Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Israel should share its great wealth with its neighbors, like the Palestinians, in areas like governance and investment as well as the building of institutions.
Creating a global platform for collaboration in education research and innovation has been the PISA initiative's aspiration from its conception in the late 1990s.
There is no upside for the U.K. in Brexit. Only costs that can be avoided and advantages to be seized by remaining in Europe. No one should have to pay the Brexit tax.
We are dealing with the greater challenges of globalisation. It is generating, in many cases, an increase in the levels of inequality in societies... that is undesirable.
In a world that places a growing premium on social skills, education systems need to do much better at fostering those skills systematically across the school curriculum.
A more robust approach to global warming is needed if we are to avoid catastrophe. Unlike the recent financial crisis, there is no bailout option for the earth's climate.
We need to focus much more on the bottom 40 per cent. They are losing ground, and the fact that they are losing ground blocks social mobility and brings down economic growth.
Gender equality is essential for ensuring that men and women can contribute fully at home, at work, and in public life for the betterment of societies and economies at large.
Governments can and do expropriate investors or discriminate against them. Domestic judicial and administrative systems provide investors with one option for protecting themselves.
Transparency and effective tax co-operation must be shared principles applied by all. Until they are, nations will need to protect themselves against loss of revenues to tax havens.
High levels of inequality generate high costs for society, dampening social mobility, undermining the labour market prospects of vulnerable social groups, and creating social unrest.
Every country faces its own obstacles to reaching gender equality, and to make a real difference, we must change public policies in tandem with stereotypes, attitudes, and behaviors.
Our leaders must get to grips with the huge risk that carbon dioxide emissions pose to the economy and the environment. As we know, carbon dioxide is a long-lived gas. It hangs around.
I feel confident that leaders will rise to this challenge with a stronger commitment to tackle climate change and seize the economic opportunities that a post-carbon world has to offer.
It doesn't really matter who owns things so long there is enough competition, which means lower pricing, better quality goods, more variety, and an economy where the consumers are the big winners.
If we can rid the world of financial centres that thrive on lack of transparency, non-cooperation, and weak regulation, an important step towards a fairer and cleaner world economy will have been achieved.
Social cohesion and inclusive growth are additional crucial perspectives to incorporate into public policies, targeting a renewed social contract that reduces inequalities and benefits the whole of society.
The G7 doesn't have a permanent secretariat. The OECD can help the G8 and set the agenda for them. The secretary general of the OECD should be going to them proactively and discussing issues and priorities.
We need to achieve zero emissions from fossil fuel sources by the second half of the century. That doesn't mean by 2050 exactly, but it means by that time we need to be pretty much on the way to achieving it.
The benefits of growth have not trickled down. Income inequalities have become one of the biggest global challenges, attracting growing attention not only in academic literature but also among policymakers globally.
Regulations for international accounting and funding will have to be examined to identify policies that inadvertently discourage institutional investors from putting their resources into longer-term, illiquid assets.
Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel available for electricity generation. The most urgent threat to climate policy is the scale of new investments in unabated coal-fired electricity generation still being planned.
The home is the planet. Unless you're a Martian, you know, we're sharing the planet. And - and the emissions don't stop and CO2 doesn't stop with the border between France, Spain or between Canada and the United States.
If the world is to avoid a collision with nature - one that humanity surely cannot win - we must act boldly on every front, particularly with respect to carbon pricing and the coherence of our economic and energy policies.
Improving the quality of our lives should be the ultimate target of public policies. But public policies can only deliver best fruit if they are based on reliable tools to measure the improvement they seek to produce in our lives.
The OECD should respond directly to the specific needs of the member countries. You basically say, 'What works?' You don't have to go on a discovery trip. It's all there; you just call them, and they know. It's like a knowledge bank.
Israel has been doing very well, but there are challenges the country faces, like poverty and social integration of the Orthodox, Arab, Beduin, and Ethiopian population, which will be essential for sustaining strong growth over time.
Unlike other essential goods, like clothing, shelter, or food, we take cheap or even free water for granted. It often takes a crisis, such as a major drought or flood, to spur investment and policy reforms in improving water security.
Reforms to product and labour markets, education, innovation, green growth, competition, taxes, health - they are the things that should be the object of our primary focus in the context of a long-term strategy to restore sustained growth.
Many governments are giving subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption that encourage greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as they are spending on projects to promote clean energy. This is a wasteful use of scarce budget resources.
One of the greatest challenges of democracies today is the question of financing campaigns. It's a tremendous challenge. Obviously I think the solution is to have the governments pay for all the campaigns and not to have any private contributions.
It isn't only rich countries that suffer from the effects of tax havens. Developing countries also lose billions of dollars in tax revenues due each year because wealthy individuals and some companies use tax havens to move assets and income offshore.
Some refugees will find it relatively easy to find jobs. A university-educated Syrian civil engineer arriving in Munich will need to learn some German, but once this is done, he or she is unlikely to have to wait too long before employers come knocking.
By assessing the capabilities and knowledge of students in the highest-performing and most rapidly improving education systems, the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment provides valuable options for reform and information on how to achieve it.
We never tell countries that they should have a particular number in terms of a tax number, you know, if countries can make do with whatever average tax they have. The question is, do they apply it to everybody? Or do they give sweetheart deals to some companies?
Our work at the OECD shows that migration, if well managed, can spur growth and innovation. Unfortunately, in the past, migration has not always been well managed: migrants have been concentrated in ghetto-like conditions, with few public services or employment prospects.
Ensuring a better future for all South Africans will require increased access to higher education, a stronger and fairer labour market, deeper participation in regional markets, and a regulatory framework that fosters entrepreneurship and allows small businesses to thrive.
The whole banking sector in Mexico was literally bankrupt. For whatever reason, instead of intervening in the sector or supporting the banks, the government expropriated them. We went through the very laborious period of selling the failing banks to the wealthy people of Mexico.
Most businesses do not take governments seriously when it comes to climate, primarily because many governments have inconsistent and incoherent policies and then often keep changing them, sometimes retroactively. This makes businesses reluctant to invest in greener technologies.
The OECD advocates a risk-based approach to water security and is calling on governments to speed up their efforts to improve efficiency and effectiveness of water management. We recommend improving water pricing to recover costs and to reflect the value of water to users and society.
You do need more revenues, and you do need to cut expenses. But you also don't want to go in a direction whereby increasing taxes creates a reticence to create new jobs. You don't want to increase taxes on work. You don't want to increase taxes on investment and the creation of wealth.
We need better measures of people's expectations and levels of satisfaction, of how they spend their time, of their relations with other people... We need to focus on stocks as much as on flows, and we need to broaden the range of assets that we consider important to sustain our well-being.
The concept of national treatment is a core component of investment and trade agreements. It promotes valuable competition on a level playing field. Investment treaties should not turn this idea on its head, giving privileges to foreign companies that are not available to domestic companies.
European leaders cannot afford to be afraid. The refugee crisis is not one from which they can opt out. No magic wand will empower leaders to transport more than a million people back across the Aegean and the Bosphorus to Mosul and Aleppo, or across the Mediterranean to Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan.
In a globally interdependent world, a better financial and investment system cannot be achieved on a country-by-country basis. There may be no one-size-fits-all model for economic development, but without global standards and complementary regulations, the long-term outlook for the world economy will remain bleak.
Governments must address inconsistencies in their energy strategies, consider the links with broader economic policies, and stop sending mixed signals to consumers, producers, and investors. In particular, they must assess whether the right regulatory arrangements are in place to allow clean-energy investments to compete on a risk-return basis.
We need to make growth greener, to make our economic and environmental policies more compatible and even mutually-reinforcing. This is not just a matter of new technologies or new sources of renewable, safe energy. It is about how we all behave every day of our lives, what we eat, what we drink, what we recycle, re-use, repair, how we produce and how we consume
While we have put an utmost emphasis on Gross Domestic Products (GDP) as a barometer for the overall economy until now, we have not paid much attention in detecting a level of social welfare. We, as a member of the society, must now take steps to create an index to indicate other critical elements to be focused on in order to restore reliability of world statistics.