Publications & Documents

The frequency and severity of extreme wildfires are on the rise in Portugal, 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 Portugal’s 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.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) creates new content in response to prompts, offering transformative potential across multiple sectors such as education, entertainment, healthcare and scientific research. However, these technologies also pose critical societal and policy challenges that policy makers must confront: potential shifts in labour markets, copyright uncertainties, and risk associated with the perpetuation of societal biases and the potential for misuse in the creation of disinformation and manipulated content. Consequences could extend to the spreading of mis- and disinformation, perpetuation of discrimination, distortion of public discourse and markets, and the incitement of violence. Governments recognise the transformative impact of generative AI and are actively working to address these challenges. This paper aims to inform these policy considerations and support decision makers in addressing them.

In the ten years since the OECD published its 2013 Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being, the inclusion of evaluative, affective and eudaimonic indicators in national measurement frameworks and household surveys has grown. Country practice has converged around a standard measure of life satisfaction, however affective and eudaimonic measures remain less harmonised. This working paper combines findings from a stock take of OECD member state uptake of Guidelines recommendations with advances in the academic evidence base to highlight three focal areas for future work. Looking ahead, the OECD should prioritise (i) revisiting recommendations on affective indicators, particularly in light of recent OECD recommendations on measuring mental health; (ii) reviewing progress towards operationalising measures of eudaimonia; and (iii) creating new extended modules to measure the subjective well-being of children, to deepen advice on domain-specific life evaluation measures, and to further develop more globally inclusive measures, drawing on (for example) concepts of subjective well-being developed in Indigenous contexts and beyond western European/North American research literatures.

Prices of essentials like energy and food have increased dramatically in OECD countries, adding uncertainty to household finances despite a persistently strong labour market post COVID-19. The latest edition of the OECD Risks that Matter (RTM) survey confirms that costs of living are at the top of people’s minds even in the world’s wealthiest countries: around nine in ten respondents, on average, report feeling concerned about inflation. Drawing on a representative sample of 27 000 respondents across 27 OECD countries, RTM illustrates respondents’ perceived economic risks, levels of satisfaction with current social policies, and preferences for future government action on social protection. People are calling on governments to help with the cost-of-living crisis, to spend more on health post COVID-19, and to reinforce support for older people, including in long-term care. Based on a comprehensive cross-national survey of perceptions of social protection, this report offers lessons for the functioning of social programmes as countries emerge from COVID-19, manage the cost-of-living crisis, and plan for future challenges.

This report provides an overview of the policies and procedures for addressing child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) material across the global top-50 online content-sharing services. It finds that only 10 of the 50 services define CSEA with sufficient detail to understand what is prohibited on their services, and only 20 of the services issue a transparency report on CSEA. Even among those services, there are significant variations in what behaviour is captured in their definitions, and the metrics, methodology and frequency of transparency reports differ across platforms. While good practices exist, the report reveals a fragmented response to this complex and evolving problem, which limits comparability and makes it challenging to conduct a thorough assessment of the overall impact of platforms’ efforts to combat CSEA.

Cette synthèse fait le point sur les initiatives récentes des pays de l'OCDE visant à renforcer l'intégration des politiques en faveur du bien-être de l'enfant. Elle expose les défis auxquels sont confrontés les pays qui s'efforcent de faire avancer l'agenda politique du bien-être de l'enfant et examine ce qu’ils peuvent faire pour être plus efficaces. Les plans d'action intégrés pour le bien-être des enfants peuvent fournir l’orientation stratégique nécessaire, mais il peut être difficile de les faire évoluer au-delà d'un simple cadre d'orientation. Les pays de l’OCDE devraient envisager de réduire leur champ d'application et stimuler le travail en commun. Les instruments d’aide à l’élaboration des politiques en direction des enfants ne jouent pas encore un rôle pleinement efficace dans l'intégration de l'agenda politique du bien-être de l'enfant dans l'ensemble du gouvernement. Il convient de faire preuve de stratégie en investissant dans des outils politiques spécifiques aux enfants et en étendant leur utilisation.

La région du Sahel et de l’Afrique de l’Ouest est confrontée à une grave crise de sécurité alimentaire et nutritionnelle : des taux de dénutrition sévère élevés y côtoient une forte prévalence des carences nutritionnelles et de la suralimentation – le « triple fardeau de la malnutrition ». À l’origine de toutes les formes de malnutrition ainsi que de diverses maladies non transmissibles courantes, la mauvaise alimentation est responsable d’environ un décès d’adulte sur cinq dans le monde. Le coût élevé des aliments constitue un obstacle majeur à l’accès à une alimentation saine. Même avant la récente inflation des prix alimentaires mondiaux, les prix alimentaires étaient déjà 30 % à 40 % plus élevés en Afrique de l’Ouest que dans d’autres régions du monde au niveau de revenu comparable. Cette note se propose d’analyser le coût d’une alimentation saine dans 17 pays d’Afrique de l’Ouest et du Sahel et d’identifier les groupes d’aliments qui composent ce coût. La forte variabilité des coûts et de leur composition observée entre les pays souligne la nécessité de politiques alimentaires plus ciblées et sensibles à la nutrition, mais aussi de données sur les prix alimentaires et de capacités de suivi renforcées.

This report looks at the demand for counterfeit goods and identifies its key drivers. It discusses the specificity of the demand for counterfeit goods, including both deliberate and unintentional demand. Indeed, some consumers will deliberately buy counterfeit and pirated goods while others will be deceived into buying illicit products, thinking they are genuine. The report also examines the profiles of destination economies in the global trade of counterfeit and pirated goods. It uses quantitative analysis to study the economic characteristics of various economies, including the quantitative relationship between counterfeit intensity and certain observable socioeconomic factors. The identification of socio-economic factors, in particular, influencing the demand for counterfeit and pirated goods is crucial to help policymakers develop appropriate policies, including better targeting of consumer awareness campaigns.

What are the root causes of gender inequality? Building on the fifth edition of the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), the SIGI 2023 Global Report provides a global outlook of discriminatory social institutions, the fundamental causes of gender inequality. It reveals how formal and informal laws, social norms and practices limit women’s and girls’ rights and opportunities in all aspects of their lives. Globally, 40% of them continue to live in countries where gender-based discrimination is assessed as high or very high. The report stresses how discriminatory social institutions curtail women’s and adolescents’ fundamental access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. It also sheds light on the gendered impacts of climate change and underlines how women can play a pivotal role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. To accelerate efforts aimed at achieving SDG 5 and eliminating the underlying and structural factors that hamper women’s empowerment, the report offers concrete policy actions. It calls for a gender-transformative approach to leverage crises and challenges into windows of opportunity to establish women and men as agents of change.