The last decade has seen considerable policy attention to the social economy and its contribution to employment, in particular as regards the inclusion and empowerment of vulnerable workers and the provision of appropriate working conditions.

A major flooding of the Seine River similar to the flood disaster of 1910 could affect up to 5 million residents in the greater Paris area and cause up to 30 billion euros worth of damage, according to a new OECD report.

LEED and Cedefop organise the second edition of the Green Skills Forum which will bring together experts in innovation, employability and skills development and lessons from work conducted by the OECD, Cedefop, and other organisations on the implications of the green economy for skills development and training policies.

Recommendation of the OECD Council on Effective Public Investment Across Levels of Government

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.

In partnership with the Swedish Public Employment Service, Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR), Swedish Ministry of Employment and the World Association of Public Employment Services (WAPES), LEED held the 10th Annual Meeting of the Forum on Partnerships and Local Development in Stockholm 23 April – 25 April, on the theme of ‘job creation just ahead: building adaptable labour markets’.

The Netherlands is gradually emerging from a double-dip recession with strengthened public finances and reforms on track to improve the labour and housing markets and the health care and pension systems. These reforms are paying off, says the OECD. Growth is expected to reach 1% this year and 1.3% in 2015.

The policy forum officially launches the conceptual framework to the public and offers an opportunity for participants to discuss the key issues for emerging Asia: housing, buildings and energy, land use and transport, water and waste management, green goods and services.

A series of short reports aimed at policy makers examine issues and policies instruments related to inclusive entrepreneurs policy. The key message of these briefs is that there is under-exploited potential among entrepreneurs from non-mainstream groups and that there are many examples of specially tailored policies that are successful in increasing participation that can serve as models for others.

Angel Gurría and Michael R. Bloomberg reaffirmed today their commitment to support international cities’ efforts to lead in the global fight against climate change — and called for national support to make this happen.

The Japan-OECD Policy Forum on Urban Development and Green Growth will address cities’ unique role in creating synergies between environmental and economic objectives to advance green growth. Asian cities in particular are at the centre of this challenge. This event is organised as a commemorative event for the 50th Anniversary of Japan's Accession to the OECD.

This International Roundtable will provide a platform for policy dialogue on addressing the challenges of ageing societies.

U.S. employers are demanding skilled workforces, but are not always able to find a local supply, says a new OECD study looking at Job Creation and Local Economic Development.

The OECD LEED Programme has a quaterly newsletter to diffuse the current news on employment and local development

Mr. Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD, was in Mexico from 6 to 9 January 2015 on an official visit, to present the OECD 2015 Economic Survey of Mexico alongside Mr. Luis Videgaray, Minister of Finance of Mexico.

Improving Myanmar's agricultural sector by building up food processing activities and related services could help the transformation of the country's economy, to a more modern one able to produce higher-value goods for export, according to a new OECD report.

In the face of shifting global trade patterns, international freight transport volumes will grow more than fourfold (factor 4.3) by 2050. Average transport distance across all modes will increase 12%, according to the latest ITF Transport Outlook.

The OECD event "Risk Governance and Resilient Cities" will examine how risk governance can better manage complex risks and how to improve the resilience of cities to these risks.

New global trend such as jobless growth, a rising youth population and resource scarcity threaten to undo much of the progress of recent decades in securing people’s ability to make a living, according to a new report by the OECD Development Centre launched in Paris today at the OECD Global Forum on Development.

The project provided recommendations to the city of Medellin and Antioquia to support the development of the local economy and includes a focus on how the innovative environment can be strengthened to support inclusion, entrepreneurship, SME, and local developmentto and how to better coordinate and integrate its policies with the national level.

Rapid population growth, ageing infrastructure and new weather risks are straining the ability of cities in OECD countries to provide clean water and to protect against floods and droughts, according to a new OECD report. Cities will need large-scale investment and more effective tariffs and taxes to pay for upgrades to water systems.

This expert seminar aims to get a better understanding of the features, limitations and preliminary findings from the use of SIBs, and to a lesser extent, of DIBs in developing countries from a multidimensional and multi-stakeholder perspective.

This report explores this question on the basis of detailed mobility data including origin, destination and timing of all trips for a mid-sized European city. ITF developed a model to test various alternative transport system configurations that would provide the same level of mobility (locations and timing) as today.

In 2011, TIME Magazine named collaborative consumption (or the sharing economy as it is often called) as one of the top 10 ideas that will change the world. Four years on, this prediction seems to be holding true. The number of companies operating in the sharing economy is rising rapidly in the transport sector alone.

With Africa’s population set to double by 2050, modernising local economies will be vital to make the continent more competitive and to increase people’s living standards, according to the African Economic Outlook 2015, released at the African Development Bank Group’s 50th Annual Meetings.

“What is the city but the people?” asked Shakespeare in Coriolanus. All city planning focuses on people and the quality of life. The big cities in Brazil took shape from the 1950s, when the country’s population amounted to approximately 52 million inhabitants, only 36.2% of whom lived in cities.

A city’s brand is pivotal for its position in global society, particularly in global competition. Indeed, a city has many aspects of a commercial product. The very strong international brand that I represent is Prague, the million-strong capital of the Czech Republic.

Local policymakers have a critical role to play in developing more resilient and inclusive economies. This event will explore topics ranging from empowering communities through local leadership to new approaches to local economic growth and catalysing growth through people by better harnessing skills and increasing productivity.

The work will seek to identify good practices for employer engagement in the areas of both developing and utilising skills, including setting up innovative workplace learning methods, designing effective employer partnerships with the employment and training system as well as financing mechanisms for employer-led training, including how best to reach SMEs.

The recent droughts in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo states have exposed the need to shift from crisis management to effective risk governance of the country’s water resources, according to a new OECD report.

The FAO, OECD and UNCDF launched a joint multi-year initiative to assess Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) policies from a territorial perspective. This joint initiative will assess, scale up, and pilot innovative policy approaches and governance mechanisms to improve food security and nutrition in rural areas, in both emerging and developing countries.

The seminar was organised by IPRASE, provincial institute for research and educational experimentation, instrumental body of the Autonomous Province of Trento, the Autonomous Province of Trento and the OECD LEED Trento Centre. The seminar represented a first public reflection on the Trentino Multilingualism Plan within a national and international comparison framework, in view of future prospects.

We are looking for national and sub-national policies and initiatives for social enterprise creation and development. The focus will be placed on initiatives funded by the European Social Fund, by other EU funds and programmes, by Member States and sub-national authorities and NOT on examples of successful social enterprises.

The OECD and the Italian government are stepping up cooperation to ensure effective implementation of local development strategies to boost jobs, encourage entrepreneurship and increase social inclusion. An agreement, to be signed in Rome on 1 December 2015, will renew the mandate of the OECD Trento Centre for Local Development and establish a satellite office in Venice.

The project will identify the policy levers and instruments that can be helpful in the design of strategies to accompany the transition to older local labour markets, and identify how national policy frameworks can best support these transformations.

The World of Public Employment Services provides systematic and comparative information to help understand the development of PES around the world as well as the challenges and opportunities they face today. This book is the most comprehensive analysis undertaken to date of the current situation and development of PESs, covering 73 organizations on all continents.

The tourism industry in OECD countries continues to grow strongly despite economic weakness in advanced economies, and outperformed tourism globally in 2014. However, active, innovative and integrated policies are needed to ensure that tourism remains a competitive and sustainable sector, says OECD.

Mayors from cities across the United States, Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America gathered in New York to launch a global campaign to address rising inequalities and foster inclusive growth in their cities, in their countries and worldwide.

The OECD will convene the 2016 edition of its Global Forum on Development on the theme of "From Commitment to Actual Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Policies, data and financing", on 31 March 2016 in Paris.

The new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a significant number of interconnected objectives related to agriculture and food.

Japan must make revitalising growth its number one priority with reforms to boost productivity and encourage more women and older people into jobs to compensate for its rapidly shrinking labour force, according to the OECD.

Not so long ago, “globalisation” was a favourite paradigm in international business. It was a trend that began in the late 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s, when corporate takeovers were the order of the day and multinational companies fixated on maximising short-term profits and boosting share prices. One approach was “global sourcing”, also called outsourcing or offshoring.

The world cannot resolve today’s development challenges with purely national approaches. We need to complement them with local approaches, too. We live in an era of enormous transformations, in which our traditional political structures and forms of democratic participation must adapt. That means casting a bigger focus than ever on the important role of local power and communities.

The OECD LEED Programme launches this "Call for Initiatives" to extract what local authorities and other actors know works, what the new scenario is demanding and how equipped they are to respond. We are interested in learning from the experiences of EU member countries, the wider OECD area as well as other countries.

11th edition of Trento Festival of Economics: the arena where economists, political and institutional stakeholders, researchers and journalists from all over the world, will exchange views and investigate the topic “Where growth takes place”.

This study will analyse how selected local areas/industry clusters identify the specific skills needed to support green growth and how related skills policies and practices can be made more effective in supporting their provision and accelerating transition to a low-carbon economy.

This event to be held on 21 June 2016 in Lisbon, Portugal, will discuss the preliminary findings of the OECD project "Resilient Cities" and share cities' experience on enhancing resilience.

This document presents draft principles for leveraging local benefits from global sporting events. These draft principles have been prepared as part of a project on optimising the local benefits from hosting the EURO 2016. They build upon previous work on Local Development Benefits from Staging Global Events.

How Africa urbanises will be critical to the continent’s future growth and development, says the African Economic Outlook 2016 released today at the African Development Bank Group’s 51st Annual Meetings.

This study provides an empirical analysis of the effects of environmental zoning on urban development. It focuses on the case of Natural Regional Parks (NRPs) in France. Of the environmental zoning instruments used in France, NRPs extend over the widest physical area. Three potential side-effects of NRPs on urban development in the regulated area are investigated.