Search results

This study aims to provide the main contents of the revision of the 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and suggest implications for the Korean government and multinational enterprises.

Following the brief history of the revision of OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, this study reviews and evaluates major substantive and procedural revisions of the 2023 OECD Guidelines, and then suggests countermeasures for Korean government and businesses.

The most significant substantive change of the 2023 revision is that expectations for environmental due diligence and disclosure obligations, including climate change and biodiversity, for multinational enterprises have been expanded and strengthened. Regarding procedural changes, the biggest change is the introduction of a basis rule for the National Contact Points for Responsible Business Conduct (NCPs for RBC) to judge each issue and a rule that the final statement must include follow-up details and deadlines, which is expected to strengthen the effectiveness of the NCP dispute resolution mechanism.

This study is the first academic paper to introduce major substantive and procedural revisions to the 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises in Korea. This study also provides implications for the Korean government and companies following the 2023 revised OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises as follows. First, the Korean government must establish a public–private partnership to closely communicate to prevent Korean companies from being harmed by failing to meet strengthening international Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) standards. In addition, Korean government should actively participate in ESG-related international forums, including the OECD, and strive to reflect the needs and interests of Korean companies. Second, the Korean NCP should strengthen its activities to prevent potential damage by expanding education and promotions for Korean businesses on related overseas legislative trends and NCP dispute case studies so that Korean companies can effectively deal with the strengthened ESG standards. Third, Korean multinational enterprises should preemptively establish an advanced ESG management system to seize new opportunities in the global supply chain previously concentrated in China and India in the process of reorganizing global supply chains according to the trend of strengthening ESG standards and the US value alliance strategy.

This viewpoint paper has two purposes: One is to argue that the Academy activities should increasingly be promoted and used for disseminating the practical and useful skills for the related law enforcement people who fight against financial crime, while the other is to contribute to the basis of discussions and further academy research.

This study summarizes and indicates potential usefulness of the new academy, specializing in the related social and political contexts in qualitative and descriptive ways.

This study indicates that the new academy activities in Japan would continue for a long time, thus providing immediately useful skillsets for the investigators and officers at the very frontline who face against various financial crimes.

While little research has been done about the series of related academy activities by OECD, this study describes the historical background and usefulness of the academy of the OECD in a specialized manner, thus showing its linkage with FATF.

Offshore financial centres are coming under increasing pressure from both the OECD and the European Union. They are seen by many bureaucrats and politicians in OECD countries as facilitating criminal activities such as laundering drug money as well as tax evasion and tax avoidance by residents of high‐tax welfare states. While there are good reasons for nation states to cooperate to suppress criminal activity, this is not true in relation to tax competition. The notion that by engaging in ‘harmful’ tax competition, offshore financial centres are damaging the legitimate interests of OECD nations has no sound foundation in economic theory. Competition in tax matters is beneficial and world welfare enhancing. Governments of offshore financial centres serve their own and the world's interests by providing zero or low tax environments for global business and investment and they are right to insist that treaties on criminal matters should not be used to enforce other countries' tax claims.

This paper considers supranational initiatives ‐ particularly those emanating from the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, the Financial Action Task Force and the Financial Stability Forum ‐ proposing changes in the regulation of offshore financial centres. The implications of the withdrawal of US support for elements of the initiative are reviewed. The underlying rationales for change are considered, as are the probable and appropriate response for the stakeholders in the offshore centres, including governments, financial institutions and clients.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the emplotment of organizational grand-narratives of a leading international organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The paper includes the reconstruction of the OECD’s inclusion approach as a prototype grand-narrative. Moreover, the main goal of this paper is understanding the reciprocal relationship between the organizational narratives and other organizational domains.

To study the structural process of emploting grand-narratives, which combines reciprocal dependencies across organizational domains, I have used process tracing, content analysis and interviews methodologies, for each domain. These methodologies were monitored by quantitative and qualitative analyses of the interactions among these domains. These methods allowed me to explore the interdependencies in the discursive and non-discursive ordering of institutional memory as a means for identifying the development of organizational narratives.

The findings of this paper confirm the reciprocal dynamics among and within three core organizational domains, narratives, organizational-epistemological settings and organizational products. These domains evolve constantly and concurrently in a three-phased process where a former organizational constellation is challenged, a consolidation takes place, and a new narrative is institutionalized. The context I chose to demonstrate this dynamic is the OECD evolving interactions between innerorganizational units and the organizational products (i.e. its activation policy recommendations), of the OECD post-Cold War inclusive approach (1989–2002).

The importance and complexity of the OECD as a global trendsetting organization, and the findings of this single case study are significant for their implications on trends and processes found in other complex grand-narratives. The transferability of these results would require further analysis.

The originality of this paper is using a transnational dynamic organization such as the OECD as the organizational model for understanding how organizations undergo emplotment processes. Moreover, this article’s analytical framework provides a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between the constraining structures and micro-level interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the approaches to smart specialisation being adopted in different European Union (EU) regions are likely to be heavily shaped by the institutional and governance context, as well as the regional economic specifics. Along with the specific regional economic characteristics, these institutional variations mean that there is no single smart specialisation template or blueprint which can be transplanted onto every region. Rather, regions have to work within their own governance frameworks to find their best solutions.

As evidence of this, the authors analyse the possibilities and challenges faced by four different sets of regional examples in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. Using OECD, EU and other official national documents and publications, the authors are able to explain the ways in which the governance set-ups vary enormously across these different arenas although they do share some certain common features with the other examples on a case-by-case basis.

The policy architecture within which the smart specialisation agenda will be operating is very different in each national or regional case. As such, in addition to the regional economic specifics, the smart specialisation challenges faced by different regions are likely to differ significantly due to governance issues as well as variations in the regional economic conditions. This is because the possibilities for different regional actions depend heavily on the governance relationship between the regional and the local governance remits.

The argument presented here are necessarily in part speculative in that while they are based on a regional systems-of-innovation conceptual framework which links institutions, innovation and regional development, the actual smart specialisation implementation processes are still in their infancy, so that the actual outcomes remain to be seen in the long run.

The analysis here helps to situate smart specialisation discussions in the national-regional institutional and governance context. This also serves to frame how smart specialisation priority-setting processes are likely to be undertaken and helps to consider how such activities may play out in other regions with different institutional settings.

This is one of the few papers that explicitly examine specialisation issues in a governance and institutional setting. In reality, the success or otherwise of smart specialisation agenda will be heavily shaped by how the governance and institutional issues are addressed. Good analysis and data gathering is essential, but good governance for policy design, monitoring and evaluation can potentially also provide a crucial advantage to smart specialisation actions. In contrast, poor governance may undermine good smart specialisation intentions and analyses.

The article aims at improving the authors’ understanding on how international organizations function by shedding light on management reforms at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The article shows the characteristics of the performance management system implemented at the OECD, the main obstacles encountered, adaptations addressing the low measurability of policy advice activities and other issues.

While multilateral collaboration could be an effective way to contrast several wicked problems, the global actors face multiple legitimacy and financial challenges. This makes understanding the way they function of outmost importance. Unfortunately, public management and administration research, while steadily grown around the reform efforts of national governments, has neglected the global level. The article addresses this literature gap through the in-depth analysis of a case study aimed at exploring the unfamiliar international organizations context. It relies on two literature streams: performance management and network management. The collaborative nature of international organizations makes the latter particularly useful.

Among the various public administration types, international organizations providing policy advise display several features that make performance measurement more difficult. The OECD case study analysis offers several insights into other international institutions struggling with managerial reforms in an effort to address legitimacy and financial issues. It shows that implementing a performance management system is possible and necessary to sustain the support of member countries and ensure a well-functioning multilateral system.

The single case study offers only limited and analytical generalizability of the findings.

Research on international organizations could help to unveil implementation obstacles or undesired effects of management reforms in other coping and networked organizations.

The article investigates the OECD, which is one of the less studied among the many global multilateral institutions. Other original features include the adoption of a public management approach to the study international organizations and the focus on network performance, a recent topic in the network management literature.

The purpose of this study is to measure and analyze the national innovation efficiency of organisation for economic co-operation and development (OECD) countries. This is to determine to what extent OECD countries efficiently use the elements that enable innovation activities possible in generating innovation outputs.

An input–output model was constructed to measure efficiency. The inputs and outputs in the research model are the input and output sub-indices of the Global Innovation Index. Data envelopment analysis was used to measure the national innovation efficiency levels of OECD countries.

The results show that national innovation efficiency is generally high in OECD countries. However, some countries lag behind in innovation efficiency. OECD countries’ ability to create and provide the elements that enable innovation activities is higher than their ability to create innovation outputs. OECD countries have a good innovation environment and a high level of resources, but they should focus on how to create more innovation outputs.

This study presents a measurement of national innovation efficiency of OECD countries which contributes “Innovation Strategy” agenda. The results empirically show that overall innovation indices cannot be the only indicator of the performance of national innovation systems. In this study, an innovation efficiency/performance matrix is constructed to present the relative positions of the countries to help in examining countries’ strengths, weaknesses and potentials based on innovation efficiency and innovation performance simultaneously. This study contributes to the literature by presenting a broader perspective and measurement of national innovation efficiency by taking an extensive number of indicators into account.

E‐commerce has changed the way in which business is conducted. One instance of this is that it has made the digitisation of products possible. This shift has severe implications for traditional consumption taxes, which were developed under the premise of a physical presence in a tax jurisdiction. A large number of countries in the world that impose Value‐Added Tax (VAT) on the supply of goods and services, including South Africa, are affected by this shift. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has suggested a number of principles that should apply to consumption taxes in e‐commerce. These principles are intended to provide fiscal climates in which e‐commerce can flourish and ensure taxation systems that secure individual countries’ tax bases. A comparison between the OECD principles and the rules pertaining to the imposition of VAT in South Africa on the supply of digitised products reveals several discrepancies and uncertainties. A baseline survey among VAT specialists in South Africa, conducted in order to substantiate these findings, confirmed these discrepancies and uncertainties in practice.

Apparel exports by OECD countries and imports of developing countries, the counter‐flow of international trade in apparel, were examined. Application of a gravity model indicated that proximity was important in determining the marketing destinations of apparel exports of OECD countries. There was a large variation in apparel imports to the developing countries from the developed countries, and while generally increasing, there were also large fluctuations over time. The trade flow was explained by differentiation of products and inequality of income in the developing countries. Regression analysis was used to determine the factors which influenced apparel imports of developing countries from OECD countries. The result indicated that income level was the most important determinant, and that apparel imports were income elastic. Market conditions, and remarkably, market barrier, had no significant impact.