Employment Policies in an Aging Society: Review of the Experiences of the OECD Countries with Population Aging and Their Policy Responses

In this paper, the experience of OECD countries with public management reform, as has been attempted since the nineteen seventies until now, is discussed. In particular we focus on the lessons which can be drawn from public management reform attempts in English speaking countries on the one hand (the ''Anglo-saxon tradition'' in public management reform), represented by the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, and in countries on the European continent (the ''continental tradition'' in public management reform), represented by the Netherlands and France. The relevance of the experience of these Western countries with public management reform to countries in Central and Eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia, will be pointed out. For this purpose, the results and conclusions of the various country chapters in the report will be employed. A critical examination of this relevance is necessary to formulate an answer to the central question of this ACE Phare research project: can public management innovations as applied in Western Europe and in other OECD countries be applied successfully in Central and Eastern Europe?

: OECD (Employment Policies in an Aging Society: Review of the Experiences of the OECD Countries with Population Aging and Their Policy Responses)

The organisation of infrastructure industries in OECD countries has undergone massive changes in the past thirty years. Taken as a whole, their experience constitutes a rich source of information on infrastructure service industries and their governance. Such information can be of great value for the People’s Republic of China, where infrastructure development will be one of the major development challenges in the years to come. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the experience of OECD countries in the management of their infrastructure service industries, and draw some lessons of relevance for policy making in China. The first part of the note provides a sketch of the public utility model that prevailed in most infrastructure industries of OECD countries until the end of the 1970s, discusses why and how this model has been challenged and gradually modified in the past thirty years, and illustrates some of the opportunities and risks of the reform process through three examples. The second part proposes a more detailed analysis of the main issues that infrastructure industries pose to policy makers today and some possible responses. The third part summarises the policy lessons drawn from the recent experience of OECD countries and examines what this entails for the management of infrastructure services in China.

This paper analyzes institutional arrangements for public debt management by reviewing the experience of OECD countries during the late 1980s and 1990s. It discusses principal-agent issues arising from the delegation of authority from the Minister of Finance to the debt management office and describes how countries have designed governance structures and control and monitoring mechanisms to deal with these issues. The paper also discusses what lessons emerging market countries and transition countries can draw from the experience of advanced OECD countries. The OECD experience clearly indicates that-regardless of whether the debt management office is located inside or outside the Ministry of Finance-four issues are of vital importance: 1) Giving priority to strategic public policy objectives rather than tactical trading objectives. 2) Strengthening the institutional capacity to deal with financial portfolio management and with the public policy aspects of debt management. 3) Modernizing debt management. 4) Creating mechanisms to ensure successful delegation and accountability to the Ministry of Finance and Parliament.

Professionalization of official activities is an important link in the process of strengthening the public service and increasing customer focus in relations between the public and private sectors. Time dictates higher demands on the professional and personal qualities of managers and ordinary employees of gov-ernment agencies. Communication skills, flexibility in decision making, and analytical skills come to the fore. The aim of this article is to study the experience of OECD countries in this area, the main trends in the training and retraining of officials, with the development of recommendations for improving ap-proaches to the professionalization of the state apparatus in Kazakhstan. The study examines and sum-marizes cases from countries such as the UK, USA, Canada, Japan, France, Lithuania, and Australia. In addition to the educational component, the policy of civil servants professionalization within the OECD countries is based on the meritocracy principles, gender equality, and continuous improvement of skills. Overall, the core principles for improving public service in OECD countries are professional, strategic and innovative. The paper concludes with recommendations aimed at advancing the professionalization of Kazakhstan’s state apparatus, drawing on current practices and lessons learned from international best practices.

Extended Producer Responsibility Policy is an environmental policy firstly implemented in OECD countries. The policy enables the producers to extend responsibility for the products to the waste disposal stage of the life cycle after consumption. The EPR policy of OECD countries is functioned on the products sold in these countries and the producers. As OECD countries are the main exporting market of Chinese business, some of them will certainly be influenced by the policy. As China’s environmental problems have become crucial, we needs to learn from the experience of OECD countries, and enable the producers to bear the waste disposal cost to reduce consumer waste emissions.

The report quantifies the rising demand for long-term care workers in one of the most rapidly aging regions worldwide. It highlights the precarious working conditions of paid care workers, the consequences of caring for unpaid carers as well as the limited training opportunities and the particular burden on women for both groups of workers. It also describes policies and best practices to support family caregivers, expand and professionalize the care workforce, and build more resilient care systems for the Latin American and the Caribbean region, also building on the experience of OECD countries.

This study contributes to an understanding of consensual and entrepreneurial culture in organisations within the context of communicating organisational culture through human resource policy. Given that consensual and entrepreneurial culture has the potential to shape employee attitudes and work behaviours towards the attainment of business efficiency and sustainability, this study examined the relationship between organisational culture and Human Resource (HR) development policy. Two hypotheses were formulated and tested to establish the significance of the relationship between organisational culture and HR development policy. We adopted a quantitative approach, utilising a structured questionnaire (n=305) and other documented evidence. The study used a combination of convenience sampling and simple random sampling techniques to select the respondents. The findings revealed that there is a significant relationship between organisational culture and HR development policy. It was found that consensual culture as a dimension of organisational culture has the greatest influence on HR development policy, and consequently the entrepreneurial mentality and creativity within the organisation. We conclude that there is a strong positive relationship between organisational culture and HR development policy as an antecedent of HR/organisational outcome in the Nigerian banking sector. This paper recommends that consensual and entrepreneurial cultures are crucial for business sustainability in the knowledge-based global economy. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n20p101

OECD countries rely on regulatory tools to manage potential risks from exposure to targeted chemicals. Ex-ante regulatory impact assessment has a long tradition in many OECD countries, with established analytical steps and oversight as well as opportunities for public engagement to hold governments accountable for conducting analysis before regulations are issued. But ex-ante analyses necessarily depend on unverifiable assumptions and models of how the world would look absent the regulation, and how responses to regulatory requirements will alter those conditions. In essence, ex-ante analyses are hypotheses of the effects of regulatory actions. Better ex-post regulatory evaluation would allow agencies and others to test those hypotheses against actual outcomes. This would not only inform decisions related to the cost-effectiveness of existing policy, but would provide feedback that would improve future ex-ante analyses and future policies. However, ex-post analysis also poses challenges, especially when it comes to chemical risks. Once a regulation is in place, it is not always obvious what the world would have looked like without it. Measuring opportunity costs is not easy, and measuring regulatory benefits is often harder. Furthermore, once a regulation is in place, neither regulators nor regulatory entities have strong incentives for examining its actual impact. As a result of these methodological and incentive challenges, while ex-post evaluation has a long tradition in other areas (particularly in programmes financed through the fiscal budget), it has received little attention (and even fewer resources) in the regulatory arena, despite government guidelines requiring it. This paper attempts to address these challenges to evaluating regulatory outcomes and learning from those evaluations. Drawing on experience in OECD countries, it reviews the practices used to understand the likely impacts of regulations aimed at reducing chemical risks both before and after they are issued. It examines why efforts at retrospective review have lagged behind prospective regulatory analysis, and offers recommendations for addressing methodological and incentive challenges to better evaluation.

In all former centrally planned economies, the question of how to restructure old‐age income provisions and open the way to non‐governmental, complementary pension schemes is being posed. This paper deals with four main areas of that problem. First, the various objectives of public and complementary schemes are discussed. The paper argues that without a broad consensus among the major interested parties there is a considerable danger that envisaged objectives will not be achieved. The second section reviews the main forms of complementary pension scheme and discusses the central characteristics of occupational and personal schemes. The third section addresses two critical policy areas: the kind of regulations that may be required in order to enforce the social and economic objectives; and the likely social and economic implications. On the basis of experience in OECD countries and the specific situation in countries in transition, the final section offers some tentative conclusions for Czechoslovakia, the main one being that during the initial phase of economic transition preference should be given to a simple defined contribution plan. Such a complementary scheme would be consistent with the lack of developed financial markets and the privatization plan of the government and require neither a great number of highly trained accountants and actuaries nor the comprehensive set of regulations a defined benefit plan is likely to dictate.

The OECD has introduced a water pricing mechanism and listed eight categories gleaned from experience in OECD countries. However, in the Asian humid tropics, it is too early to apply water pricing because there is seldom a concept of water right, or practical organization of water management. In almost all irrigation projects in Japan, area charge has been applied, and collected fees have recovered entire operation and maintenance costs. Although effective volumetric charge is employed in several regions in Japan, most farmers pay area-based annual charges at several times of the year via Land Improvement Districts. In the Asian humid tropics, it is important to facilitate the establishment of sound management organizations of irrigation water before introducing a strict water pricing mechanism to levy the charge.

Farmers have a long record of adapting to climate change. The evolving nature of the present changes could, however, have a significant impact on agriculture that will challenge farmers to adapt even further as regards land use and production practices. Moreover, agriculture is expected to reduce its GHG emissions and to offset CO2 emissions from other sectors through carbon sequestration. These actions are closely related to farm management practices. It is therefore important to understand how the cultural and social factors (education, information, traditional local practices) in addition to policy incentives facilitate or hinder the implementation of adaptation and mitigation actions. Such an understanding is critical as many potential winwin options are not adopted. Drawing on the experiences of OECD countries, this report identifies policy options that would contribute to a sustainable and resilient agricultural sector in the context of climate change.

Gender inequality is an important and visible issue for OECD countries and the costs are borne at both social and economic levels. In line with the 2015 OECD Recommendation on Gender Equality in Public Life, gender budgeting ensures that gender equality considerations are taken systematically into account in tax and spending decisions. Effective implementation of gender budgeting has the potential to improve gender equality, ensure a sense of fairness and contribute to inclusive economic growth. This paper draws on the experiences of OECD countries and aims to provide insights into how the budget process can develop as a tool to support gender equality goals; the different ways in which gender budgeting can be implemented; and the factors that help provide an enabling environment for gender budgeting. Arising from this analysis, this paper proposes initial guidelines for designing and implementing gender budgeting to assist countries in putting in place an effective and sustainable approach. It also presents a first pass at a composite index for gender budgeting which assesses the extent to which OECD countries gender budgeting efforts are characterised by a strong strategic framework, effective tools of implementation and an enabling environment.

Problem setting. One of the basic principles of land law is the principle of payment for land use, which is enshrined in the Land Code of Ukraine and provides for the payment (in monetary terms) of the object, which is transferred to the property or use of the respective entity. At present, the essence of the principle of payment for land use is also revealed through the existence of a legal mechanism for payment of land, which includes land tax and rent for land of state and communal property (rent). These payments are provided for by the Tax Code of Ukraine. Land payment is a significant source of local budget revenue and is the second largest source of income after the personal income tax. Analysis of recent researches. A lot of scientists, in particular: M. P. Kucheryavenko, T. M. Shulga, E. M. Bogatyryova, Yu. I. Plotnikova, and others are trying to cover some aspects of modern legal regulation of land taxation. Article’s main body. The article is devoted to the study of the modern legal regulation of land tax in Ukraine and foreign states. The experience of OECD countries is explored. The author found that each state has a fairly well-established land tax model that provides for effective tax rates and benefits, an objective tax base, and so on. At the same time, differentiated taxation in different countries varies in terms of taxation, tax base, rates, methods of tax collection, fiscal powers of different levels of government, scope and amount of privileges, etc. A common feature of these countries is that in the rampant countries, the proceeds from the payment of a real estate tax or a pure land tax are directed to the development of urban infrastructure, so it is profitable for citizens to pay this tax. At the same time, the most effective systems of land taxation operate in the countries with developed land and real estate market, since the efficiency of taxation and increase of tax revenues to the budgets depend on the completeness of accounting of the objects of taxation. Conclusions and prospects for the development. Therefore, we consider it expedient and logical to apply the land valuation used in OECD countries. Unlike land valuation (currently in use in Ukraine), mass valuation makes it more fair to assess the taxation of land and its objects from the point of view of the objective distribution of the tax burden in the context of constant changes in the real estate market.

Lessons from the Experience of OECD Countries