United Kingdom
OECD’s periodic surveys of the British economy. Each edition surveys the major challenges faced by the country, evaluates the short-term outlook, and makes specific policy recommendations. Special chapters take a more detailed look at specific challenges. Extensive statistical information is included in charts and graphs.
Études économiques consacrées périodiquement par l'OCDE à l’économie du Royaume-Uni. Chaque étude analyse les grands enjeux auxquels le pays fait face. Elle examine les perspectives à court terme et présente des recommandations détaillées à l’intention des décideurs politiques. Des chapitres thématiques analysent des enjeux spécifiques. Les tableaux et graphiques contiennent un large éventail de données statistiques.
Scotland (UK) is a strong innovator, ranking among the top 20% of economies among European regions, with strengths in university-firm collaborations and skills for innovation. With close to two-thirds of all growth in productivity from 2010 to 2018 coming from better use of resources in remote rural areas, rural areas are critical to economic prosperity.
In addition to the valuable heritage that they offer, rural areas in Scotland have had remarkable achievements over the past decade in terms of economic growth, social innovation and progress for climate mitigation. Unlike the demographic decline perceived in OECD countries, the decline in rural areas of Scotland is much slower. In the case of accessible rural areas, the population is still growing. In part, much of the progress of ensuring well-being in rural areas, is supported by mechanisms to link entrepreneurs with researchers, regional support for entrepreneurs and an established system of social entrepreneurship.
This report sets the scene, reviews main policies and programmes impacting rural innovation, and explores the importance of social innovation in rural areas. It provides recommendations to reinforce some of the good practices in Scotland, which is particularly important as the government implements the new National Innovation Strategy.
This paper estimates the data intensity of occupations/sectors (i.e. the share of job postings per occupation/sector related to the production of data) using natural language processing (NLP) on job advertisements in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Online job advertisement data collected by Lightcast provide timely and disaggregated insights into labour demand and skill requirements of different professions. The paper makes three major contributions. First, indicators created from the Lightcast data add to the understanding of digital skills in the labour market. Second, the results may advance the measurement of data assets in national account statistics. Third, the NLP methodology can handle up to 66 languages and can be adapted to measure concepts beyond digital skills. Results provide a ranking of data intensity across occupations, with data analytics activities contributing most to aggregate data intensity shares in all three countries. At the sectoral level, the emerging picture is more heterogeneous across countries. Differences in labour demand primarily explain those variations, with low data-intensive professions contributing most to aggregate data intensity in the United Kingdom. Estimates of investment in data, using a sum of costs approach and sectoral intensity shares, point to lower levels in the United Kingdom and Canada than in the United States.
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This reliable source of yearly data covers a wide range of statistics on international trade of OECD countries and provides detailed data in value by commodity and by partner country. The first four volumes each contain the tables for six countries, published in the order in which they become available. The fifth contains seven countries and the sixth volume also includes the OECD country groupings OECD Total and EU28-Extra.
For each country, this publication shows detailed tables relating to the Harmonised System HS 2012 classification, Sections and Divisions (one- and two- digit). Each table presents imports and exports of a given commodity with more than seventy partner countries or country groupings for the most recent five-year period available.
This paper investigates the demand for language skills using data on online job vacancies in 27 European Union member countries and the United Kingdom in 2021. Evidence indicates that although Europe remains a linguistically diverse labour market, knowing English confers unique advantages in certain occupations. Across countries included in the analyses, a knowledge of English was explicitly required in 22% of all vacancies and English was the sixth most required skill overall. A knowledge of German, Spanish, French and Mandarin Chinese was explicitly demanded in between 1% and 2% of all vacancies. One in two positions advertised on line for managers or professionals required some knowledge of English, on average across European Union member countries and across OECD countries in the sample. This compares with only one in ten positions for skilled agricultural, forestry and fishery workers and among elementary occupations.
This reliable and up-to-date source of OECD quarterly balance of payments and international merchandise trade statistics provides a detailed insight into the most recent trends in trading patterns for OECD countries with the rest of the world. Balance of payments data are presented adjusted for seasonal variations. International trade data are broken down by country. The series shown cover data for the last ten quarters and two years available. This quarterly publication is divided into three parts: I. Balance of payments and international trade, II. International merchandise trade by country and III. International trade by commodity (annual data). The third part is a special topic which changes with each publication.
Addressing 21st century development challenges requires investments in innovation, including the use of new approaches and technologies. Currently, many development organisations prioritise investments in isolated innovation pilots that leverage a specific approach or technology rather than pursuing a strategic approach to expand the organisation’s toolbox with innovations that have proven their comparative advantage over what is currently used.
This Working Paper addresses this challenge of adopting innovations. How can development organisations institutionalise a new way of working, bringing what was once novel to the core of how business is done?
Analysing successful adoption efforts across five DAC agencies, the paper lays out a proposed process for the adoption of innovations. The paper features five case-studies and concludes with a set of lessons and recommendations for policy makers on innovation management generally, and adoption of innovation in particular.
Improving the resilience of farmers against external shocks is a priority for policy makers. This paper measures the resilience of a sample of farmers in the United Kingdom to assess the impact of the 2011-12 drought on their productivity and income. The analysis allows for the distinction of four resilience capacities: to prepare; to absorb the immediate impact of the shock; to adapt farming practices to a new environment; and to transform the business model, and improve productivity and income in the longer term. Results show that a single farm rarely performs strongly across these four capacities, and that those farms that best absorb the impact of the drought, perform poorly in transforming their business after the shock. While size and diversification improve absorption and adaptation, innovation is a key driver of long-term resilience to keep the pace of productivity gains. In the past, policies on agricultural risk management focused on the absorption capacity of farms and on stabilising income. Forward-looking resilience policies today need to prioritise other capacities, in particular preparedness, adaptation and transformation.
In the face of what has increasingly been referred to as an ongoing “permacrisis”, governments must cope with and respond to emerging threats while already grappling with longstanding issues such as climate change, digital disruption and low levels of trust. In this context, understanding new approaches and spreading successful ideas has never been more important. To promote this, the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) has analysed 1 084 innovative initiatives from 94 countries to derive and understand novel government practices. The report discusses four key trends: 1) new forms of accountability for a new era of government, 2) new approaches to care, 3) new methods for preserving identities and strengthening equity and 4) new ways of engaging citizens and residents. Ten case studies and dozens of supporting examples illustrate these trends.
The Pensions at a Glance database includes reliable and internationally comparable statistics on public and mandatory and voluntary pensions. It covers 34 OECD countries and aims to cover all G20 countries. Pensions at a Glance reviews and analyses the pension measures enacted or legislated in OECD countries. It provides an in-depth review of the first layer of protection of the elderly, first-tier pensions across countries and provideds a comprehensive selection of pension policy indicators for all OECD and G20 countries.
This dataset contains data on metropolitan regions with demographic, labour, innovation and economic statistics by population, regional surface, population density, labour force, employment, unemployment, GDP, GDP per capita, PCT patent applications, and elderly dependency ratio.
This dataset comprises statistics on different transactions and balances to get from the GDP to the net lending/borrowing. It includes national disposable income (gross and net), consumption of fixed capital as well as net savings. It also includes transaction components such as net current transfers and net capital transfers. Data are expressed in millions of national currency as well as US dollars and available in both current and constant prices. Data are provided from 1950 onwards.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the standard measure of the value of final goods and services produced by a country during a period minus the value of imports. This subset of Aggregate National Accounts comprises comprehensive statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) by presenting the three different approaches of its measure of GDP: output based GDP, expenditure based GDP and income based GDP. These three different measures of gross domestic product (GDP) are further detailed by transactions whereby: the output approach includes gross value added at basic prices, taxes less subsidies, statistical discrepancy; the expenditure approach includes domestic demand, gross capital formation, external balance of goods and services; and the income approach includes variables such as compensation of employees, gross operating surplus, taxes and production and imports. Gross domestic product (GDP) data are measured in national currency and are available in current prices, constant prices and per capita starting from 1950 onwards.
The paper discusses the implications of recent advances in artificial intelligence for knowledge workers, focusing on possible complementarities and substitution between machine translation tools and language professionals. The emergence of machine translation tools could enhance social welfare through enhanced opportunities for inter-language communication but also create new threats because of persisting low levels of accuracy and quality in the translation output. The paper uses data on online job vacancies to map the evolution of the demand for language professionals between 2015 and 2019 in 10 countries and illustrates the set of skills that are considered important by employers seeking to hire language professionals through job vacancies posted on line.
New OECD surveys of employers and workers in the manufacturing and finance sectors of seven countries shed new light on the impact that Artificial Intelligence has on the workplace —an under-researched area to date due to lack of data. The findings suggest that both workers and their employers are generally very positive about the impact of AI on performance and working conditions. However, there are also concerns, including about job loss—an issue that should be closely monitored. The surveys also indicate that, while many workers trust their employers when it comes to the implementation of AI in the workplace, more can be done to improve trust. In particular, the surveys show that both training and worker consultation are associated with better outcomes for workers.
As societies become increasingly digital, cyber security has become a priority for individuals, companies and nations. The number of cyber attacks is exceeding defence capabilities, and one reason for this is the lack of an adequately skilled cyber security workforce. This report analyses the demand for cyber security professionals in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States using information contained in online job postings. The analysis looks at recent trends in the demand for workers in different types of cyber security roles, the geographical distribution of cyber security job postings, and the changing skill requirements for professionals in this field. The report also looks at the supply side, zooming in on the landscape of cyber security education and training programmes in England (United Kingdom). It describes the different types of programmes provided in further and higher education, the profile of learners in these programmes and their outcomes. Finally, the report also looks at policies and initiatives adopted in England to make cyber security education and training programmes more accessible and relevant. This report is part of a larger initiative examining the evolution of policies and experiences in the cyber security profession around the world.
This study responds to six key questions about the impact that the demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) skills is having on labour markets. What are the occupations where AI skills are most relevant? How do different AI-relevant skills combine in job requirements? How quickly is the demand for AI-related skills diffusing across labour markets and what is the relationship between AI skill demands and the demand for cognitive skills across jobs? Finally, are AI skills leading to a wage premium and how different are the wage returns associated with AI and routine skills? To shed light on these aspects, this study leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to analyse the information contained in millions of job postings collected from the internet.