What is the main focus of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development?

OECD privacy guidelines

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), though often considered exclusively European, consists of 30 member nations from around the world. The members include such countries as the United States, Mexico, Australia, Japan, and the Czech Republic, as well as prominent European countries. The OECD provides a forum in which countries can focus on issues that impact the global economy. The OECD will routinely issue consensus recommendations that can serve as an impetus to change current policies and legislation in the OECD member countries and beyond.

9.7.1 The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an international organization comprised of 29 industrialized member countries committed to all aspects of international economic cooperation, including investment, conduct of multinational companies, electronic commerce, privacy, and encryption. The members of the OECD are Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In its work, the OECD publishes voluntary guidelines on several topics such as the following.

Code of conduct for multinationals, which establishes voluntary guidelines for appropriate international enterprise behavior,

Privacy, used as the basis of privacy policy in many European and Pacific Rim nations,

Transborder Data Flow, 1980,

Information Security, 1992, and

Encryption, 1996–1997.

Government Responsibilities and Legal Framework

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in a report published in May 2011, acknowledges that the legal and policy framework for protecting children in the global digital network is extremely hazardous and complex. The complex policy challenges include: how to mitigate risks without reducing the opportunities and benefits for children online; how to prevent risks while preserving fundamental values for all Internet users; how to ensure that policies are proportionate to the problem and do not unsettle the framework conditions that have enabled the Internet economy to flourish?

Furthermore, governments have tended to tackle online-related sexual exploitation and abuse with an emphasis on building the “architecture” to protect or rescue children—establishing legislation, pursuing and prosecuting abusers, raising awareness, reducing access to harm and supporting children to recover from abuse or exploitation. These are essential components of a protection response.

It is also worth noting that despite various efforts we are far from a globally agreed set of guidelines and legal framework that protects children from serious risks they face on-line. Clearly this is a serious gap exploited by criminals and those who have vested interest in using the current “freedoms” for personal monitory benefit.

Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development Privacy Principles

According to the OECD, their mission is to “promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of the world.” Although the OECD achieves their mission in many ways and provides invaluable guidance in a number of areas, our focus will be on the privacy principles. In terms of exam preparation, focusing on the 12 general privacy principles, and applying foundational privacy knowledge to the mission and organizational aspects of the OECD will suffice for exam preparation. Since OECD has an international presence, and works with organizations across the world, they can leverage the 12 privacy principles to address healthcare privacy from an international perspective.

5.3 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

The Paris-based OECD comprises 29 member countries, most of which are the advanced countries in North America and Western Europe, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. In addition, some of the transition countries of Eastern and Central Europe, Mexico, and Korea became members of the OECD in the 1990s. Most OECD labor statistics cover the member countries only, but some series are being expanded to cover non-member Asian and Latin American countries.

The main labor-related publications of the OECD are the annual and quarterly editions of Labour Force Statistics (1999). The annual publication compiles two decades of statistics, while the quarterly editions show selected data for the past five years. These publications provide statistics on key elements of the labor force, rather than on the broader range of labor statistics contained in the ILO Yearbook. Through the OECD's provision of extended time series, it is possible to identify structural changes that have taken place in the labor force of the countries with respect to gender, age, and economic activities. Data on part-time employment and duration of unemployment are included. The detailed statistics on employment are generally in conformity with the International Standard Industrial Classification.

Another program of the OECD, the Standardized Unemployment Rates, provides unemployment rates adjusted to ILO concepts for 24 member countries. The Standardized Rates are published in an annex to the aforementioned quarterly editions and they also are available from the OECD web site.

Additional labor statistics are published in the annual OECD Employment Outlook, expanding the range considerably to include special international analyses of training statistics, indicators of the degree of employment protection and regulation, trends in self employment, income distribution, minimum wages and poverty, the transition from education to the labor market, trends in working hours, and work-force aging, to name some of the special studies. The OECD analyses pay careful attention to comparability and often contain annexes that explain the data comparison issues in detail.

1 Why is governance important?

The mission of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. The OECD works to advance these causes, throughout its 34 member nations, through various means including corporate governance. To this end, the OECD has produced guidelines for and reporting of corporate governance.1

The OECD defines corporate governance as “Procedures and processes according to which an organization is directed and controlled. The corporate governance structure specifies the distribution of rights and responsibilities among the different participants in the organization—such as the board, managers, shareholders and other stakeholders— and lays down the rules and procedures for decision-making.”2

So why is governance important? As the OECD has stated, governance defines the rules and procedures for decision making and ensuring oversight of operations. As business operations are moved to cloud service providers (CSPs), the decision-making process can become (for lack of a better word) cloudy. Oversight of operations can become difficult. How do customers, their boards, managers, shareholders, and other stakeholders ensure that their business requirements and interests are adequately met? Unless the risk is also outsourced (e.g., insurance), the responsibility still remains with the customer.

Boards are hearing much about the benefits of cloud computing—lower cost, higher efficiency, faster innovation, and implementation. These are some of the potential benefits depending on strategy and implementation. A full discussion of these potential benefits will not be included in this chapter. For the purpose of this chapter, it is assumed that the enterprise is considering an external cloud provider. Also, for the purpose of this chapter, the word “enterprise” will refer to the organization, or customer, seeking services from a CSP.

International Organizations

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) was the first organization to popularize the term in the 1960s and 1970s as a way of connecting formal and informal education. UNESCO has produced two groundbreaking reports on lifelong learning: the Faure Report (International Commission on the Development of Education & Faure, 1972) and the Delors Report (International Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century, Delors, & UNESCO, 1996, 1998), both articulating the fundamental principles of lifelong learning. One of the overarching aims of the “UNESCO Medium-Term Strategy 2008–2013,” http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001499/149999e.pdf, accessed September 17, 2011, for the Education Sector is “attaining quality education for all and lifelong learning.” Initially, the UNESCO approach to the subject was a humanistic one, focusing on the development of the individual with an emphasis on “learning to learn.” However, in the 1990s, UNESCO adapted its approach to lifelong learning to the needs of the “knowledge economy” and human capital development. Despite this, the organization avoided the purely economic arguments for lifelong learning, which is evident in its 1996 report on lifelong learning titled “Learning: The Treasure Within.” (International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century et al., 1998). This report defines lifelong learning as adaptation to changes in technology and as the continuous “process of forming whole human beings—their knowledge and aptitudes, as well as the critical faculty and the ability to act.” UNESCO’s commitment to lifelong learning is evident from its establishment in 2006 of the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) in Hamburg, Germany, in 2006 (http://www.uil.unesco.org/, retrieved September 17, 2011). This organization is the successor to the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE), which was established 60 years ago. UIL’s goal is to further literacy as a foundation for lifelong learning.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) is an international economic organization of 34 countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade and is a forum for countries committed to democracy and the market economy. It provides a platform for nations seeking answers to common problems by identifying good practices and coordinating the domestic and international policies of its members. In 1996, the OECD’s education ministers adopted a comprehensive view of lifelong learning that covers all purposeful learning activity with the goal of “lifelong learning for all” that improves knowledge and competencies for all individuals who wish to participate in learning activities. The concept has four main features - the relevant points for our present project are summarized below:

A systemic view. Viewing the demand for—and the supply of—learning opportunities as part of a connected system covering the whole life cycle and comprising all forms of formal and informal learning.

Centrality of the learner shifting the focus from the supply side to the demand side of meeting learner needs.

Attention to learn is recognized as an essential foundation for learning that requires developing the capacity for “learning to learn” through self-paced and self-directed learning.

Multiple objectives of education policy. The life cycle view recognizes the multiple goals of education, such as personal development; knowledge development; and economic, social, and cultural objectives.

“The OECD Policy Brief on Lifelong Learning” (2004), http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/11/29478789.pdf, accessed September 17, 2011, covers this topic in depth, including the following lengthy statement on the importance of lifelong learning. This statement has great relevance to the importance of and need for lifelong learning in the engineering profession:

A number of important socio-economic forces are pushing for the lifelong learning approach. The increased pace of globalisation and technological change, the changing nature of work and the labour market, and the ageing of populations are among the forces emphasizing the need for continuing upgrading of work and life skills throughout life. The demand is for a rising threshold of skills as well as for more frequent changes in the nature of the skills required. Firms’ drive for greater flexibility has injected precariousness in jobs. There is a tendency towards shorter job tenures in the face of more volatile product markets and shorter product cycles. Career jobs are diminishing and individuals are now experiencing more frequent changes in jobs over the working life.

The European Commission issued “A Memorandum of Lifelong Learning” in 2000, in which it recognized that the transition to a knowledge economy requires a rethinking of patterns of learning, living, and working in Europe. The definition of lifelong learning used in the Memorandum is: “all purposeful learning activity, undertaken on an ongoing basis with the aim of improving knowledge, skills, and competence and all learning activity undertaken throughout life, with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and competences within a personal, civic, social and/or employment-related perspective.” The memorandum launched a Europe-wide debate on strategies for implementing lifelong learning at individual and institutional levels, and in all spheres of public and private life (“A Memorandum of Lifelong Learning,” http://www.bologna-berlin2003.de/pdf/MemorandumEng.pdf, accessed September 17, 2011).

The key points of the document are the need to:

Guarantee universal and continuing access to learning for gaining and renewing the skills needed for sustained participation in the knowledge society,

Visibly raise levels of investment in human resources in order to place priority on Europe’s most important asset—its people,

Develop effective teaching and learning methods and contexts for the continuum of lifelong and lifewide learning,

Significantly improve the ways in which learning participation and outcomes are understood and appreciated, particularly those in nonformal and informal learning,

Ensure that everyone can easily access good quality information and advice about learning opportunities throughout Europe and throughout their lives, and

Provide lifelong learning opportunities as close to learners as possible, in their own communities and supported through Information and Communications Technology Network (ICT)-based facilities wherever appropriate.

ICT refers to the information and communications technology network.

Close on the heels of this memorandum, the European Commission issued a communication entitled “Making a European Area of Lifelong Learning a Reality,” http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:52001DC0678:EN:NOT, accessed September 17, 2011.

Using the memorandum and the communication as a springboard, the EC has established an extensive and impressive program in lifelong learning (“Lifelong Learning Programme,” http://ec.europa.eu/education/lifelong-learning-programme/doc78_en.htm, accessed September 17, 2011).

Naturally, national governments also have a vested interest in lifelong learning. It is interesting to compare the approach to lifelong learning of the United States with that of Japan. Young and Rosenberg (2006) conducted an excellent study comparing the approaches of the two countries. The paper examines the programs available to older adults in the United States and Japan and offers interesting insights for our present project. The authors conclude that there has been greater governmental acceptance of the concept in Japan whereas there has been minimal governmental intervention in the United States. In the United States the task has mostly been left to educational institutions to offer lifelong learning in the form of adult education.

In answer to the question “What is Lifelong Learning?” the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology stated:

In order to create an enriching and dynamic society in the 21st century, it is vital to form a lifelong learning society in which people can freely choose learning opportunities at any time during their lives and in which proper recognition is accorded to those learning achievements.

Lifelong learning comprises two main aspects: the concept to comprehensively review various systems including education, in order to create a lifelong learning society; and the concept of learning at all stages of life. In other words, the concept of learning in the context of lifelong learning encompasses not only structured learning through school and social education but also learning through involvement in such areas as sports, cultural activities, hobbies, recreation and volunteer activities. The places for conducting learning activities are also diverse, including elementary and secondary schools, universities and other institutions of higher education, citizens' public halls, libraries, museums, cultural facilities, sports facilities, lifelong learning program facilities in the private sector, companies, and offices.

The English translation is available at: “Lifelong Learning,” http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/glossary/lifelonglearning.htm, accessed September 17, 2011

There are many common elements in these definitions recognizing the importance of the continuum of lifelong learning in a knowledge economy, through formal and informal channels, and through educational and vocational institutions and in the workplace. The need for purposeful self-directed learning is seen as important in all stages of a citizen’s adult life to enhance the quality of one’s life and to improve his or her economic standing. Many of these definitions suggest that a nation’s most important asset is its people, and governments are urged to provide lifelong-learning opportunities through national programs for their citizens and to give them the ability to create their own personal pathways. In short, lifelong learning means engaging in formal and informal education on an ongoing basis, and ensuring that a person is equipped with the skills and abilities required to continue his or her own self-education beyond the end of formal schooling (Candy, 1991). Still more variants of lifelong learning include active learning, adult education, continuing education, and continuing professional development (or simply professional development).

Our book is solely concerned with lifelong learning as it relates to the education of engineering students in the United States and their subsequent performance in the workplace. The importance of the lifelong learning of engineers has firmly been established by its recognition as a program outcome in the launch of the 2000 ABET accreditation process with Criteria 3i stating that programs must demonstrate that their students attain “a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in lifelong learning.” The evolution of ABET to an outcomes-based accreditation process is covered in detail in Chapter 3.

Recognizing the importance and significance of this topic, the National Academy of Engineering has taken up the charge by undertaking a major project: “The Lifelong Learning Imperative.” The Lifelong Learning Imperative (LLI) project assesses current practices in lifelong learning for engineering professionals, reexamines the underlying assumptions, and outlines strategies for addressing unmet needs. A workshop was held in June 2009—“Lifelong Learning Project Agenda,” http://llproject.org/2009-workshop-agenda/agenda, accessed September 17, 2011—to frame the project and identify critical issues for structuring the education of engineering professionals in a twenty-first-century knowledge economy. The LLI workshop initiated a national discussion on lifelong learning in the sciences and engineering and its necessity for sustaining a cutting-edge workforce in this knowledge age. A report of the findings of the workshop is published in the National Academies Press book entitled “Lifelong Learning Imperative in Engineering: Summary of a Workshop” edited by Dutta (2010). A free copy of the report is available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12866.

Some of the major themes from the workshop are summarized as follows:

In this age of rapid technological change and knowledge creation, an engineer must continue to learn throughout his or her career.

Learning is a continual process throughout an engineer’s career.

There is sometimes conflict between the goals of an engineer’s employer and the goals of his or her current continuing education providers.

Information technologies will play a prominent role in future lifelong learning.

A workplace appropriately structured and augmented by access to cyberinfrastructure can be a powerful way to achieve sustainable lifelong learning.

The engineering professional is no longer competing solely in a domestic market, but rather in a global economy.

Further, lifelong learning should be provided through a collaborative effort among industry, academia, the government, and professional societies.

Many of these themes are also echoed in our book.

Given the half-life of a modern engineer’s skills, at a minimum he or she should develop a new set of skills every decade, if not every year or so. There are relatively few lifetime jobs left in engineering, and new engineers do not even expect they will stay with one company for 25 or 30 years. Staying current on technology trends, business cycles, and inventions will demand an engineer stay up-to-date with his or her knowledge and skill set, enabling him or her to have the freedom and choice to move from job to job or from project to project, either locally or globally. Of course, this is not to forget that this global work environment is tied together by what is trending to be a global economy and a down-sized job market. Engineers working as contractors on a particular design task or programming job are not unusual. Short-term blocks of employment can often be desirable prospects to Millennials—also known as members of the Net Generation—a group linked by a revolution in communication technology and a desire to experience a variety of assignments in various locations, rather than striving for the constancy of being a company man who earns a gold watch at retirement. Innovations in communication provide exciting opportunities for personalized education, streaming to a personal data device anywhere in the world. Lifelong learning can provide the edge an engineer needs to secure the next position or the next job.

Some corporations strongly support the concept of lifelong learning. Companies such as Microsoft, Motorola, and Raytheon have their own in-house courses of study leading to certificates of expertise in various areas and at different skill levels. Companies such as these have the size, budget, and manpower to divert their engineers to lifelong learning at the expense of strict job performance and task completion. This type of lifelong learning opportunity often results in increased loyalty to the company, higher productivity, increased job satisfaction, and a rise in the quality of work. Mirroring this type of ideal lifelong learning environment is the less structured company, with a smaller organization, and fewer capital reserves. Companies such as these may not have the time, resources, or people to make any investment at all in education. They may concern themselves only with which employee was able to do a job on time and without running over budget. In either situation, it is the proactive lifelong learner who will have the knowledge base needed to secure the next position, the best jobs, and the greatest opportunities.

Lifelong learning has its foundation during the formal education that engineers receive. Lifelong learning and internships go hand in hand in creating a well-rounded engineer. Not only should a graduate emerge from the academic setting with the competency to recognize a need for lifelong learning, but he or she should have the ability to actively pursue the acquisition of knowledge. There is a certain onus that must be placed upon the newly minted engineer, and that is to “stop thinking of education as what they did for 4 years in college and come to see it as a lifetime project” (Smerdon, 1996). In order to keep their careers at pace with emerging technologies and current practices, lifelong learners should attend workshops and conferences even while they are in college so that it becomes a habit. But—at the very least—they will have to search the World Wide Web and read a book or a journal article (Mourtos, 2003) and all without the direction of a professor or mentor.

Happily, some of the best opportunities for employment start when the student engineer is still in the classroom environment and is selected for an internship opportunity with an engineering firm or corporation. An internship is a temporary apprenticeship, wherein a student receives on-the-job training to gain experience in his or her chosen field. Internships seldom last beyond 1 year, and they can be either paid or unpaid. The internship is a partnership between the student, the engineering firm providing the opportunity, and the university that provides the steady stream of eager low-cost or free workers for low-level tasks. The student gains workplace experience, familiarity with being a working engineer, and the awareness of what lifelong learning looks like on the job. The employer gets reduced cost labor and the chance to mine the next group of new engineers for talented individuals who can join their company with much training already completed. The university gains community partners for development and the goodwill of the alumni who reflect back on their university education with positive thoughts (Johnston, Taylor, & Chappel, 2001). When appraising engineering firms for suitability for internship programs, the university will look for several key factors that will contribute to students achieving a higher level of professional training. They are looking for a company with an intern mentor who can serve as a counselor, has relevant experience, has perhaps held a student internship position at some time in the past, and is someone who can serve as an advisor and guide to stimulate professional development (Guest, 2006).

As the student intern sees how life is as a professional engineer, they begin to contextualize the connection between lifelong learning and workplace literacy. Of course, each individual will differ in the amount of interest shown with regard to active lifelong learning. Even given a corporate climate with extensive learning and literacy opportunities, developing workplace literacy will still depend upon a person’s background, educational experiences, and his or her professional drive (Fuller, Unwin, Felstead, Jewson, & Kakavelakis, 2007). It is known that in today’s business climate, firms must be ready to deliver a “whole package” product and not simply one piece or a specific component. The new, modern engineer will have to be adept at both the technological and the commercial aspects of his or her firm and products. Streamlined staffing and corporate bottom lines require today’s engineer to be skilled across multiple disciplines—able to function in a variety of job activities, rather than in specific engineering skills. Being familiar with a project’s life cycle, understanding the workings of a product, and helping to market it may be part of an engineer’s job, even to the point of developing close relationships with customers, leading to new product designs. The ability to operate as a systems engineer, with a grasp of all phases of a project, is an emerging professional trend in engineering (Spinks, Silburn, & Birchall, 2007). This necessitates engineers keeping up with lifelong learning and workplace literacy as—no matter how broad a professional degree program may be—it can never account for all the vagaries and practicalities one will be confronted with on the job.

And so, with foundational support from the educators instructing the upcoming generations of engineers, from the accrediting organization ABET, and from members of the engineering profession, themselves, lifelong learning is becoming a way of life for those who choose a career in engineering.

Funding of research by governments, business and other organisations

Across the 34 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), gross expenditure on research and development (R&D) amounted in 2008 to $964 billion.1 Roughly 35 per cent of investment in R&D takes place in North America, 31 per cent in Asia and 28 per cent in Europe; the rest of the world (Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, and Oceania) together account for about 6 per cent. Expenditure has increased by over 60 per cent in real terms since the mid-1990s, and in major research countries has tended to exceed the rate of growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Thus in the US the average annual growth in R&D expenditure over the past 20 years has been 3.1 per cent in real terms, as compared with average growth in GDP of 2.8 per cent. The result is that across OECD countries as a group, R&D represents a growing proportion of the economy as a whole: R&D expenditure grew as a proportion of GDP from 1.9 per cent in 1981 to 2.3 per cent in 2008.

Of course, not all of this expenditure results in research findings and outputs of the kinds that are reported in scholarly books and journals. The business sector is the major source of funding for R&D among the members of the OECD, and the majority of those funds are devoted to ‘experimental development’: the development of products, processes or services. In the US, for example, development of this kind accounts for over 60 per cent of the total expenditure on R&D. The more fundamental ‘basic’ or ‘applied’ research that is reported in the scholarly literature thus represents just a part of the overall expenditure on R&D. Expenditure on basic research – that is, according to the definitions developed by the OECD, ‘experimental or theoretical work undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge of the underlying foundation of phenomena and observable facts, without any particular application or use in view’ (OECD, 2002) – thus amounts in the US to 17 per cent and in France to 25 per cent of total expenditure on R&D (National Science Board, 2010).2

In China it accounts for about 5 per cent of activity (Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, 2007). Governments fund a significant proportion of all recorded R&D expenditure; but they tend to be the major funders of basic and applied research. In the US, for example, the Federal Government accounted in 2008 for about a quarter of all R&D expenditure, but 57 per cent of the funding for basic research. And in the major research-producing countries, governments have tended over the past decade to increase their research budgets quite sharply. Thus in the UK the budgets for the Research Councils increased by 78 per cent in real terms between 1998 and 2008, while the block grant allocated to universities to support their research activities increased by 62 per cent.3 In the US, the Federal budget for basic research rose by 20 per cent in real terms between 2000 and 2008, although the sharpest increases were in the early part of the decade (NationalScience Board, 2010, Appendix Table (4–18). Such sharp increases have become less common since 2008, but it is notable that the economic stimulus package enacted in early 2009 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided a considerable one-off increase in the Federal R&D budget of over $18 billion.

Governments have been prepared to increase expenditure in this way because they believed that it is necessary in order to achieve economic success. The UK was typical in adopting the kind of strategy announced in its Science and Innovation Investment Framework, published in 2004 (HM Treasury et al., 2004).4 This announced that: ‘For the UK economy to succeed in generating growth through productivity and employment in the coming decade, it must invest more strongly than in the past in its knowledge base, and translate this knowledge more effectively into business and public service innovation.’

The new strategy promised to make good past under-investment in the science base, and to raise science spending faster than the trend rate of growth of the economy to achieve that end. But the investment was for a purpose, and brought with it a renewed emphasis on the linkages between research and innovation, and translating the results of research into tangible outcomes for the benefit of society and the economy. ‘Knowledge transfer’ and working collaboratively with business were key themes in this strategy, which was accompanied by the development of targets and performance indicators, along with periodic reviews to track performance and progress. Similar themes have been repeated in the funding and policy papers issued by the new Coalition Government elected in 2010 in the UK, which have used remarkably similar language (Department for Business Innovation and Skills, 2010).

‘Our world-class science and research base is inherently valuable, as well as critical to promoting economic growth. Investment in science and research creates new businesses and improves existing ones; brings highly skilled people into the job market; attracts international investment and improves public policy and services. The UK’s world-class research base will be a key driver in promoting economic growth.’

None of this is unique to the UK. The OECD’s Ministerial Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy identified in 2004 the pressure for publicly funded research ‘to increase its contribution to innovation, economic performance and the fulfilment of social needs’ (OECD, 2004, 2009). In Japan, the Science and Technology Agency has made investment in research a foundation for its economic strategy,5 and similar points were made in the review of Australia’s innovation system (Cutler and Co., 2008).

The OECD Ministerial Committee also noted, however, that governments were wrestling with questions of ‘how best to restructure and reform public research organisations to improve their contributions to social and economic problems without sacrificing the objectivity and independence of their advice and their ability to pursue curiosity-based research’. More recently, the European Union has noted the need to address: ‘both a competitiveness challenge (closing Europe’s gap in innovation) and a cultural challenge (integrating research and innovation to focus on societal challenges)’ (European Union 2011, p. 1).

The struggle to balance these different kinds of goals continues and is reflected in the strategic aims and objectives of major funding bodies. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which provides block grants to universities to support their research activities, for example, defines its aim in this area as: ‘to develop and sustain a dynamic and internationally competitive research sector that makes a major contribution to economic prosperity and national wellbeing and to the expansion and dissemination of knowledge.’6

In China, the Law on Science and Technology Progress makes repeated mention of the role of science and technology in ‘economic construction and social development’.7 Funding bodies that provide project-based rather than block grants to support research typically make the link even more explicit. Thus, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines its mission as: ‘to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce the burdens of illness and disability.’8

In similar vein, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, like similar funding bodies in other countries, has put an increasing emphasis on translational outcomes of medical and health research; while the more broadly based Australian Research Council talks of ‘capturing and quantifying the outcomes of research and knowledge transfer and the contribution of research to the economic, social, cultural and environmental well-being of Australians.’9

This focus on research as a key underpinning of economic performance and social well-being means that Government funding of scientific research – in both research institutes and universities – has shown an increasing tendency to be based on performance criteria; and in countries such as the UK and Australia, this has been accompanied by large-scale research assessment exercises undertaken by national agencies. The impact on universities will be considered in the next section.

While science policy in many countries is based on the belief that investment in research is intimately tied to economic growth, evidence about the nature and scope of the linkages is far from conclusive. This is not surprising, as the relationship between science and innovation is non-linear, and complex outcomes may differ substantially between different countries and disciplines. We do not understand the mechanisms through which investments in R&D − still more the investments in basic research − and the immediate results in the form of new knowledge or technologies, interact with other features of societies and economies to produce innovation and growth. Impacts often come after considerable time-lags, and are complex to identify and analyse. Hence there is renewed interest in developing capacity and capability to assess the impact of research through programmes such as the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) programme in the US.10 The challenges faced by such programmes are, however, formidable.

1 Perspectives on Reform

This review of core values among OECD nations and the reforms that track those values is certainly not comprehensive. It merely illustrates the most common concerns. Apart from the debate over each of them, there are general differences among advanced democracies in reform orientations. They relate to the three sources of core goals: democratic, professional, and private ethical values.

With respect to the first, democratic values, there are important differences between those who interpret more democratic to be more majoritarian and those who resist such a formulation. American populists for instance prefer reforms that put more power directly in the hands of voters and less in the hands of elected and unelected officials. Neo-Madisonians in the US see popular control as lacking in the requisite checks against majority tyranny and in the expertise that representative government affords. Advocates of parliamentary systems prefer leaders to be chosen by (and therefore tied more directly to) other elected officials, and that the public show more deference to those in public office. Clearly, the position a society takes on this dimension strongly influences reforms that affect accountability, transparency, and equity.

Perspectives on professional values also shape modern governmental reforms. Systems that rely heavily on the socialization and training of public officials will tend to rely more on codes and internal monitoring (e.g., the British Civil Service). Polities that view professionalism as elitist or that are skeptical that people can be educated to high levels of public service, will rely on external checks and legal regulations (e.g., the American system).

There will also be important differences in the perspectives of those who believe that public ethics derives directly from private ethics vs. those who believe that the two differ in important ways. In the view of the latter group, public officials need to be held to a higher standard and to ever growing scrutiny. In the view of the former, the two sectors can be analyzed within the same framework, and lessons learned from one sector can be imported to another. The shape of reforms to come will be determined by how future reformers situate themselves on these three continuums.

8.14.2 Other Nations

In addition, in February 1998, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) held a conference on Data Protection in International Networks. The results of the workshop, including an overview of various efforts to ensure privacy protection, are discussed under the reference to “OECD Workshop on Privacy Protection in a Global Networked Society” (February 1998) available at www.oecd.org//dsti/sti/it/secur/prod/reg985final.pdf. The United Nations has also established a human rights Web site at www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b71.htm in which it addresses privacy issues from the perspective of other countries. Thus this is a continuing area of importance in U.S. telecommunications law that should be tracked by all parties involved in system operations and use.