Mr. Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD, will travel to Reykjavik to meet with Mr. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, President of Iceland, Mr. Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, Prime Minister, Mr. Bjarni Benediktsson, Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs, and other members of the government.

These country notes contain indicators which compare the political and institutional frameworks of national governments as well as revenues and expenditures, employment, and compensation. They include a description of government policies on integrity, e-government and open government.

Country profiles highlight some key findings from TALIS 2013 for individual countries and economies

Iceland must balance growth in power and tourism industries with nature conservation, OECD says Iceland has one of the world’s most pristine natural environments and its glaciers, volcanoes and hot underground springs bring major economic benefits via renewable energy and tourism.

Country notes with main key findings of the book and key fact tables: a customised snapshot of a country's educational environment, highlighting the most important issues in the educational landscape.

The Secretary-General presented the 2015 OECD Economic Survey of Iceland and held meetings with the President of Iceland, the Prime Minster and several other ministers. Mr. Gurría also attended meetings with business and unions, and the Parliament’s Economic and Trade Affairs Committee.

The 2015 edition introduces more detailed analysis of participation in early childhood and tertiary levels of education. The report also examines first generation tertiary-educated adults’ educational and social mobility, labour market outcomes for recent graduates, and participation in employer-sponsored formal and/or non-formal education.

This policy profile is part of the Education Policy Outlook series, which presents comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across OECD countries.

Education at a Glance 2016 - Country Notes

This country note provides an environmental tax and carbon pricing profile for Iceland. It shows environmentally related tax revenues, taxes on energy use and effective carbon rates.

Despite a small aid budget, Iceland stands out among donors for its commitment to supporting the poorest countries and using its expertise in areas like renewable energy, land restoration and gender equality for aid programmes that advance global goals, according to a new OECD report.

Iceland is the OECD’s smallest economy and,currently,the fastest growing. A booming financial services and construction led to a deep financial crisis in 2008. However, Iceland has made a remarkable turnaround, helped by spectacular growth of tourism, prudent economic policies and a favourable external environment.

This note presents marginal effective tax rates (METRs) that summarise the tax system’s impact on the incentives to make an additional investment in a particular type of savings. By comparing METRs on different types of household savings, we can gain insights into which assets or savings types receive the most favourable treatment from the tax system.

The family-friendly policies introduced by Nordic countries over the past 50 years and associated increases in female employment have boosted growth in GDP per capita by between 10% and 20%, according to a new OECD report.

This country note for Iceland provides detail on the proportion of CO2 emissions from energy use subject to different effective carbon rates (ECR), as well as on the level and components of average ECRs in each of the six economic sectors (road transport, off-road transport, industry, agriculture and fishing, residential & commercial, and electricity).

The Icelandic standard VAT rate is 24.0%, which is above the OECD average. The average VAT/GST¹ standard rate in the OECD was 19.3% as of 1 January 2019. The previous standard VAT rate in Iceland was 25.5% in 2014. It changed to the current level in 2015. Iceland applies reduced VAT rates of 0% and 11% to a number of goods and services.

Mr. Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD, will be in Reykjavik on 15-16 September 2019 to present the 2019 OECD Economic Survey of Iceland, alongside Mr. Bjarni Benediktsson, Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs, and Ms. Lilja Alfredsdottir, Minister of Education, Science and Culture of Iceland.

The OECD Working Group on Bribery has serious concerns that recent steps taken by Greece may leave the country in breach of the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention. On 11 June 2019, Greece amended the Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes. As a result, the main active bribery offence was converted from felony to a misdemeanour, which is a less serious offence.

Greece - Country Health Profiles 2019: Launch presentation. The Country Health Profiles provide a concise and policy-relevant overview of health and health systems in the EU/European Economic area, emphasizing the particular characteristics and challenges in each country against a backdrop of cross-country comparisons.

Sebbene in Italia la prevalenza dell’obesità sia inferiore a quella della maggior parte degli altri paesi, essa ha comunque conseguenze significative. Gli italiani vivono in media 2,7 anni in meno a causa del sovrappeso. Il sovrappeso rappresenta il 9% della spesa sanitaria, superiore alla media degli altri paesi.

A fronte di una spesa sanitaria inferiore alla media, l’Italia ha la quarta più alta aspettativa di vita fra i paesi OCSE, 83 anni alla nascita. Meno del 6% delle persone valuta la propria salute “non buona”, rispetto a una media OCSE dell’8,7%. Gli italiani hanno generalmente stili di vita sani. Il consumo di alcol è basso. Anche la percentuale di adulti in sovrappeso o obesi è relativamente bassa.

Key findings for Italy from the report "Pensions at a Glance 2019"

Italy - Country Health Profiles 2019: Launch presentation. The Country Health Profiles provide a concise and policy-relevant overview of health and health systems in the EU/European Economic area, emphasizing the particular characteristics and challenges in each country against a backdrop of cross-country comparisons.

Strengthening Cybersecurity is becoming “the new comparative advantage”, as companies and customers move to countries with safer and more reliable cyber-frameworks, said Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary-General.

This report discusses the main areas in which national strategies to expand broadband networks affect universal service objectives, proposes criteria to rethink the terms of universal service policies, and shares the latest developments across a selected group of OECD countries.

An examination of payments issues is taking place in the context of the review of the OECD’s 1999 guidelines on e-commerce. This report looks at what might need to be amplified or revised to enhance consumer trust and adoption of new and emerging online and mobile payment mechanisms. It reflects contributions made by national delegations, business and civil society.

The OECD has adopted a new basket methodology for benchmarking wireless broadband prices. It adds to the existing baskets for voice, leased lines and fixed broadband services and reflects the increasing importance of wireless broadband for laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Mobile providers have garnered a very large share of traditional services, such as telephony, over the past decade. Nevertheless, mobile networks are dependent on fixed networks and could not efficiently meet the rapidly expanding demand of users without the contributions made by fixed broadband networks.

The OECD has launched an online portal to give consumers, businesses and governments quick and easy access to the latest information on products recalled from the market in Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States.

Every day one exabyte of data is said to travel over the Internet – enough data to fill 300,000 of the world’s biggest hard disks or 212 million DVDs. And astonishingly, according to a new OECD report on Internet traffic exchange, most of the thousands of networks that exchange this traffic do so without a written contract or formal agreement.

This report provides background on e-book markets and examines various policy issues. These include differing tax rates in countries between physical books and e-books, consumer lock-in to specific platforms, limitations on how users can read and share their purchased content, and a lack of transparency about how data on their reading habits is used.

Viewers are watching a growing share of video via Internet-based distribution systems. New digital content distribution services are having appreciable impacts on established media industries and network service providers in many OECD countries. This paper argues that convergence should be taken as the rule, rather than the exception. Careful application of best practices can address most policy concerns.

This report provides an overview of existing data and statistics in the fields of information security, privacy and the protection of children online. It highlights the potential for the development of better indicators in these respective fields showing in particular that there is an underexploited wealth of empirical data that, if mined and made comparable, will enrich the current evidence base for policy making.

In 2017 a household with two teenagers will have 25 Internet connected devices. In 2022 this will rise to 50, compared with only 10 today. In households in the OECD alone there will be 14 billion connected devices, up from 1.7 billion today and this doesn’t take into account everything outside the household and outside the OECD. All this leads to the smart world discussed in a new OECD paper.

Even though the term “open access” is widely used in policy discussions surrounding broadband networks, there is little universal agreement as to what it means. A new OECD report helps to shed some light on this important concept by examining how and why open access policies have been implemented in communication markets around the world.

While consumer demand for digital goods has increased rapidly in recent years, a range of challenges undermine confidence in the market and require policy attention.

This report takes an initial look at methodologies to measure and estimate the monetary value of personal data, which is creating economic and social value at an increasing pace. But measuring and estimating its value is difficult. This is because not only a huge amount of personal data is being generated, but also as it is used in many different situations and for numerous purposes.

This report explores principles that could form the basis for good practices in the establishment of international mobile roaming (IMR) agreements between two or more countries. Given the cross-country nature of IMR services and, especially, the fact that wholesale prices are determined by foreign operators outside the jurisdiction of domestic regulators, international co-operation is vital to address the challenges in roaming markets.

This report explores the potential role of data and data analytics for the creation of significant competitive advantage and the formation of knowledge-based capital. Five sectors are discussed as areas in which the use of data can stimulate innovation and productivity growth: online advertisement, health care, utilities, logistics and transport, and public administration.

The aim of this consultation, held on 20-21 June 2013 in Oxford (UK), was to stimulate discussion at the highest possible level of expert engagement in setting out an agenda for OECD action to accelerate innovation for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

A new OECD report sheds light on mobile handset acquisition models, and provides pricing information from selected operators in 12 OECD countries for 2012.

OECD countries must ensure mobile markets remain open and competitive in order to sustain innovation and meet rising demand for data services, according to a new OECD report.

This publication reviews progress made since 2008 and identifies areas for future work. It demonstrates that the Internet economy has now reached a point where it has become a new source of growth, with the potential to boost the whole economy, to foster innovation, competitiveness and user participation, and to contribute effectively to the prosperity of society as a whole.

The work of the expert group played an essential role in a process which concluded in July 2013 with the adoption by the OECD Council of the first revisions to the OECD Privacy Guidelines since their original release in 1980. This document identifies a number of issues that were raised but not fully addressed as part of the review process and which could be considered as candidates for possible future study.

Leading mobile platform providers have recently taken steps to improve transparency on how applications access personal data but more can be done to inform users and give them the ability to limit access. This paper provides an overview of the app economy and identifies emerging policy issues related to competition, consumer protection and skills development.

Connected television allows the provision of certain new and valuable services to end-users that will also have implications for the activities of all players in the content distribution ecosystem. In addition to identifying the new services that connected TV enables, this report analyses their effects and includes a discussion of policy implications raised for the actual connected television devices and for network infrastructure.

Today, anything with network access connected to a screen can serve as a television. A new OECD report looks into the impact these new devices and services have on telecommunications networks.

In OECD countries, networks look like a mesh with multiple paths that can act as each other’s backup. In developing countries, however, communication networks often resemble rivers, with small branches of regional networks delivering their traffic to a central national backbone that ends at one submarine fibre, making cable cuts a greater risk to the functioning of the economy.

This report focuses on the development of backhaul and cross-border networks, which enable local networks to connect to the wider Internet. To connect their networks to others around the world, operators need access to regional and international high-speed networks. The level of investment required in these networks varies and can be very different from region to region.

This report considers the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 alongside the use of network technologies to prolong IPv4 use in the face of depletion of further IPv4 protocol addresses.