Oecd Quotes

The gender pay gap in Korea is the highest among the OECD countries. According to 2014 data, women working in Korea earn only 63 percent of what men earn; the OECD average percentage is 84.13 Korea was also ranked as the worst country in which to be a working woman, receiving the lowest scores among the nations surveyed on the glass-ceiling index by the British magazine The Economist.14 8 “Repeated Protests against Tuition Increase,” Yonhap News, April 6, 2011.

The United States now ranks twentieth out of twenty-seven OECD nations in the share of young people expected to finish high school.50

embarrassing entanglements. “Bribery interferes with trade, investment, and development,” Hillary Clinton said at the OECD’s fiftieth-anniversary forum in 2011. “It undermines good governance and encourages greater corruption. And of course, it is morally wrong—and far too common.” On that we can all agree.

A 2011 OECD report showed that, over the past three decades, in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Israel, and New Zealand--all countries that have chosen a version of capitalism less red in tooth and claw than the American model--inequality has grown as fast as or faster than in the United States. France, proud, as usual, of its exceptionalism, seemed to be the one major Western outlier, but recent studies have shown that over the past decade it, too, has fallen into line.

Once without peer, the United States has fallen to nineteenth in college completion in the OECD, and the gap in completion between higher-income and lower-income students has widened.56 Older Americans are the most educated in the world. Younger Americans, not even close.

Over the past 30 years, approximately 300 million people have moved into China’s middle class. And according to the OECD Development Centre, the forecast is for another 200 million people to move into the middle class by 2026. This means the Asia Pacific region, which in 2009 represented 18% of the world’s middle class, will reach 66 percent by 2030. Let’s repeat that. Over the next 15 years, Asia will go from 20 percent to 66 percent of the world’s middle class. At the same time, the developed markets of North America and Europe, which held a combined 54 percent of the global middle class in 2009, are forecast to drop to only 21 percent by 2030. Basically, follow the money. Asia’s middle class consumers are the future. Learn Mandarin.

Everything is argued over in this world. Apart from only one thing that is not argued over. Nobody argues about democracy. Democracy is there as if it was some sort of saint in the altar from whom miracles are no longer expected. But it’s there as a reference. A reference. Democracy. And no-one attends to the matter that the democracy in which we live is a democracy taken captive, conditioned, amputated. Because the power..the power of the citizen, the power of each one of us, is limited, in the political sphere, I repeat, in the political sphere, to remove a government that we do not like and replace it with another one that perhaps we might like in the future. Nothing else. But the big decisions are taken in a different sphere, and we all know which one that is. The big international financial organisations, the IMFs, the World Trade Organisations, the World Banks, the OECDs. All..not one of these entities is democratic. And so, how can we keep talking about democracy, if those who effectively govern the world are not chosen democratically by the people? Who chooses the representatives of each country in those organisations? Your respective peoples? No. Where then is the democracy?

All of the Nordic countries have high levels of trust, but the Danes are the most trusting people on the planet. In a 2011 survey by the OECD, 88.3 percent of Danes expressed a high level of trust in others, more than any other nationality (the next places on the list were filled by Norway, Finland, and Sweden, respectively, and the United States was way down in twenty-first place out of thirty countries surveyed).

Indeed, social spending in the United States is even higher than it appears, because many Americans are forced to pay for health, retirement, and disability benefits through their employers rather than the government. When this privately administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD countries, just behind France.

The proportion of the Danish population considered to be below the poverty line has almost doubled, from 4 percent to 7.5 percent, over the last ten years. A recent report by think tank Cevea revealed that, in Denmark, the wealthiest 1 percent owns almost a third of the country’s combined wealth: that’s still below the OECD average, but hardly what you would call “equality.” The elite are increasingly congregating in residential enclaves, almost all of them in and around Copenhagen.

Other international organizations—the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU), the World Economic Forum—now encourage their member nations to guarantee their workers paid parental leaves and subsidized day care. They do so because it’s clear that these things are good for economic growth. Studies demonstrate the ways that family-friendly policies tailored to today’s realities benefit a country’s economy. Family leave policies and affordable day care increase women’s participation in the labor force, help employers retain workers, and improve the health of women and children.

The United States is famously resistant to anything smacking of redistribution. Yet it allocates 19 percent of its GDP to social services, and despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians the spending has continued to grow. The most recent expansions are a prescription drug benefit introduced by George W. Bush and the eponymous health insurance plan known as Obamacare introduced by his successor. Indeed, social spending in the United States is even higher than it appears, because many Americans are forced to pay for health, retirement, and disability benefits through their employers rather than the government. When this privately administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD countries, just behind France.

Life expectancy continues to rise in most of the rest of the industrialized world, but in the United States it has dropped for three years in a row—for the first time in a century. As we’ll see, American kids today are 55 percent more likely to die by the age of nineteen than children in the other rich countries that are members of the OECD, the club of industrialized nations. America now lags behind its peer countries in health care and high-school graduation rates while suffering greater violence, poverty and addiction. This dysfunction damages all Americans: it undermines our nation’s competitiveness, especially as growing economies like China’s are fueled by much larger populations and by rising education levels, and may erode the well-being of our society for decades to come. The losers are not just those at the bottom of society, but all of us. For America to be strong, we must strengthen all Americans.

We had heard rumours of what people referred to as a ‘phantom accounting system’, also called zappers and phantom ware. This phenomenon was unheard of in South Africa at the time. The more formal term used to describe this kind of criminal financial-management software is a ‘sales-suppression system’. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in which South Africa has observer status, issued a guide on these systems in 2013.10 On the surface, the technology seems like a supposedly normal accounting system, used mainly by retailers. It has all the expected features: it records stock, sales, invoices, receipts and taxes. It can print daily, weekly and monthly accounting records. Yet the software has a feature that can blank out certain sales and receipts. You can set it to suppress, for instance, every fourth sale, or random sales of a particular value, whichever you prefer. The effect is that, on paper, your stock, sales and receipts would balance for tax purposes. All you would have to do is click on a secret place on the screen, or type a particular code on the keyboard, and the unrecorded sales and receipts would reflect. One would then be able to take this money out of the company’s takings for the day, week or month, and people would be none the wiser.

My gratitude goes as well to the other data scientists I pestered and to the institutions that collect and maintain their data: Karlyn Bowman, Daniel Cox (PRRI), Tamar Epner (Social Progress Index), Christopher Fariss, Chelsea Follett (HumanProgress), Andrew Gelman, Yair Ghitza, April Ingram (Science Heroes), Jill Janocha (Bureau of Labor Statistics), Gayle Kelch (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Alaina Kolosh (National Safety Council), Kalev Leetaru (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone), Monty Marshall (Polity Project), Bruce Meyer, Branko Milanović (World Bank), Robert Muggah (Homicide Monitor), Pippa Norris (World Values Survey), Thomas Olshanski (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Amy Pearce (Science Heroes), Mark Perry, Therese Pettersson (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Stephen Radelet, Auke Rijpma (OECD Clio Infra), Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Google Trends), James X. Sullivan, Sam Taub (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Kyla Thomas, Jennifer Truman (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Jean Twenge, Bas van Leeuwen (OECD Clio Infra), Carlos Vilalta, Christian Welzel (World Values Survey), Justin Wolfers, and Billy Woodward (Science Heroes). David Deutsch, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Kevin Kelly, John Mueller, Roslyn Pinker, Max Roser, and Bruce Schneier read a draft of the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice.

with the exception of England, every other industrialized democracy has higher levels of income equality than the United States. Data from the OECD shows one consistent, general principle: The higher the taxes in a given country, the less inequality. This makes obvious and intuitive sense. Taxation is the primary method for redistribution, and as a general rule, the more taxation, the more redistribution; the more redistribution, the more equality. The United States collects a far smaller share of the national income in taxes than nearly every other industrialized democracy, and in recent years that rate has been dropping. Total tax revenue as percentage of GDP in the United States is at 24.8 percent, down from 29.5 percent in 2000. You can compare that to Denmark, which has the highest level of tax revenue as a percentage of GDP (48.2 percent) and the most equality out of any OECD country.15 Over the last thirty years or so we’ve seen rising inequality in pre-tax income, which means that before the government even starts its taxing, spending, and redistribution, there has been a profound and accelerating gap between high income earners and everyone else. The rich are earning more, while the non-rich’s earnings stagnate or decline. But these pre-tax earnings are run through the redistributive mechanisms of the state. And during the same time that pre-tax inequality has been growing, our tax system has grown less redistributive, further amplifying inequality rather than mitigating it. This

도서관 대전출장안마( Ymz44.COM )대구섹파매칭인프라 확충 및 운영 활성화 지식정보사회에서 도서관 확충을 통한 문화 향수권 신장으로 국민의 삶의 질 향상과 평생교육을 증진하기 위하여 공공도서관 건립 지원 및 생활밀착형 작은 도서관 조성 지원 사업을 추진하고 있다. (1) OECD수준의 공공도서관 확충 정부는 도서관법에 의한 법정계획인 도서관발전종합계획(2009-2013)에 근거하여 OECD 등 선진국 수준의 공공도서관 인프라 구축을 위해 2013년까지 공공도서관 900개관(인구 약 5만 명당 1관)을 목표로 「공공도서관 건립 지원」대전출장안마( Ymz44.COM )대구섹파매칭사업을 추진하고 있다. 공공도서관 건립 지원 사업은 지역의 교육·문화 중심지이며 복합문화정보공간인 공공도서관을 확충하여 전 국민의 정보문화향수권을 신장하고 도농 간 정보격차를 해소하는 것을 목적으로 한다. 사업수행주체인 지방자치단체에 부지매입비를 제외한 총 건립비의 40% 범위 내에서, 농어촌지역은 지방자치단체의 열악한 재정 상황을 감안하여 총 건립비의 80% 범위 내에서 최대 16억 원까지 국고를 지원하고 있다. 1991년부터 2004년까지는 일반회계로, 2005년부터 2009년까지는 균형발전특별회계, 2010년부터는 광역지역발전특별회계로 편성되었으며, 2012년에는 13개 시·도 53개관 418억 대전출장안마( Ymz44.COM )대구섹파매칭원을 지원하였다.

OECD countries other than the United States, for every dollar spent on health care, an additional two dollars was spent on social

위험에 처한 새끼사자 구하는 엄마 사자포토한국 공교육비 민간부담 14년째 OECD 1위北 총리, 남북관계 개선 강조 "새 국면 열 것""평화유지군, 소말리아 여성에 성폭력-성매매"탕웨이 "보호본능 자극하는 조용한 이미지?"마티

Skutečně "spravedlivé" srovnání je tedy takové, které říká, kolik procent státu odvedeme z průměrné mzdy v dané zemi: U nás je to celkem 42,5 %. A tak najednou zjišťujeme, že Češi platí deváté nejvyšší daně ze zemí, které jsou členem Organizace pro hospodářskou spolupráci a rozvoj (OECD).

Meanwhile, Chairman Lee visited the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and met with Secretary-General Angel Gurría and Deputy Secretary-General Yves Leterme, former prime minister

Belgium. At this meeting, Chairman Lee introduced Korea’s achievements of the Act on the Protection of Public Interest Whistleblowers and efforts to expand the range of protection. The OECD requested for the ACRC’ s active leadership in preventing corruption in the Asia

period among emerging market countries and non-OECD countries. Economic growth gathered

momentum also among OECD countries, but its pace was slower. However, once into the 2nd half of 2010, the

The Commission also took an active part in activities by international organizations such as ITU, OECD and APEC. As a result, five

members of the Commission currently hold the office of chair or vice-chair at OECD, 14 at ITU, and four at APT, increasing the in

(4151)GNP(4151) an examiner in the 3 phase review of the OECD Working Group on Bribery on New Zealand at the OECD Working Group on Bribery in October 2013. The ACRC successfully responded to the review by establishing a cooperative system with the

The US is exceptional. It’s exceptionally big, with two and a half times the population of any other member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an organisation that includes most of the world’s richest countries.

Americans spend an average of about $7,200 a year on health care, compared with the roughly $2,900 average for the other market economies that make up the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and for that greatly increased outlay we get higher infant mortality, higher obesity rates, lower longevity, fewer doctors per 1,000 people (just 2.4 per 1,000 in the United States, compared with 3.1 in OECD states), and fewer acute care hospital beds (2.7 per 1,000, compared to 3.8 per 1,000 in the OECD countries).

The most recent edition of the test—called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)—was conducted in 2012, and it found that among the OECD’s thirty-four members, the United States ranked twenty-seventh, twentieth, and seventeenth in math, science, and reading, respectively.

The OECD similarly looked at many countries to establish the relationship between tax and growth. It came to the conclusion that for every 1 per cent of a country’s economic output that is taken by tax, the output per person falls by 0.6 to 0.7 per cent.

According to an OECD report published in 2012, the United States and European Union countries will, by 2020, only account for around 25% of college-educated people in the world.

In a very humbling process, the Swiss have had to admit to their faults and compromise on secrecy, changing the law and releasing the names of bank clients to please the US, as well as signing a dozen double taxation agreements in six months to please the OECD.

Labor productivity (i.e. the economic result of each hour worked) is extremely disappointing, with South Korea coming 28th out of the 30 OECD countries: only Mexico and Poland produce less economic value per hour of work.

Figure 1: The incidence of banking crises Source: Own calculations, based on the reported numbers of major bank failures in OECD economies, from Reinhart and Rogoff (2010)

There are two main databases, the World Bank’s PovcalNet database and the World Inequality Database. Out of the many potential measures of inequality we initially select four, (but they all tend in the same directions), to wit (i) the Gini coefficient,3 Diagram 7.1, for a number of OECD countries, (ii) for a few selected countries the share of income of the top 10 and 1% of the distribution, Tables 7.1 and 7.2, and (iii) the share of wealth for the top 10%, Table 7.3. We show these latter data points for the income inequality data at five-year intervals for the USA, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy Japan, China, Brazil, Egypt and India, and the wealth inequality data for four countries, USA, China, France and UK.

There is striking evidence—now gathered and acknowledged by the OECD and IMF—that economies with more equal distributions of income and wealth have stronger and more stable economic growth than those with greater inequality.56 Redistributive policies which reduce inequality are found to have in general a positive impact on growth.57

Democracies raise money through taxation. The overall tax revenues (taking together all levels of government) in the United States in 2017 was just 27 percent of GDP. This is seven points lower than the average in the OECD. The United States was tied with South Korea, and only four other countries in the OECD have lower tax revenues (Mexico, Ireland, Turkey, and Chile).

Intricately connected to the restructuring of relations of production, neoliberalism has also entailed the restructuring of social reproduction in ways that have rendered it increasingly insecure for particular sectors of the population. In the US, Canada and the UK, the move from welfare to ‘workfare’ states is particularly relevant, though other cutbacks to government services, the hollowing out of public housing, the restructuring of pension plans in ways that render them increasingly dependent on global financial markets and the imposition of austerity measures (especially in Europe) post-2008 are all key moves that have contributed to the ‘reprivatization of social reproduction’. The latter refers to the ways in which the decline in social forms of provisioning in most OECD countries over the past several decades has resulted in an increase in the amount of work done by families, particularly by women, and/or the private sector.

The OECD study also found that women’s words translated into action. As female political representation increased in Greece, Portugal and Switzerland, these countries experienced an increase in educational investment. Conversely, as the proportion of female legislators in Ireland, Italy and Norway decreased in the late 1990s, those countries experienced ‘a comparable drop in educational expenditures as a percentage of GDP’. As little as a single percentage point rise in female legislators was found to increase the ratio of educational expenditure. Similarly, a 2004 Indian study of local councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan found that reserving one-third of the seats for women increased investment in infrastructure related to women’s needs.5 A 2007 paper looking at female representation in India between 1967 and 2001 also found that a 10% increase in female political representation resulted in a 6% increase in ‘the probability that an individual attains primary education in an urban area’.

University entrance anxiety is regarded as one of the reasons that Korea has the highest suicide rate of any nation in the industrialized world. In fact, the most common cause of death for Koreans under the age of forty is suicide; for most other OECD nations, the leading cause is auto accidents or heart attack. Hanging is the most popular method, constituting 44.9 percent of all suicides; poison comes in at a close second.6 I

Usually, when gun control researchers do a study, only a small set of countries are used in any comparison, typically limited to so-called “civilized,” as David Hemenway or Piers Morgan calls them, or “developed” countries.18 It isn’t clear what is meant by “civilized” countries, so what can Americans learn from these other “developed” nations? First, here is how homicide rates vary across developed countries. Currently, thirty-four countries are in the OECD, though the agency also includes Brazil and Russia in its statistical data, as they meet the definition of “developed.”19 (Both countries have been negotiating for membership, but Russia has had talks suspended because of the Crimea crisis.)

With industrial capacity destroyed in Europe—except for Scandinavia—and in Japan and crippled in the United Kingdom, the United States produced approximately 60 percent of the world output of manufactures in 1950, and its GNP was 61 percent of the total of the present (1979) OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries. This was obviously a transitory situation.

The vast majority of families in poverty with children do not receive any help for child care. This again makes the United States a rarity: its public child care spending as a share of GDP is one-quarter of that of sixteen other OECD countries

Depending on the country, a 70-year-old is about four to five times more likely to vote than a 25-year-old. The compounding effect of a more numerous elderly population and a higher voter participation rate implies that in the next 20 to 30 years OECD countries would systematically have an above 65 majority of voters at each election

Statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tell another tale: economic growth is dramatically slowing while inequality in developed countries is increasing.

Overall, Reagan’s first term witnessed a decline in the density of unionization that was unprecedented in the postwar experience of any OECD nation. Private sector unionization which stood at nearly 35% in 1953 has plummeted from a fifth to a sixth of the labor force. The contrast with the Canadian experience is dramatic: from 1940 to 1965, unionization in both countries was synchronized in trend, from 1965, however, there has been a sharp divergence, accelerating since 1975.

Arguments for reshoring many kinds of manufacturing in order to gain greater resilience and reduce unexpected disruptions are not new. The progress of globalization and the actions of multinational companies have been questioned and criticized since the 1990s and, more recently, these sentiments became part of electoral discontent in some countries, most notably in the UK and the US.[98] But as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, a remarkable lineup of institutions began to publish analyses and appeals for the reorganization of global supply chains. The OECD looked at the policy options to build more resilient production networks that would rely less on imports from distant places and that could better withstand global trade interruptions

At the sectoral level, basic earnings in finance and energy are twice as high as in catering or agency work. But within companies, too, the difference in pay between the simple case handler and managerial staff has grown. According to an OECD study, income inequality has risen particularly dramatically since the turn of the century.30

When he puts it like this, it sounds surprisingly sensible. Danes have a collective sense of responsibility – of belonging, even. They pay into the system because they believe it to be worthwhile. The insanely high taxation also has some happy side effects. It means that Denmark has the lowest income inequality among all the OECD countries, so the difference in take-home wages between, for instance, Lego’s CEO and its lowliest cleaner, isn’t as vast as it might be elsewhere. Studies show that people who live in neighbourhoods where most people earn about the same amount are happier, according to research from San Francisco State University and the University of California Berkeley. In Denmark, even people working in wildly different fields will probably have a similar amount left in the bank each month after tax. I’m interested in the idea that income equality makes for better neighbours and want to put it to the test. But since I live in what is essentially a retirement village, where no one apart from Friendly Neighbour works, there isn’t much of an opportunity in Sticksville. So I ask Helena C about hers. She tells me that the street she lives in is populated by shop assistants, supermarket workers, accountants, lawyers, marketers and a landscape gardener. ‘Everyone has a nice home and a good quality of life,’ she says, ‘it doesn’t matter so much what you do for work here.’ Regardless of their various careers and the earning potential that this might afford them in other countries with lower taxes, professionals and non-professionals live harmoniously side by side in Denmark. This also makes social mobility easier, according to studies from The Equality Trust on the impact of income equality. So you’re more likely to be able to get on in life, get educated and get a good job, regardless of who your parents are and what they do in Denmark than anywhere else. It turns out that it’s easier to live ‘The American Dream’ here than it’s ever likely to be in the US.

There’s a brittleness to life for about 150 million Americans, with a constant risk that sickness, layoffs or a car accident will cause everything to collapse. One in seven Americans lives below the poverty line, a substantially higher rate than in Canada or other OECD countries, and scholars estimate that half of all Americans will at some point slip below the line.

If more Americans were to learn of the large body of research showing that higher inequality in rich countries isn’t just unfair but actually slows down economic growth—by a fifth since the 1980s, according to a 2014 study by the OECD—the remarkably strong support for Robin Hoodism might get even stronger.

The Chicago boys and their mentors had the good sense to maintain the highly efficient, nationalized copper producer Codelco, the world’s largest. That’s, of course, a radical violation of market principles, of neoliberal principles, but worthwhile since the company was the source of much of Chile’s export earnings and the basis of the state’s fiscal revenues. In general, it was close to a perfect experiment. It looked like a great success, if you ignored the human costs. In 1982, Friedman published the second edition of his manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom, celebrating the triumph of the cause. The timing was auspicious. In 1982 the Chilean economy crashed and had to be bailed out by state intervention. The state then controlled more of the economy than it had under Allende. Analysts who had their eyes open called it “the Chicago road to socialism.” The prominent OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) economist Javier Santiso described the “paradox [that] able economists committed to laissez-faire showed the world yet another road to a de facto socialized banking system

Indeed, in many OECD countries unemployment was very low. One prime minister of New Zealand claimed to know personally all the unemployed in his country; this may well have been true, since according to International Labour Organisation (ILO) statistics, in 1955 there were only fifty-five unemployed people in his country.

In 2020 there will be 40% more 25–34 year olds with higher education degrees from Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa than in all OECD countries (a group of 34 countries primarily in Western Europe and North America).

Globalization is not just continuing—it’s accelerating. In 2020 there will be 40% more 25–34 year olds with higher education degrees from Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa than in all OECD countries (a group of 34 countries primarily in Western Europe and North America).

Pascal Saint-Amans, the OECD’s top tax official, said the move was “very unhelpful” as it lumped jurisdictions that have signed up to global transparency initiatives together with holdouts such as Panama. He criticised the criteria as unfair, inefficient and subjective. The commission drew the “first pan-EU list of third-country non-cooperative tax jurisdictions” from blacklists provided by individual members. There were high numbers of offshore centres listed as unco-operative by some countries such as Greece and Italy, while others such as the UK, Germany and Sweden did not list any countries.

In a 2016 book widely publicized in the US, Stern claimed that 58 per cent of all jobs would be automated eventually, driven by the ethos of shareholder value. He told the American media group Bloomberg, ‘It’s not like the fall of the auto and steel industries. That hit just a sector of the country. This will be widespread. People will realize that we don’t have a storm anymore; we have a tsunami.’16 Nevertheless, there are reasons to be sceptical about the prospect of a jobless or even workless future. It is the latest version of the ‘lump of labour fallacy’, the idea that there is only a certain amount of labour and work to be done, so that if more of it can be automated or done by intelligent robots, human workers will be rendered redundant. In any case, very few jobs can be automated in their entirety. The suggestion in a much-cited study17 that nearly half of all US jobs are vulnerable to automation has been challenged by, among others, the OECD, which puts the figure of jobs ‘at risk’ at 9 per cent for industrialized countries.18

The Economist has produced a more sophisticated set of ‘back-of-the-envelope’ estimates in an interactive basic income calculator for all OECD countries.4 This purports to show how much could be paid as a basic income by switching spending on non-health transfers, leaving tax revenues and other public spending unchanged. Interestingly, even on this very restrictive basis, a cluster of seven west European countries could already pay over $10,000 per person per year. The United States could pay $6,300 and Britain $5,800. Obviously, for most countries, the level of basic income that could be financed from this tax-neutral welfare-switching exercise would be modest – though, especially for bottom-ranked countries such as South Korea ($2,200) or Mexico (only $900), this largely reflects their current low tax take and welfare spending. The Economist’s interactive calculator also aims to calculate what tax rises would be needed to pay a basic income of a given amount. For the UK, the calculator estimates that the cost of a basic income of one-third average GDP per head would require a 15 percentage point rise in tax take. Its calculations can again be questioned in their own terms. However, all these back-of-the-envelope exercises are flawed in more fundamental ways. First, they do not allow for clawing the basic income back in tax from higher-income earners, which could be done with no net cost to the affluent or to the Exchequer, simply by tweaking tax rates and allowances so that the extra tax take equals the basic income paid. Second, they do not take account of administrative savings from removal of means testing and behaviour conditions. Administration accounted for £8 billion of the £172 billion 2013–14 budget of the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, much of which will have gone to pay staff in local job centres to monitor and sanction benefit recipients. This does not include hundreds of millions of pounds paid to private contractors to carry out so-called ‘work assessment’ tests on people with disabilities, which have led to denial of benefits to some of society’s most vulnerable people. Third, they compare the cost of a basic income with the existing welfare budget and assume that all other areas of public spending remain intact. Yet governments can always choose to realign spending priorities. The UK government could save billions by scrapping the plan to replace the Trident nuclear missile system, now estimated to cost more than £200 billion over its lifetime. It could save further billions by ending subsidies that go predominantly to corporations and the affluent.

But in terms of what they need to flourish in whatever society is round the corner, the following are the top ten things the OECD say children will need to be able to do:   1    Solve complex problems.   2    Think critically.   3    Think creatively.   4    Manage people.   5    Co-operate with others.   6    Demonstrate emotional intelligence.   7    Be confident in judgement and decision-making.   8    Be service orientated.   9    Be skilled in negotiation. 10    Show cognitive flexibility. To repeat, learning information is no longer enough – you can Google it. What you have to be able to do is to make use of knowledge – and you have to want to.

When OECD researchers looked at average homework loads for fifteen-year-olds in each country, they concluded that “after around four hours of homework per week, the additional time invested in homework has a negligible impact on performance.

In 2003, the OECD published a paper on ‘sources of growth in OECD countries’ between 1971 and 1998, finding to its explicit surprise that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. Yet it is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.

The G.I. Bill, formally known as the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, provided many benefits for the returning World War II veterans. These benefits included cash payments of tuition and living expenses to attend a university, high school or vocational education school, provided low-cost mortgages, and supplied low-interest loans to start a business, as well as one year of unemployment compensation. About 2.2 million returning, honorably discharged veterans used the G.I. Bill in order to attend colleges or universities, and another 5.6 million used the G.I. Bill for other kinds of training programs. This program helped make the United States the best educated country and the exceptional leader of the world, for years to come. It was an exciting time in America and I had a center aisle seat to witness it.” I and many other veterans used the G.I. Bill to help pay for my education. In my case it allowed me to attend Central Connecticut State College (now a State University) to do my graduate work in education. The fact that so many people could afford to go back to school made the United States the best educated country in the years following World War II. Unfortunately during the past five years the United States has dropped by 11 points in our educational standing worldwide and now scores 17th among the 34 OECD countries. To make matters worse is that we are below average in math and science when the world depends more than ever on technology. A good part of the reason is that young people cannot afford the cost of a college education! The defense used by many of the less educated is that college is for egg heads and being a deplorable is worn as a badge of honor. If something doesn’t happen soon we will become a third world country but that opens up another topic for another day!

Manmohan Singh’s lost opportunity The anti-corruption agitations of 2011 provided a wonderful opportunity for the prime minister and his government to start the process of purging the system of corruption and retrieving black money illegally stashed away in foreign banks. The government had two options to get our money back. The first, to behave like a responsible, honourable and strong nation and demonstrate political will to fight corruption using the ample machinery available through international and bilateral legal instruments, the Tax Information Exchange Treaties (TIEAs), Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) automatic exchange route. The Swiss have volunteered cooperation; and India can follow the example of the US and UK, and get India’s stolen money back to the country. Or, the government can take the other option and behave like a banana republic and a failed state, plunder capital from their own country through a UPA-sponsored version of imperialism, perpetuate poverty and backwardness by denying the people of this country their rightful development dividend while repeatedly rewarding and incentivizing the looters with amnesty schemes. Mr Singh’s government has continuously concealed information on black money by fooling the people of our country, shielding the corrupt and guilty who have illegal bank accounts in foreign banks, and by creating obstacles for any progress in the matter instead of taking proactive measures to obtain the information from the foreign governments concerned. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have chosen the former option and gone down in history as a great patriot and leader of our country, a pioneer against corruption. But sadly, he has lost the opportunity and chosen such, that history will remember him as having presided over the greatest frauds practised on this poor and gullible nation.

there may be marked differences among various sectors with regard to their knowledge base. Some science-intensive sectors base their activities mainly on codified knowledge, while others operate and compete mainly on the basis of unstructured and experience-based implicit knowledge. But there are no pure cases. Even in the most strongly science-based sectors, tacit knowledge will be a key element in their competitive position, and conversely, it is difficult to find firms in the OECD area that can avoid completely the need to codify.

The OECD estimates that poor countries lose three times as much to tax evasion as they receive in foreign aid.16 Measures against tax havens, for example, could potentially do far more good than well-meaning aid programs ever could.

In a 2009 paper, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) described skills and competencies that young people require in order to benefit from and contribute to a rapidly changing world. The OECD distinguishes these by defining skills as the ability to perform tasks and solve problems. Skills include critical thinking, responsibility, decision making, and flexibility. They define competencies as the ability to apply skills and knowledge in a specific context such as school or work. The OECD framework for 21st century skills and competencies has three dimensions: Figure 1.2 Center for Public Education Source: Jerald (2009). Used with permission. Information: This dimension includes accessing, selecting, evaluating, organizing, and using information in digital environments. Use of the information involves understanding the relationships between the elements and generation of new ideas. The competencies necessary to effectively use information include research and problem-solving skills. Communication: This dimension includes the ability to exchange, critique, and present information, and also the ability to use tools and technologies in a reflective and interactive way. The requisite skills are based on sharing and transmitting information to others. Ethics and Social Impact: This dimension involves a consideration of the social, economic, and cultural implications of technologies, and an awareness of the impact of one’s actions on others and the larger society. Skills and competencies required for this are global understanding and personal responsibility.

One needed reform, and the eighth proposal in my ten-point blueprint, is to address declining voter participation by making voting mandatory. Established democracies, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, have seen “a slow but steady decline in turnout since the 1970s.”8 In November 2014, only 36 percent of eligible voters in the United States cast a vote—the lowest turnout in more than seventy years. And while estimates show more than 58 percent of eligible voters voted in the 2016 US presidential election, turnout was down from 2008 (when it was 62 percent). Since 1900, the percentage of voters voting in US presidential elections has scarcely gone above 60 percent. Many of the world’s countries whose turnout rates are highest—including Australia, Singapore, Belgium, and Liechtenstein, where the 93 percent turnout rate is the highest in Western Europe—enforce compulsory voting laws. As of August 2016, of the thirty-five member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), five had forms of compulsory voting. In those countries, turnout rates were near 100 percent. There are more than twenty countries where voting is compulsory, including Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, and Singapore. In Australia, voter turnout is usually around 90 percent. A more direct comparison within the European Union member states reveals remarkable turnouts from states where voting is mandatory, with 89.6 percent in Belgium and 85.6 percent in Luxembourg. For the sake of comparison, voter turnout was only 42.4 percent in France, 43.8 percent in Spain, and a mere 35.6 percent in the United Kingdom.9 Most often, compulsory voting is enforced through fines on those who don’t vote. Typically these fines are relatively small; in Australia it is AUD 20 the first time you don’t vote and have no good reason, and AUD 50 afterward, while it ranges from 10 to 20 pesos in Argentina.10 Many times, the penalty amounts to little more than a symbolic slap on the wrist.

Since the first Industrial Revolution, the average real income per person in OECD economies has increased around 2,900%.

Among the thirty-four member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, or OECD, the United States still ranks a respectable eighth in its college-enrollment rate. But in college completion—the percentage of entering college freshmen who go on to graduate—the United States ranks second to last, ahead of only Italy.