The Baltic Sea Region is rapidly becoming one of the world’s more competitive regions. The region is capitalising on its strengths and making the most of its diversity to stimulate innovation, build a strong pool of skilled labour and foster ...

This book analyses new economic development in the Baltic States and Northwest Russia and provides suggestions on how to speed up this progress.

Demonstrates that the success of local development strategies depends on the capacity of the government and its partners to accelerate change within the policy and governance aspects of economic and social development.

Innovation, skills, entrepreneurship and social cohesion are key drivers of growth. Each has a strong governance component, which is analysed in this OECD book.

This report explores the various challenges and opportunities for Polish regional development policy, and provides recommendations to best design and implement the policy mix, looking in particular at governance challenges.

Innovation, skills, entrepreneurship and social cohesion are key drivers of growth, and essential goals of effective economic development strategies. Each has a strong governance component, which requires partnership between government, business and civil society for co-ordinating actions and adapting policies to local conditions. But what are the best governance mechanisms to fuel the drivers of growth? What is the role of central government in maximising their effectiveness? What specific actions must cities carry out to become more competitive and spread prosperity? How can public services be managed in the most effective way to support local competitiveness in the age of globalisation and networking? How can partnerships generate more funding and deliver better results? For this book, the OECD has brought together top world experts to translate policy lessons into concrete recommendations that will help policy makers and practitioners make the best governance decisions to stimulate growth.

Social enterprises are long-standing agents of inclusive growth and democratisation of the economic and social spheres, and they have proved resilient to economic adversity all the while addressing socio-economic challenges in innovative ways, re-integrating people back to the labour market, and contributing to overall social cohesion. This compendium derives policy lessons for boosting social enterprises from the analysis of 20 initiatives in several EU member-countries, covering a range of policy areas from legal frameworks, finance, market access, and support structures, to education and skills.

This book identifies how development agencies and companies work, what they do and how they can collaborate and what constitutes success and value added in their efforts to achieve local economic development.

This joint OECD-ILO report provides a comparative analysis of case studies focusing on improving skills use in the workplace across eight countries. The examples provide insights into the practical ways in which employers interact with government services and policies at the local level. They highlight the need to build policy coherence across employment, skills, economic development and innovation policies, and underline the importance of ensuring that skills utilisation is built into policy development thinking and implementation. Skills utilisation concerns the extent to which skills are effectively applied in the workplace to maximise workplace and individual performance. It involves a mix of policies including work organisation, job design, technology adaptation, innovation, employee-employer relations, human resource development practices and business-product market strategies. It is often at the local level that the interface of these factors can best be addressed.