustainable and digital Europe and is structured around the ten principles of the Small Business Act for Europe, which provide a wide range of measures to guide the design and implementation of SME policies. This report marks the fourth edition in this series, following assessments in 2012, 2016, and 2020. It tracks progress made since 2020 and offers the latest key findings on SME development and related policies in the countries of the Eastern Partnership (EaP). It also identifies emerging challenges affecting SMEs in the region and provides recommendations to address them. The 2024 edition benefits from an updated methodology that also offers a deeper analysis of policies to support the digital transformation of SMEs.

This paper investigates the link between gender diversity in senior management and firm-level productivity. For this purpose, it constructs a novel cross-country dataset with information on firms’ senior management group and other firm characteristics, covering both publicly listed and unlisted firms in manufacturing and non-financial market services across nine OECD countries. The main result from the analysis is that productivity gains from increasing gender diversity in senior management are highest among firms with low initial diversity. Increasing the female share to the sample average of 20% in firms with initially lower shares would increase aggregate productivity by around 0.6%. This suggests that improving women’s access to senior management positions matters not only for equity but could yield significant productivity gains.

In the context of the green transition, universities have much to offer in joint green innovation projects with business, government and citizens. As hubs of diverse expertise, universities are uniquely placed to build interdisciplinary teams and bridge gaps between society and industry. Their regional ties also enable them to engage with the local ecosystem. This paper draws from ten international case studies of university partnerships with industry and society in green mobility, green energy and green products, services and processes. The comparative evidence gathered from interviews with representatives from these initiatives examines universities’ practices for green co-creation. Additionally, the paper outlines policy recommendations crucial to supporting these initiatives, essential for the global success of sustainable development efforts.

The bioeconomy brings opportunities for economic growth while tackling climate change. Fossil carbon resources can be replaced by bio-based carbon resources, especially biomass. To allow these solutions to be scaled up without threats to biodiversity and the environment, it is necessary to develop the bioeconomy as a circular economy. With this carbon management approach, other sources of carbon complement biomass: industrial waste, including gases such as CO and CO2, as well as physically and chemically recycled carbon. In the future, direct air capture (DAC) may become competitive and form part of the solution. These approaches can be considered ‘circular’ because they close material loops and keep carbon recycling in the economy rather than emitting carbon to the atmosphere. This report reviews a number of hybrid technologies that can be deployed to ‘defossilise’ economic sectors and sets out policy options to bring these technologies to commercial scale.

This paper discusses five innovation policy imperatives critical to achieving green and digital transitions: coordinated government, stakeholder engagement, policy agility and experimentation, directionality and support for breakthrough innovation. The paper provides policy examples from Germany, based on the OECD Review of Innovation Policy: Germany , and other countries to illustrate in what ways countries have addressed these imperatives. Overall, the quality and scale of these policy responses need to increase if transitions are to succeed. Open questions for future policy research are also highlighted.

This document provides an integrated view on income-based tax incentives for R&D and innovation. It brings together the latest evidence on the adoption, design, generosity, cost and take-up of income-based tax incentives, and gives new insights into both the long-term and short-term trends in the take-up of income-based tax incentives by business and their cost to governments, including role of policy design changes. Furthermore, the report explores the scope for developing indicators that provide a more complete picture of the value of expenditure- and income-based tax relief for R&D and innovation in the OECD area and beyond.

Open finance enables the sharing of, and access to, financial sector data. This paper analyses the benefits, risks and implementation challenges of Open finance and provides policy recommendations for the safe and successful implementation of such data-sharing frameworks in finance. It considers the impacts of providing access to customers’ financial data and how to do this responsibly and safely, with due consideration for data privacy. The paper also discusses other consumer safeguards, notably related to consent and liability. Finally, it considers whether there is a need to support the development of technical infrastructure to promote data interoperability.