Publications & Documents

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.

This Policy Insights takes stock of OECD countries’ recent initiatives to strengthen the integration of child well-being policies. It lays out some of the challenges facing countries as they work to push the child well-being policy agenda forward and discusses what countries can do to become more effective. As this Policy Insights illustrates, integrated policy plans offer opportunities to steer the child policy agenda but can be tricky to grow beyond a guiding framework. Countries should consider narrowing down their scope and incentivising joint work. Child-specific policy tools are not yet playing a fully effective role in mainstreaming the child well-being policy agenda across government. Being strategic about investing in these tools and extending their use is called for.

The Sahel and West Africa region is facing a serious food and nutrition security crisis with high rates of acute malnutrition, combined with high rates of malnourishment and over-nourishment – the 'triple burden of malnutrition'. Poor-quality diets are the root of all forms of malnutrition, as well as common non-communicable diseases, and are responsible for an estimated one in five adult deaths globally. The high cost of food is a key barrier to accessing a healthy diet. Even before the recent global inflation in food prices, West Africa’s food prices were 30%-40% higher than other regions in the world of comparable income levels. The paper analyses the costs of healthy diets in 17 countries in the Sahel and West Africa and which food groups drive up costs. The observed high cross-country variability in costs and cost composition points to a need for more targeted and nutrition-sensitive food system policies as well as the need to invest in better food price data and monitoring capacities.

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.

Good policy making for child well-being calls for government ministries, agencies and other service providers to better collaborate and focus on a small number of key child well-being issues. 'Integrated policy making for child well-being: Common approaches and challenges ahead' takes stock of OECD countries’ recent initiatives to strengthen the integration of child well-being policies. It documents OECD countries’ experiences of implementing integrated policy plans for child well-being and child-specific policy tools, specifically child indicator sets, child impact assessments and child budgeting. It lays out the challenges facing countries as they work to push the child well-being policy agenda forward and discusses what countries can do to become more effective. Pursuing efforts to strengthen the integration of child well-being policies is costly. Accordingly, it’s important for countries to proactively consider the arising challenges and to look at options to overcome or avoid altogether the common pitfalls.

This report provides an overview of gender budgeting practices across OECD countries, based on the 2022 OECD Survey on Gender Budgeting as well as trends from surveys conducted in 2016 and 2018. It takes stock of countries’ progress in developing an effective and sustainable gender budgeting approach and discusses challenges and plans for the further development of gender budgeting. Country case studies highlight gender budgeting in practice. The report also presents the 2022 OECD Gender Budgeting Index, which compares the implementation of gender budgeting across five key areas: 1) institutional and strategic arrangements; 2) methods and tools; 3) enabling environment; 4) accountability and transparency; and 5) impact.

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are laying the groundwork for extensive and rapid transformations in society. Understanding the relationship between AI capabilities and human skills is essential to ensure policy responsiveness to ongoing and incoming changes. The OECD has tracked how well AI systems fare on tasks from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), comparing AI performance to that of 15-year-old students in the test’s core domains of reading, mathematics and science. Tests were conducted using the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) family of large language models (LLMs), the AI behind ChatGPT, which took the world by storm after its public release in late 2022. Results show that both GPT versions outperform average student performance in reading and science. In addition, we observe rapid advances in mathematics where AI capabilities are quickly catching up with those of students. In November 2022, GPT-3.5 could answer 35% of a set of PISA mathematics tasks, a level of performance significantly below that of humans, who answer 51% of the tasks successfully on average. However, by March 2023, GPT-4 answered 40% of the tasks successfully. Policy implications of these results are discussed in this paper.

This study provides an in-depth examination of the fiscal and governance decentralisation of long-term care (LTC) across OECD countries, offering projections of future fiscal burdens of LTC spending across levels of government. With rapid population ageing and a decrease in the supply of informal care, LTC spending has increased significantly. The paper introduces a novel methodology to estimate LTC expenditures across different government levels, including central and subnational governments. By analysing country cases, it explores the responsibilities assigned to each government level and the implications for service delivery and intergovernmental coordination. The study also discusses the overall anticipated increase of LTC expenditure to 2.3% of GDP by 2040, identifying the most impacted countries. This research contributes to our understanding of LTC systems, highlights the challenges of increasing LTC costs and provides insights for optimising governance and fiscal expenditure.