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Background: Hospital governance is broadening its orientation from cost and production controls towards 'improving performance on clinical outcomes'. Given this new focus one might assume that doctors are drawn into hospital management across OECD countries. Hospital performance in terms of patient health, quality of care and efficiency outcomes is supposed to benefit from their involvement. However, international comparative evidence supporting this idea is limited. Just a few studies indicate that there may be a positive relationship between medical doctors being part of hospital boards, and overall hospital performance. More importantly, the assumed relationship between these so-called doctor managers and hospital performance has remained a 'black-box' thus far. However, there is an increasing literature on the implementation of quality management systems in hospitals and their relation with improved performance. It seems therefore fair to assume that the relation between the involvement of doctors in hospital management and improved hospital performance is partly mediated via quality management systems. The threefold aim of this paper is to 1) perform a quick scan of the current situation with regard to doctor managers in hospital management in 19 OECD countries, 2) explore the phenomenon of doctor managers in depth in 7 OECD countries, and 3) investigate whether doctor involvement in hospital management is associated with more advanced implementation of quality management systems.Methods: This study draws both on a quick scan amongst country coordinators in OECD's Health Care Quality Indicator program, and on the DUQuE project which focused on the implementation of quality management systems in European hospitals.Results: This paper reports two main findings. First, medical doctors fulfil a broad scope of managerial roles at departmental and hospital level but only partly accompanied by formal decision making responsibilities. Second, doctor managers having more formal decision making responsibilities in strategic hospital management areas is positively associated with the level of implementation of quality management systems.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that doctors are increasingly involved in hospital management in OECD countries, and that this may lead to better implemented quality management systems, when doctors take up managerial roles and are involved in strategic management decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is one response to the challenges faced by agriculture due to climate change. As with other sustainability transitions, technological innovation is highlighted as playing a critical role, however, the adoption and diffusion of technological innovations in OECD countries is slow. The aim of this paper is to identify key socio-economic barriers, in terms of supply and demand, that inhibit the adoption and diffusion of CSA technological innovations in Europe. To achieve this aim, a theoretical framework is constructed based on a literature review of socio-economic barriers effecting adoption and diffusion. This framework is explored with data from semi-structured interviews with CSA technology providers and members of agricultural supply chains, such as farmers associations and consumer goods producers (the end-users of the technology). Data was collected on the barriers they experienced, with interviews conducted in the Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Italy. This data was thematically coded and categorised to identify key barrier typologies. The results demonstrate that barriers exist on both the demand (user) and supply (technology provider) sides. The paper provides recommendations for increasing the adoption and diffusion of CSA technological innovations, as well as implications for the CSA and innovation literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Throughout human history, livestock producers have relied on a vibrant international exchange of genetic resources to achieve improvements in the quality and productivity of their animals. In recent years, however, some observers have argued that changes in the legal, technological, and economic environment now imply that international exchanges of animal genetic resources (AnGR) systematically benefit rich countries at the expense of poor countries. It is argued that international flows of AnGR are displacing the indigenous animal genetic resources of developing countries, and also that the genetic wealth of the developing world is being expropriated by rich countries. In reaction, there have been growing calls for limitations and/or barriers to the exchange of animal genetic resources. These discussions, however, seem to be based on limited information about the magnitude and direction of current trade flows in AnGR. This paper offers an analysis of AnGR trade flows from 1990 to 2005. The paper draws on national-level data from 150 countries that reported information to the United Nations Statistics Division. Three major trade categories were evaluated: live cattle and pigs for breeding, and cattle semen. Over the period studied, Europe and North America were the primary exporters of genetic resources for the species evaluated. OECD countries accounted for 98.7, 92.5, and 95% of cattle semen, live cattle, and swine exports in 2005, respectively. In evaluating the direction of trade between developed (North) and developing (South) countries, North–North trade had the largest magnitude, followed by North–South, South–South, and South–North. The data do not support the notion that Southern genetic resources are being used on a large scale in the North. We believe that importation from South to North is limited by the vast discrepancies in production efficiency and production systems between countries in the North and South. Given the low volume of South–North exchange, it seems doubtful that sufficient revenues could be acquired through a “benefit-sharing mechanism” to have any substantial impact on in situ or ex situ conservation efforts, or to generate benefits for poor livestock keepers in developing countries. We question whether global agreements or restrictions on trade will achieve the desired goal of conserving rare breeds and threatened genetic resources. We also doubt whether these agreements will succeed in improving the well-being of the poor. We suggest that resources instead be urgently employed for conservation and that more direct measures should be taken to aid poor farmers, ranchers, and herders in their efforts to conserve genetic resources. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which has become a major and influential component of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) educational work. This measure of comparative performance of educational systems of member and other nations is based on tests commissioned by the OECD. The paper discusses the role of the OECD in establishing the 'comparative' turn and also describes PISA, its management and effects. It provides three examples of the impact of PISA in Finland, Germany and the UK before moving the focus to its impacts at the transnational level, through an examination of how key European policy actors see PISA and its effects. The paper concludes that PISA, through its direct impact on national education systems in Europe and beyond, has become an indirect, but nonetheless influential tool of the new political technology of governing the European education space by numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we study the impact of port activities on local employment by analyzing a sample of about 560 regions located in ten West European countries and observed over the period 2000–2006. The biggest European ports of OECD countries belong to our sample, which includes 116 ports. The empirical analysis is based on the estimation of a set of employment equations with the GMM-System estimator of Blundell and Bond (1998) that allows us to take into account persistence effects in employment, regional unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity, and endogeneity of port activity. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: first, regional employment is positively correlated to port throughput, while the number of passengers is not; in second place, we found a higher impact of port throughput when the liquid bulk is considered only for 10% of its weight; third, our main results are confirmed if we consider service and manufacturing employment instead of total employment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The rapid aging of OECD country populations and the now five-year-long financial crisis in Europe are causing many OECD countries to reconfigure their assistance programs for the elderly, particularly their long-term care (LTC) policies. Debates about intergenerational responsibilities are evident in recendy published research papers that examine how countries are revising programs for the elderly. Building financial sustainability into program reforms has suddenly become a priority. Until just recendy, reform efforts focused on creating efficiencies and better quality of services. What emerges from the recent literature is a strong sense that the OECD countries are responding to the financial crisis and the rapid aging of populations in very similar ways. Given the countries' different histories of how they provide assistance to their elderly citizens, the convergence of policy responses is not something we might have foreseen. The United States could learn much from the OECD countries' choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reconcile the often inconclusive evidence on the role of FDI in the process of economic development by taking into account the heterogeneity both among industries and among countries. Using a comparable database at the industry level for 35 countries in the OECD, Asia and Eastern Europe from 1987 to 2002, we test for the influence of both stage of development and sectoral FDI patterns in the relationship between FDI and productivity growth. In certain industries and for the catching-up countries, a significant and positive relationship emerges when FDI coincides with high investment or export orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the convergence of energy intensities for a group of 97 countries in the period 1971–2003. Convergence is tested using a recent method proposed by Pesaran (2007) [Pesaran, M.H., 2007. A pair-wise approach to testing for output and growth convergence. Journal of Econometrics 138, 312–355] based on the stochastic convergence criterion. An advantage of this method is that results do not depend on a benchmark against which convergence is assessed. It gives more robust results. Applications of several unit-root tests as well as a stationarity test uniformly reject the global convergence hypothesis. Locally, for Middle East, OECD and Europe sub-groups, non-convergence is less strongly rejected. The introduction of possible structural breaks in the analysis only marginally provides more support to the convergence hypothesis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The history of the social welfare systems in Europe in the postwar period appears as autonomous national processes because the construction of Europe which imposed common rules in many areas was equally consistent with the national development of social welfare systems, within each national culture. However, the idea of a common system of social protection has always remained linked to political and economic European construction which would create a more cohesive society. Many studies have analysed the trend of specific social policies and their convergence or divergence in Europe. Therefore, global convergence is often conceived as resulting from the domestic dynamics of each social risk. The paper focuses on one specific topic: the quantitative evaluation of convergence among the EU and OECD countries at the macroeconomic level. In the first part we explain the construction of social indicators which can assess the convergence or divergence of social expenditure in EU and OECD countries. In the second part we show many methodological problems and difficulties of interpretation of the social indicators. Then we see that the analysis of national trajectories of social expenditure and the link with economic development can enrich the analysis of convergence in social protection. Finally, the empirical analysis supports the idea of “adjustment” reforms rather than radical changes in a transitional period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]