Secretary-General Angel Gurría welcomes a network of senior officials attending the 31st Centres of Government (COG) meeting held in London. Highlights include the importance of institutions in economic reform through improved co-ordination, outreach and transparency.

OECD Workshop on assessing the harms posed by illicit trade and the illegal economy for global supply chain integrity, economic growth, and market security.

by Charles Jenkins, Writer, Commentator and former Director of Western Europe Country Analysis, Economist Intelligence Unit, London. The EU’s crisis has as much to do with leadership and solidarity as resolving fiscal and debt problems. It is time to dispense with caricatures and write the next chapter in the EU’s ongoing history. And for that, clear and transparent data will be needed.

These country notes profile public sector human resource practices and policies, covering issues including legal frameworks; age and gender composition of workers; public sector restructuring; management practices; industrial relations and reforms.

In response to increasing pressure to deliver on growth, jobs and better governance, policy makers from MENA and OECD reiterated their support for measures to strengthen the business climate and governance in the region.

Mexico’s river basins are under severe water stress. The quality of rivers, lakes and aquifers is declining and floods, droughts, and hurricanes are more frequent. These are some of the alerts signaled in OECD’s Making Water Reform Happen in Mexico.

Austerity programmes to restore order to public finances can add to the woes of already struggling economies, leading to more job losses and social hardship. But there are ways for governments to put their fiscal houses in order, while supporting growth and reducing income inequality at the same time.

Ports are the nervous system of global trade. Over 80% of world cargo (by volume) is transported by sea. Our efforts to raise the efficiency, competitiveness and sustainability of ports can help boost trade, growth and jobs. It can also help us to promote green growth and development in the poorest regions, said OECD Secretary-General.

This paper develops a simple model-based framework for stress testing fiscal consolidation strategies under different scenarios of future shocks

The Spanish government has launched a series of ambitious public administration reforms as part of wider efforts to promote economic competitiveness and strengthen trust in government and public institutions.

In the run-up to the financial crisis, indebtedness of households and non-financial businesses rose to historically high levels in many OECD countries; gross debt of financial companies rose dramatically relative to GDP. Much of the debt accumulation appears to have been based on excessive risk-taking and exceptional macro-economic conditions and therefore not sustainable.

Mexico has achieved a high degree of decentralisation in public services, but the Mexican fiscal federal system has important shortcomings. States and municipalities have become heavily dependent on federal transfers to finance a growing share of public spending.

On 19 September 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to grant the right to vote to all adult women. New Zealand's Permanent Representative to the OECD Rosemary Banks says the 120th anniversary of this decision is an time to reflect on that achievement.

This workshop served to discuss how benchmarking and measuring regulatory performance can help advance a regulatory policy at the sub-national level.

Today’s post is from Kate Lancaster, editor in charge of publications on government finance at the OECD. Government budgets are news. Tough choices have had to be made in these challenging economic times and we’re all interested in how our governments are managing our money.

The metropolitan region of Aix-Marseille in the south of France needs to tackle its fragmentated governance if it is to return to more inclusive and sustainable economic growth, according to a new OECD report.

The Netherlands is a global pioneer in water management with a long history of containing flood risks and reclaiming land from the sea. Yet it will need to adapt its water governance policies to meet the looming challenges of shifting demographics, regional development and climate change, according to an OECD report.

These principles give practical guidance for designing, implementing and improving budget systems to meet the challenges of the future. They are currently being considered as a draft Recommendation of the OECD Council, underpinning their importance to good public governance.

World Economic Forum: Global Agenda Council Launches Guide to Good Government and Trust-Building

Workshop held in The Hague on 17-18 June 2014 to evaluate stakeholder engagement in regulatory policy

Latin American and Caribbean countries need to do more to improve budget management, tax collection and public sector pay equality if they are to catch up with advanced economies in terms of government performance, according to a joint report by the OECD and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries are looking for ways to build a strategic public sector capacity to enable full women’s empowerment in society and public life in a sustainable manner. They also seek to ensure conformity with international standards related to issues of gender equality and human rights.

This paper estimates the elasticities of government revenue and expenditure items with respect to the output gap for European Union (EU) countries. These elasticities are used by the European Commission, as part of the EU fiscal surveillance process, to calculate the semi-elasticity of the budget balance as a percentage of GDP with respect to the output gap.

This chapter studies the governance of the Frankfurt metropolitan area. It focuses on public transport and spatial planning issues. It provides an overview of the economic conditions in the metropolitan area and analyses the role of the regional association of municipalities (Regionalverband FrankfurtRheinMain) and the state of Hesse for metropolitan governance.

Knowledge sharing is critical in fostering urban green growth. Cities in dynamic Asia urgently need to adopt and strengthen green growth models that take into account rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, and motorisation.

This report shows that cities in advanced economies are growing older more quickly than rural areas. In OECD cities, 14% of people were over 65 in 2011 up from 12% in 2001. The trend will put pressure on cities to rethink some infrastructure and plan for an ageing labour force, change in revenue lower tax revenues, rising demand for social housing and higher spending on health and social care.

Governments should set prudent debt targets to ensure that public finances serve to promote economic growth and stability, according to new OECD research.

The objective of this paper is to define long-run prudent debt targets for OECD countries and country-specific fiscal rules. To this end, a semi-structural macroeconomic model for OECD countries and primary balance reaction functions are estimated.

This Recommendation offers a whole-of-government policy arsenal commonly agreed upon among OECD Members that governments can use to close remaining gender gaps in public life, scale up inclusive approaches to policy making and public service delivery, and monitor continuous progress.

Reforms over the past two decades have produced a well-balanced, modern tax system. However, considerable revenues will be needed in the years ahead to expand social spending and infrastructure in order to raise growth and well-being. The challenge is to generate these revenues without penalising growth or exacerbating inequality.

This report analyses the strengths and weaknesses of Ireland’s system of parliamentary engagement in budgeting, and outlines a number of proposals for reform.

This paper uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the efficiency of welfare spending in a sample of OECD countries around 2012, focussing on health care, secondary education and general public services.

OECD countries have agreed to work towards greater gender equality in public life – including in governments, parliaments and judiciaries – with concrete measures to improve women’s access to leadership and decision-making roles and integrate more of a gender perspective into public policies.

Blog article on the complex and multi-dimensional challenges faced by city policy-makers in addressing urban issues at all levels of government.

In Hungary, young people want to have bigger families, but concerns over issues like housing and striking a work-life balance appear to be obstacles. In response, the government has introduced a range of family-friendly policies–a vital step in helping families fulfil their dreams and in meeting the challenge of a rapidly ageing population.

Launch of the OECD review of the risk management policies in Morocco. The review provides an objective assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Morocco's risk management policies by international experts.

The Paris floods are another call to action for the international community. Preventing such shocks from happening and limiting the damage they cause should be a public policy priority.

Across the OECD, GDP per capita is converging. In contrast, regional disparities – or differences in GDP per capita across jurisdictions – are rising, mainly as a result of widening productivity differences. Fiscal decentralisation could help reduce them again. According to new OECD research, assigning more ownsource revenue to sub-national governments dampens regional GDP disparities and underpins regional convergence.

The growth pattern of OECD countries and their sub-national entities is puzzling. Between-country differences in GDP per capita are declining, yet the differences across jurisdictions within those countries tend to rise.

The OECD Governance and Territorial Development Directorate has worked closely with United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) on urban development issues. This webpage highlights the complex governance challenges that cities present and offers guidance on how they may be overcome.

Governments in Latin America will need to improve public sector management and capacity – including budget allocation – to compensate for the pressure on public finances from sliding commodity prices, according to a new report by the OECD and Inter-American Development Bank covering more than 15 countries in the region.

Malaysia has sustained over four decades of rapid, inclusive growth, reducing its dependence on agriculture and commodity exports to become a more diversified, modern and open economy.

Malaysia has sustained over four decades of rapid, inclusive growth, reducing its dependence on agriculture and commodity exports to become a more diversified, modern and open economy.

Comments on the draft OECD Best Practice Principles on Stakeholder Engagement in Regulatory Policy are to be sent to regstakeholders@oecd.org by 15 March 2017.

Blog argues that governments should stop approaching complex challenges through the limitations of their institutions and explore innovative ways of problem solving.

Towards Gender Equality before the Law

Seminar on Innovations and challenges in the management of a regional policy held in Bratislava, Slovak Republic, 22 February 2017

Women’s representation in parliaments remains a global issue. In 2016, women constituted 23% of parliamentarians over both upper and lower houses combined, with the Pacific, Arab States and Asia having the lowest representation (16.4%, 18.2%, and 19.2% respectively).

As part of efforts to deepen co-operation between the OECD and Argentina and contribute to the country’s public policy and reform agenda, Argentina’s Finance Minister Nicolás Dujovne has presented an Action Plan to OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría.

A Job for Life? The old notion of a safe job in the civil service is profoundly changing - OECD Insights blog by Bill Below.