Despite having advanced social protection systems, OECD countries still face challenges in identifying, enrolling, and providing benefits and services to all those in need. Even when programmes are well-designed and adequately funded, cumbersome enrolment processes and challenges in service and benefit delivery can be an obstacle to the full take-up of social programmes. Advances in digital technologies and data can go a long way towards making social protection more accessible and effective. This report presents a stocktaking of OECD governments’ strategies to identify individuals and groups in need, collect and link (potential) beneficiary data across administrative and survey sources, and apply data analytics and new technologies to improve programme enrolment and the benefit/service delivery experience – all with the objective of reaching people in need of support in OECD countries.

With population ageing, the demand for helping older people with daily activities – so-called long-term care – is set to increase across OECD countries by more than one-third by 2050. Older people with long-term care needs are more likely to be women, 80-years-old and above, live in single households, and have lower incomes than the average. Currently, across OECD countries, publicly funded long-term care systems still leave almost half of older people with care needs at risk of poverty, particularly those with severe care needs and low income. Out-of-pocket costs represent, on average, 70% of an older person’s median income across the OECD. This report suggests avenues to improve funding to make long-term care systems better able to meet the demand for their services, and suggests policy options to improve the targeting of benefits and seek efficiency gains to contain the costs of long-term care.

This report presents a synthesis of OECD’s empirical work that aims at identifying the types of social and emotional skills that drive children’s future outcomes.

This seminar proceedings examines whether The fundamental policy question addressed in the seminar was whether the current designs of social protection systems in OECD societies are well-suited to contemporary life-course realities.

Measuring the Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for the Future provides new insights into the state of the digital transformation by mapping indicators across a range of areas – from education and innovation, to trade and economic and social outcomes – against current digital policy issues, as presented in Going Digital: Shaping Policies, Improving Lives.

This edition of the OECD Sovereign Borrowing Outlook reviews developments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for government borrowing needs, funding conditions and funding strategies in the OECD area.