By Guillaume Gruyère. Drought in California has been in the headlines frequently these last three years, with startling pictures of empty reservoirs, rivers and canals, wildfires, disappearing snowpack and dry earth. The ongoing drought in the State is believed to be the most severe in the last 500 years. More...
By Stefano Scarpetta and Adrian Blundell-Wignall. The 2015 edition of Pensions at a Glance marks the tenth anniversary of the OECD’s flagship series on pension systems and retirement incomes. Ten years of scrutiny of member and G20 countries’ pension systems and policies, ten years of assessing and predicting workers’ pension entitlements, and ten years of recommending reforms that lead to more financially sustainable pay-as-you-go pensions and respond to citizens’ need for stable and adequate incomes in old age. More...
By Thomas Allen. We have to face facts: agriculture’s role in the food economy of West Africa isn’t as important as it used to be. Today, 40% of the agro-food sector’s value added is no longer produced by agriculture. Agriculture remains a pillar of economies in the region, but the food chain’s downstream segments are evolving in line with changes in society. More...
By Brian Keeley. How much do you know about health? Take the OECD Health at a Glance 2015 quiz and find out. The data visualisation below will help. More...
By Adrian Blundell-Wignall. The global financial and economic crisis of 2008 left the international monetary system with vulnerabilities caused by volatile capital flows and spillovers from national policy responses, even if international co-operation helped to avoid the scale of restrictions on goods and capital flows that prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s. The current policy environment has moved multilateral co-operation, openness and transparency to the top of the capital flow policy agenda. A new capital controls dataset suggests traditional residency-based capital controls are back in use. OECD research has also noted that measures restricting banks’ operations in foreign currency are rising. More...
By Julia Stockdale-Otarola. Millennials are “lazy, entitled narcissists”.
No, millennials are multi-taskers, tech-savvy and confident.
The media has offered various contradictory views regarding the characteristics that best define the millennial generation and the labour situation they face. More...
By Glenda Quintini. The Great Recession has hit youth harder than any other group in the labour market, and the situation has improved only little since. While public debates about youth labour market outcomes tend to focus on the concerning levels of youth unemployment – around 50% in Spain and Greece, 40% in Italy, and 25% in France – a better measure of labour market performance among young people is the rate of youth not in employment, education or training (the ‘NEETs’). The main reason is that unemployment is only part of the problem: an even greater share of young people are out of education or work but not looking for a job, and these inactive youth are not captured by the youth unemployment rate. Together, inactive and unemployed NEETs accounted for around 14% of all 15-29 year-olds in OECD countries in 2014, 1.5 percentage points more than before the start of the crisis (OECD Employment Outlook, 2015). Many of these youth, and particularly those at risk of remaining NEET for longer, have a disadvantaged background. More...
By Glenda Quintini. While there is a lot of discussion around the need to strengthen skills, reduce skills mismatch and promote the creation of the right skill set to boost economic growth, defining what ‘skills’ truly are remains an extremely difficult task. Translating the whole idea of ‘skills’ into an univocal indicator is even more arduous and it entails several empirical and theoretical challenges, many of which are still unresolved today. More...
The city of Larissa in Greece sees its development into a learning city as one of the ways to tackle unemployment, social and healthcare challenges. Larissa, which has just joined the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC), has already started implementing the Key Features of Learning Cities provided in the Guiding Documents (link) of the Network. More...
The 2015 UNESCO General Conference adopted a new Recommendation on Adult Learning and Education (2015) to replace the 1976 Recommendation on the Development of Adult Education. At the last two International Conferences on Adult Education, CONFINTEA V (Hamburg, 1997) and CONFINTEA VI (Belém, 2009), as well as the 2013 UNESCO General Conference, the international community had requested a revision of the 1976 Recommendation to ‘reflect current educational, cultural, political, social and economic challenges’. More...
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