Publications & Documents

The OECD Territorial Review of the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium, provides an in-depth assessment of the trends, challenges and opportunities for sustainable and inclusive urban development in the region. It aims to help tackle the so-called ‘Brussels paradox’ between a highly performing region in terms of economic wealth creation and competitiveness but relatively poor social conditions. The region is also grappling with a shortage of affordable and quality housing, as well as several mobility challenges, including a high reliance on individual cars and traffic congestion, resulting in high commuting times and pollution levels, despite good accessibility to public transport. Although a comprehensive urban and land-use planning system exists, there is a lack of co-ordination with the surrounding regions and municipalities to drive more effective policies on housing, mobility, and other infrastructure investments. This review also examines the governance and institutional framework and suggests policy actions to strengthen co-ordination and co-operation mechanisms, and promote incremental collaboration at the metropolitan level. Finally, the review provides recommendations to enhance public finances in the region, focusing on better compensating for its additional charges, co-ordinating public investment among levels of government more efficiently, and establishing a metropolitan fund.

Reaching climate neutrality requires economic transformations of unprecedented scale and speed. Immediate action from the business community can avoid unnecessary costs, create wellbeing co-benefits and prepare local businesses with a better competitive position in the future climate neutral economy. This report shows what reaching climate neutrality by 2040 means for Hamburg businesses and identifies key actions they need to undertake. It provides insights where the Hamburg economy and its businesses stand on the way to climate neutrality and on their needs to advance, drawing on a business survey. The study also shares insights from action plans of selected comparison cities. It points to cross-sector as well as to sector-specific challenges and opportunities for Hamburg businesses. This includes making better use of low-cost renewables, addressing energy efficiency in buildings as well as challenges and opportunities in activities in and around the port and in industry. It highlights Hamburg's potential as a hydrogen hub as well as the need to adopt circular economy practices. It illustrates that a regional and business perspective are necessary to achieve climate neutrality in prosperity, requiring individual and collective business action.

The frequency and severity of extreme wildfires are on the rise in the United States, causing unprecedented disruption and increasingly challenging the country’s capacity to contain losses and damages. These challenges are set to keep growing in the context of climate change, highlighting the need to scale up wildfire prevention and climate change adaptation. This paper provides an overview of the United States’ wildfire policies and practices and assesses the extent to which wildfire management in the country is evolving to adapt to growing wildfire risk under climate change.

This paper provides evidence on the impact of international migrants on regional innovation. The study combines administrative individual-level data covering all Australian residents with data on intellectual property rights applications such as patents, trademarks, and design rights. The analysis uses a standard shift-share instrument based on past migrant settlements to identify the causal effects of migration on innovation. Its four main findings are the following: First, on average, a one percentage point increase in the regional employment share of higher-educated migrants relative to total employment leads to a 4.8% rise in regional patent applications in the medium run (five years). Second, while migrants of all skill and education levels have a positive impact on patenting, those in scientific occupations have the largest effect. Third, regions with lower levels of patenting benefit relatively more from increases in migration compared to those with higher patenting levels. Fourth, there is no effect of migration on trademarks or design rights applications.

Ce document présente une vue d'ensemble des chaînes de valeur agroalimentaires dans les régions ultrapériphériques de l'UE (RUP de l'UE). Il évalue les tendances émergentes, discute des opportunités et des défis, examine les cadres politiques et les outils qui peuvent renforcer la participation bénéfique des RUP de l'UE dans les chaînes de valeur agroalimentaires internationales, et propose des actions prioritaires. Ce document s’inscrit dans le cadre du projet conjoint UE-OCDE sur les régions ultrapériphériques du monde.

Cities have a pivotal role to play in achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Smart city solutions can help enable and accelerate the net-zero transition by, among many others, curtailing energy use, accelerating the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, improving resource efficiency, reducing transport demand, and fostering necessary behavioural change. This paper summarises the proceedings of the 3rd OECD Roundtable on Smart Cities and Inclusive Growth, which took place on 3 July 2023 at the OECD Headquarters in Paris. It discusses concrete solutions that can boost the net-zero transition, explores the barriers to scaling up smart city solutions and the enabling factors that can help overcome them, and proposes ways to strengthen the net-zero objective in the OECD Smart City Measurement Framework.