New Approaches to Economic Challenge - Wie soll oder kann die Wirtschaft der Zukunft aussehen?

http://www.oecd.org/naec/

http://ineteconomics.org/

http://www.weforum.org/

Anbei eine Zusammenfassung der OECD zum Thema wirtschaftliche Disruption und Zukunftsorientierung. Die vollständige Studie kann unter http://www.oecd.org/mcm/documents/Final-NAEC-Synthesis-Report-CMIN2015-2.pdf heruntetgeladen werden.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. The starkness and magnitude of the recent crisis and its lingering legacy calls for a serious

reflection, to revisit and supplement existing policy approaches and build a new policy agenda for stronger,

more resilient, inclusive and sustainable growth. The New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC)

Initiative is a comprehensive organisation-wide reflection process which is triggering and accelerating a

revision of the OECD’s analytical frameworks as well as a renewal and strengthening of its policy

instruments and tools.

2. Policy analysis prior to the crisis often prioritised market efficiency. Less systematic focus was

placed on aspects of well-being such as quality of life, environmental sustainability and equal access to

opportunities. As a result, economic growth was often considered too narrowly as an end, rather than a

means to improve societal well-being.

3. NAEC is proposing and supporting a change in objectives and perspectives.

h NAEC calls for a greater focus on well-being and its distribution to ensure that growth

delivers progress for all. This is timely as the gap between rich and poor is at its highest level in

30 years in OECD countries. Policy choices should be informed by an assessment of their impact

on different dimensions of well-being as well as their distributional consequences. This will

enhance understanding of the unintended consequences of policies and lead to a balanced analysis

of the trade-offs and complementarities between different policy options. The OECD has

developed an analytical framework that takes these insights into account.

h NAEC also calls for better integration of the financial sector and related risks in the analysis,

shedding light on the numerous and complex interactions between finance and the real economy.

h NAEC recognises the increased international economic integration and resulting complexity, and

the insights that may be gained by analysing the global economy as a complex adaptive system.

This will help to take into account uncertainty, spill-overs, systemic risks and network effects.

This analysis, amongst others, will help policymakers get a better grip on rising global

interconnectedness.

h NAEC recommends the adoption of a longer-term perspective that considers how economies are

embedded in institutions shaped by history, social norms and political choices. This would

lead to more tailored policy solutions adaptable to countries’ specific needs, conditions, capacities

and institutional settings.

h NAEC recommends informing such a change in perspectives by further developing strategic

foresight.

4. To make these changes in perspectives happen, the OECD needs to develop, where feasible, new

instruments and tools, and deepen, generalise and systematise their use.

h These changes require measurement of stocks (of wealth, natural, and social capital, etc.) as well

as adequate consideration of both stock and flow concepts in analyses.

h It also requires further developing the use of micro-data to identify the heterogeneity of

households and firms, and facilitate analyses to understand and tackle inequality.

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h The Organisation also needs to review and improve its modelling approaches, taking a more

integrated approach while diversifying the types of models it uses and noting the limitations of

the fundamental assumptions upon which they are built.

5. All these changes in instruments and tools should enrich OECD analysis. They also need to be

supplemented further with insights from other disciplines which are relevant to policy, such as

sociology, psychology, geography and history.

6. The aforementioned new approaches promote experimentation and strengthening of OECD

analyses to improve its policy advice. They are leading to a series of policy recommendations that would

support a stronger, resilient, more inclusive and sustainable growth agenda.

7. To fully understand trade-offs, synergies and unintended consequences of policies, it is essential

to recognise the importance of the multidimensionality and distributional effects of policies. This

requires a comprehensive approach to inclusive growth that takes into account the different dimensions

of inequality. There is increasing evidence that large income inequality undermines growth and wellbeing,

by reducing investment in skills by low-income households. To address these issues:

h Structural policies need to be carefully designed to consider their distributional consequences,

looking in particular at the impacts on groups such as the young and the elderly, and to mitigate

trade-offs between material and other dimensions of well-being, such as education and health

outcomes.

h To ensure equality of opportunity, it is necessary to promote access to high-quality education

from early childhood and to a broader range of skills, cognitive as well as social and emotional.

In doing so, governments should once again focus on disadvantaged and at-risk groups.

h Taxation systems need to be reformed to ensure that they are progressive enough.

h Labour market policies are another area in which policy makers need to broaden their objectives

by pursuing job quality together with job quantity, targeting jointly labour market security, the

quality of the working environment, and the level of remuneration.

h Governments should promote gender equity in education, employment and entrepreneurship,

as this is a key factor in economic development, growth and well-being.

h Promoting inclusive governance, in particular at the metropolitan level, is also critical for

improving well-being and economic growth, as well as for fighting social exclusion.

Mainstreaming spatial policies will help in general to ensure more effective design and

implementation of policies.

8. NAEC is highlighting the impacts of economic activity on environmental systems and the

consequent imbalances which are putting economic growth, well-being and development at risk. It calls for

improving understanding of inter-linkages between economic and environmental goals to more clearly

articulate how economic and environmental objectives could be achieved simultaneously. Greater clarity

on these connections is all the more important considering that a binding agreement on greenhouse gas

emissions reduction needs to be reached by the 21st session of the Conference of Parties to the UNFCC

(COP21) later this year.

h NAEC calls for ensuring strong market and policy signals both to make pollution and climate

change more costly and clean and green approaches more attractive, and for increasing the

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ambition and stringency of environmental policies while ensuring they remain competitionfriendly

by using flexible, market-based instruments.

h It is also critical to pay attention to the distributional consequences of these policies and to

develop policy packages that enhance their progressivity.

9. A return to strong and sustainable growth that delivers for people necessitates policies to tackle

emerging challenges such as the decline in long-term productivity growth.

h To this end, young and innovative firms (including start-ups) should be enabled to emerge and

grow through policies that reduce the costs of entry, experimentation and exit.

h It is also necessary to boost innovation without stifling reallocation, while implementing

complementary social and skills policies to allow a more efficient allocation of skills, which are

at the heart of social-mobility mechanisms, and ensure that innovation promotes inclusive

growth.

10. NAEC emphasises the need to increase macroeconomic stability and the resilience of the

economy by implementing an effective regulatory framework, promoting fiscal soundness and fostering

the counter-cyclicality of macroeconomic policies. In order to enhance the resilience of economies, it is

crucial to develop a framework to monitor economic vulnerabilities to shocks. NAEC also calls for

improving the stability, inclusiveness and sustainability of the financial sector, while ensuring that the

financial sector plays its key role of financing the real economy.

h Work under NAEC shows the importance of strengthening the resilience of banks through

higher capital and liquidity requirements as well as structural reforms.

h NAEC calls for reforming the corporate tax treatment of debt and equity, as this could

positively affect resource allocation and financial stability.

h It also calls for more monitoring of system-level risks by financial supervisors, with due attention

given to risks rising in the shadow banking sector.

h It is also necessary to strengthen equity market infrastructure and to ensure it plays its role as a

key channel for financing companies.

h Meanwhile, it is also necessary to broaden the range of financing instruments, particularly for

young innovative firms, and to enable non-bank actors to provide long-term finance, while

removing regulatory, legal and governance impediments to long-term investment.

11. Last but not least, to make these reforms politically feasible and socially acceptable, it is crucial

to restore trust in governments and market institutions.

h To do this, an overhaul of the process of policy-making is needed as a lot remains to be done to

ensure transparency, open government and stakeholder engagement in some countries.

h The political system must work for all the people and not just special interests. Lobbying and

political finance thus need to be properly regulated to address conflicts of interest.

h In addition, business and finance must be appropriately regulated and companies must pay

their fair share of taxes, while responsible business conduct must also be encouraged.

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h Foreign bribery and illicit financial flows should also be more decisively tackled.

12. NAEC is thus an ambitious policy programme that requires political leadership as well as

careful crafting and implementation. NAEC does not claim to have all the answers but points to progress in

a number of areas. Challenges remain in enhancing the OECD’s analytical approaches; accessing and

assembling new data; developing modelling capacities; and embracing new ideas and new ways of

working across the Organisation. These analytical improvements will need to be supported by appropriate

changes in the structure of the Organisation to avoid one-size-fits-all and move beyond a silo-approach to

policy, to enhance inter-disciplinarity and to safe-guard against groupthink.

13. This report draws attention to green shoots of change in many parts of the OECD. NAEC

projects have delivered useful analysis, data and policy tools. Emerging results shed light on critical

challenges as well as on the strong, resilient, sustainable and inclusive growth agenda needed to address

them.

14. But a lot remains to be done if the OECD is to deliver on new approaches to economic

challenges. Key NAEC findings need to be mainstreamed in the OECD’s core work and flagship

publications. Horizontal co-operation among Committees and Directorates should be strengthened through

the NAEC seminars and possibly the NAEC Group and internal processes that hinder horizontal work

should be reviewed. At the same time, efforts should be made to foster continuous improvement in policy

analysis, as well as to anticipate and better respond to emerging priorities. These challenges are to a great

extent shared by Member and Key Partner governments heightening the need to deepen the dialogue and

outreach on NAEC. Therefore, sharing experiences on new approaches at the country level would help in

reframing and designing better policies for better lives.