21 April 2016, Paris: The OECD will host a High-Level Meeting on boosting the impact of anti-corruption reforms in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

This study explores what governments, business associations, NGOs, and companies do in order to strengthen business integrity with a particular focus on anti-corruption measures in and for the private sector in countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as in selected other countries.

Countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have introduced important anti-corruption reforms in recent years. However, corruption in the region remains high. This report identifies progress achieved as well as challenges which require further action by countries.

The OECD and the Greek Government, with the support of the European Commission, today launched a collaboration project to strengthen Greece’s action plan to fight corruption.

This stocktaking report first presents a chronology of how systems for the liability of legal persons have evolved among the 41 Parties to the Anti-Bribery Convention. It then presents a “mapping” of the features of these systems for the 41 Parties.

The paper summarises views expressed by practitioners at a workshop in Beijing on 13-14 April 2016 with respect to contemporary challenges in international co-operation in corruption cases and possible solutions to mitigate these challenges. It has a practical orientation and is intended to contribute to ongoing dialogue at national and multilateral levels on enhancing international co-operation.

Mutual legal assistance, and international co-operation more broadly, are important issues in the investigation and prosecution of corruption crimes. This report outlines common barriers to MLA among the 31 member jurisdictions of the ADB/OECD Anti-Corruption Initiative for Asia and the Pacific, and describes best practices used to overcome these barriers.

Nearly one in five mobile phones and one in four video game consoles shipped internationally is fake, as a growing trade in counterfeit IT and communications hardware weighs on consumers, manufacturers and public finances, according to a new OECD report.

Drawing on data presented in the 2017 OECD Business and Finance Outlook, this article looks at some of the forces influencing recent economic developments and asks what can be done to ensure a “fairer” global economy.

This compendium of good practices was prepared by the OECD at the request of the G20 Anti-corruption Working Group (ACWG), to raise awareness of the benefits of the digital transformation in the public sector, including governance, productivity, economic development and social innovation.

Effective international co-operation between countries is crucial for the successful investigation, prosecution and sanction of international corruption offences.

This meeting of the Anti-Corruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ACN) will take place at the OECD on 12-14 September 2017.

The OECD Working Group on Bribery has just completed a review of Switzerland's enforcement of the Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions and related instruments. The Working Group welcomes the significant level of enforcement by the Federal Office of the Attorney General. Switzerland has cracked down on the bribery of foreign public officials in recent years.

Peru is taking important steps toward fighting corruption and fostering greater transparency and exchange of information by completing the necessary steps to become a Party to the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (Anti-Bribery Convention) and the multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters.

A country’s success in integrating immigrants’ children is a key benchmark of the efficacy of social policy in general and education policy in particular. The variance in performance gaps between immigrant and non-immigrant students across countries, even after adjusting for socio-economic background, suggests that policy has an important role to play in eliminating such gaps.

The relative earnings premium for those with a tertiary education increased in most EU21 countries over the past ten years, indicating that the demand for more educated individuals still exceeds supply.

Governments should increase investment in early childhood programmes and maintain reasonable costs for higher education in order to reduce inequality, boost social mobility and improve people’s employment prospects, according to a new OECD report.

As the spectre of another economic downturn looms large in many countries and is already a reality in others, new data from the 2012 edition of Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators – released today – provides powerful insights into the link between education, economic progress and social mobility around the world.

The U.S. is now the only country in the industrialised world in which the generation entering the workforce does not have higher college attainment levels than the generation about to leave the workforce. While that is in part due to the traditionally high levels of college attainment in the U.S, an increasing number of countries have approached and surpassed U.S. graduation levels and others are bound to follow over the coming years.

What does the OECD have to say about the state of education today? What are the main OECD messages on early childhood education, teacher policies and tertiary education? What about student performance, educational spending and equity in education? OECD work on these important education topics and others have been brought together in a single accessible source updating the first edition of Education Today which came out in March 2009.

The OECD today announced the winner of its first-ever global data visualisation challenge.

Colombia es una de las principales economías de la región de América Latina y el Caribe y el gobierno tiene planes ambiciosos para su desarrollo social y económico, para lo que es crucial el fortalecimiento del capital humano.

The exceptional turnout at the 2013 OECD/Japan Seminar in Tokyo this week, where over 300 participants from over 20 countries discussed global strategies for higher education, shows that the seminar had exactly the right agenda at exactly the right time. I asked myself how many people would have turned up had this seminar been held five years ago; or whether five years ago, Japan would have ventured to take the lead on this theme.

The higher the level of education, the higher the salary cost of teachers per student. In Belgium (Flemish Community), France and Spain, the difference in the annual salary cost between the primary and upper secondary levels of education exceeds USD 1 800 in 2010.

How can assessment and evaluation policies work together more effectively to improve student outcomes in primary and secondary schools? This report provides an international comparative analysis and policy advice to countries on how evaluation and assessment arrangements can be embedded within a consistent framework to improve the quality, equity and efficiency of school education.

Rather than prescribe actions, the OECD often prefers to show policy makers what everyone else is doing and how successful those initiatives have been. A new OECD series of individual Education Policy Outlook Country Profiles does just that: each profile describes how an individual country is responding to key challenges to improve the effectiveness of its education system.

Flanders builds a "triangle of quality" based on extensive autonomy for schools, supported by pedagogical advisory services and monitored by government inspectors.

In a drive to raise the quality of classroom teaching and boost student performance, Dutch education authorities are encouraging teachers to learn from each other through a process of peer review.

If there’s one lesson we’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that we cannot simply bail ourselves out of a crisis, we cannot solely stimulate ourselves out of a crisis and we cannot just print money our way out of a crisis. But we can become much better in equipping more people with better skills to collaborate, compete and connect in ways that drive our economies forward.

In most OECD countries, newly arrived 15-year-old immigrant students show poorer reading performance than immigrant students who arrived in their new country when they were younger than five.

David Hoey, Chief Executive Officer of WorldSkills International spoke to us of the international skills extravaganza (WorldSkills Leipzig 2013) going on now, between 2-7 July.

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.

Students who know how to summarise information tend to perform better in reading. If disadvantaged students used effective learning strategies to the same extent as students from more advantaged backgrounds do, the performance gap between the two groups would be almost 20% narrower.

This book suggests strategies for building an education model that could inspire other Mexican states and fuel federal reform efforts.

Most students enjoy orderly classrooms for their language-of-instruction lessons. Socio-economically disadvantaged students are less likely to enjoy orderly classrooms than advantaged students. Orderly classrooms – regardless of the school’s overall socio-economic profile – are related to better performance.

In a global economy, the benchmark for educational success is no longer improvement by national standards alone, but the best performing school systems internationally.

Brazil’s strong economic growth has helped cut the youth unemployment rate over the past decade to levels below those of most OECD countries. Increased investment in education and vocational training is also helping young people get a foot in the jobs market, according to a new OECD report.

Two rounds of the Survey of Adult Skills are under way: Round 1 (2008-13) with 24 participating countries, whose results were released in October 2013, and Round 2 (2012-16) with 9 participating countries, whose results will be released in 2016. A third round is scheduled to begin in May 2014.

The story of Korean education over the past 50 years is one of remarkable growth and achievement. Korea is one of the top performing countries in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey and among those with the highest proportion of young people who have completed upper secondary and tertiary education.

The report Improving Schools in Wales: An OECD Perspective proposes a comprehensive strategy for Wales to support equity and quality in its school system building on a comparative perspective. It draws upon lessons from PISA, high performers and successful reformers in education, and on the research and analysis of key aspects of education policy in Wales undertaken by the OECD-Wales Review Team.

Around one in seven students in the 13 OECD countries and economies that took part in the first OECD PISA international assessment of financial literacy are unable to make even simple decisions about everyday spending, and only one in ten can solve complex financial tasks.

The OECD and China have announced that they will expand their cooperation in PISA, following the successful implementation of PISA 2009 and 2012 in Shanghai.

How educational resources are allocated is just as important as the amount of resources available.

How can mathematics education foster the skills that are appropriate for innovative societies? Mathematics education is heavily emphasised worldwide, nevertheless it is still considered to be a stumbling block for many students.

How can mathematics education foster the skills that are appropriate for innovative societies? Mathematics education is heavily emphasised worldwide, nevertheless it is still considered to be a stumbling block for many students. This book is designed to assist practitioners, curriculum developers and policy makers alike in preparing today’s students for tomorrow’s world.

Countries where 15-year-old students perform at high standards internationally tend to be the same countries where these young adults tend to perform well at the age of 26 to 28.

More than 40 years ago, the former French Prime Minister Edgar Faure and his team published one of the most influential educational works of the 20th century: “Learning to Be”, better known as the “Rapport Faure”, in which he mainstreamed the idea of lifelong learning.

This report offers a broader view of teachers and school principals across all levels of compulsory education, and all the similarities and differences in the issues they are facing.

While most 15-year-old students spend part of their after-school time doing homework, the amount of time they spend on it shrank between 2003 and 2012. Socio-economically advantaged students and students who attend socio-economically advantaged schools tend to spend more time doing homework.

Between 2000 and 2012, the proportion of young adults (25-34 year-olds) with a tertiary qualification has grown by more than 3% per year on average in OECD countries. On average across 24 national and sub-national entities participating in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, 39% of adults have achieved a higher level of education than their parents.