Social Europe: Tax havens: patience is running out

 That’s no surprise. The OECD had certainly sought to legitimise its claim to speak for all by creating an ‘inclusive framework’ involving developing countries. However, of the 137 nations sitting around the negotiating table, only the G7—those home to the major multinationals and their lobbying teams—had a voice. As a result, the solutions advocated by the OECD would hardly limit financial flows to tax havens and the scarce resources recovered would mainly benefit rich countries. [...]

Estimating the loss of resources caused by corporate and individual tax abuse country by country, and the consequences for healthcare spending, this research is chilling. Globally, these diversions correspond to 9.2 per cent of health budgets, equivalent to the salaries of 34 million nurses. The impact is even more devastating in developing countries, where the shortfall represents 52.4 per cent of health spending. [...]

Of course, there is strong opposition within the EU itself, for one simple reason: if we readily point the finger at the small islands of the Caribbean, it is to make people forget that Europe has its own tax havens. The departing UK, together with its network of Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies—often referred to as its ‘spider’s web’—is responsible for 29 per cent of the $245 billion the world loses to corporate tax abuse every year, according to The State of Tax Justice. And we have further examples inside the EU. Every year, for example, the Netherlands steals the equivalent of $10 billion from its EU neighbours. And it is not alone: Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta do the same.

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Social Europe: An effective corporation-tax system for the EU

The European social contract is broken. The largest companies are no longer contributing adequately to the provision of the public services and infrastructure they use. If the European project and single market are to survive and thrive, there has to be an effective EU taxation system. The small amounts paid in tax by some of the most profitable companies in the world are undermining citizens’ belief in government, in politicians and in Europe. [...]

The European Union has made feasible tax-reform proposals and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has developed corporate-tax reforms for the world, through its ‘base-erosion and profit-shifting’ process. Both are making progress but this is far too slow in terms of agreement among states. Europe needs fair taxation of companies now, when revenue is so urgently needed. [...]

It is not the rate of tax which is the issue but the actual tax paid. The EU should move from seeking ‘harmonised’ tax rates to co-ordinated rates within bands—say between 15 and 25 per cent. This would allow peripheral and poorer countries to set lower nominal rates if they wished. What is needed is to close gaps between nominal and effective rates and eliminate tax breaks. [...]

Europe should establish a well-funded European tax agency, ‘Eurotax’, with wide powers of investigation into tax evasion and avoidance by wealthy individuals, companies and criminals. Eurotax would implement tax policy, including the co-ordination of tax assessments and collection. With a single market, the EU needs one tax body to oversee taxation in this globalised world.

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New Statesman: Anatomy of a crisis

In theory, the UK was well-prepared for a pandemic. The Global Health Security Index for 2019 – which measures preparedness – rated only the US higher. Yet the UK has one of the world’s highest official Covid-19 death rates per capita, and its excess deaths during the pandemic period are 45 per cent higher than expected in a typical year. A survey, commissioned by the New Statesman, of more than 500 UK-based business leaders, 72 per cent of whom work for organisations with revenues of more than $250m a year, revealed that 38 per cent thought the UK was well prepared to handle the outbreak, but only 25 per cent thought the government responded well. [...]

Just as the UK locked down late, it lifted lockdown early. At the time restrictions were first eased the UK was still recording nearly seven deaths per million population per day – higher than any other country at the point of lockdown release. [...]

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has predicted the UK economy will shrink by 11.5 per cent in 2020 – more than any other country in the group. Job losses have so far been mitigated by the furlough scheme: while the unemployment rate quadrupled in the US between January and April, in the UK it remained static at 3.9 per cent. However, furloughed workers may find they have no job to go to when the scheme ends in October, and the number seeking unemployment-related benefits has more than doubled. [...]

Boris Johnson – like all leaders in the comparator group – saw his approval rating rise in the early stages of the pandemic. By the end of May it had fallen back to roughly where it was at the time of the UK’s first Covid-19 death. Leaders in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Canada and South Korea all preserved increases of between 5.7 and 18.9 percentage points. The only world leaders to suffer bigger falls in their approval ratings were Shinzo Abe of Japan, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Donald Trump. Only 33 per cent of our survey respondents rated Johnson’s leadership during the crisis positively. While the Chancellor Rishi Sunak had a net approval score of 21 per cent, Johnson’s was -1 per cent, the lowest of any government member we asked business leaders to rate.

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Social Europe: Seven ‘surprising’ facts about the Italian economy

A country lives beyond its means if it imports significantly more goods and services than it exports over the long term. A country that exports as much as it imports is not however living beyond its means, as production and consumption are in line. Indeed, Italy has been recording export surpluses since 2012. Italy’s export surpluses are by no means only due to tourism, as the country exports more industrial goods than it imports. The Italian economy therefore consumes less than it produces—it lives below its means.

If the Italian economy as a whole has not been living beyond its means, the problem of debt must be confined to the public sector. This is indeed the case: Italy’s private-sector debt relative to gross domestic product is relatively low by the standards of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This also illustrates that high debt-to-GDP ratios are not a problem across all sectors of the Italian economy. [...]

Italy overtook the United Kingdom in 1969 and France in 1979 in per capita purchasing power. In 2000, Italy’s average standard of living was virtually equal to that of Germany (98.6 per cent of its GDP per head). But after the introduction of the euro in 1999, the country fell behind the UK (in 2002) and France (in 2005) once more. By 2019, Italian per capita income was more than 20 per cent below that of Germany. [...]

‘Structural reforms’ from the market-liberal playbook not only reduced inflation in the 1990s. They may also have contributed to reducing unemployment, as the rate in Italy was lower than in Germany and France when the financial crisis hit in 2008. But cheap labour also diminished incentives for Italian companies to make labour-saving investments, key to the productivity improvements which are the basis for long-term growth and rising incomes. Both austerity and market-liberal reforms have inhibited Italy’s productivity growth and, on balance, may have brought more macroeconomic damage than benefits.

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Social Europe: Industrialised countries gamble with younger generations’ future

Indeed, more than half of the 41 members of the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have even recorded slight declines in intergenerational justice in recent years. There are however major differences between the countries in their efforts to balance fairly the interests of younger and older generations (see table at bottom).[...]

The sad truth is that in 19 of the 41 countries assessed greenhouse-gas emissions actually increased from 2017 to 2018. Australia, the United States and Canada, which continue to emit nearly 20 metric tons of greenhouse gases per capita, are among the biggest polluters. [...]

Sustainable fiscal policies are key to ensuring justice between generations. High debt levels, for example, will spell enormous financial burdens for younger generations. A large number of countries have once again been able significantly to reduce their debt levels since the crisis, thereby creating the financial breathing room needed for present and future generations. Nonetheless, we observe continued high levels of debt, particularly in Japan, the US and the crisis-stricken countries of southern Europe. Greece, for example, has the second highest debt ratio, 183.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), following a rise of four percentage points from 2017.

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Vox: Teaching in the US vs. the rest of the world

Teachers in America have a uniquely tough job. But it doesn't have to be that way.

From hours worked to pay rates, countries like Finland, Japan, and South Korea make teaching a more respected and sustainable profession.

UnHerd: What does it mean to be French?

When President Emmanuel Macron said recently that it was time for France to “recreate the art of being French”, there was merriment abroad and puzzlement at home. When did the French ever stop being French? Why is being French an “art”? Is Frenchness not also an infinite capacity for protest, division and complaint? [...]

France is a country which is, en masse, prone to anger, pessimism and self-destruction but individually devoted to the pursuit of happiness. France is a country which is (mostly) proud of its past but often distrustful of the future. [...]

What Macron was attempting to achieve with these comments was three-fold. He was using the Notre Dame calamity to wrap himself in the cloak of France’s long history. He was implying that the restoration of French self-confidence and creativity was a sacred duty, like the restoration of Notre Dame. And he was trying to counter the impression – once encouraged by himself but now caricatured by the Far Right, the Far Left and the Gilets Jaunes – that he is a globalist who regards French national traditions and habits of mind as handicap and a misfortune. [...]

France’s real problem is that it has a smaller proportion of its adult population in productive work than other developed nations. Early retirement, high youth unemployment and interminable studies mean that France has barely 70% of its 16 to 65 population in work – compared to almost 80% in, say, Britain and Germany.

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Quartz: In rich countries, the middle class is getting smaller and smaller, generation by generation

When the Baby Boomers, who were born between 1943 and 1964, were in their twenties, some 68% were in middle-income households. Only 60% of Millennials, who were born between 1983 and 2002, could say the same at a similar time in their lives.

The OECD defines the middle class as people earning between 75% and 200% of the national median annual income. Its data is an average of results from Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. [...]

Housing costs are squeezing the middle class the hardest; this now consumes a third of disposable income for middle-class households, up from a quarter in the 1990s. Housing and higher education expenses have been rising faster than middle incomes, the OECD said. [...]

Still, there are differences between countries. The OECD data show that the US middle class has shrunk as a result of both the lower and upper classes expanding, although the latter has grown by almost twice as much. In Spain, the decline of the middle class is entirely due to people falling into the lower class. In the UK, the lower class has gotten smaller, while the upper class has grown, but within the middle class, the lower-middle has grown while the mid-middle and upper-middle are in decline.

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Politico: Macron criticizes ‘ultra-liberal’ Europe

In his first appearance on a radio talk show since he was sworn in, the increasingly unpopular French president came out swinging against an EU he is better known for defending against opponents such as Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin.

The EU is letting down its middle classes, ignoring their legitimate fears and exposing itself to a populist wave that could ultimately submerge the bloc, Macron told Europe 1 radio a few months before his centrist La République En Marche starts campaigning for the European Parliament election.[...]

His target was not the right-leaning populists who oppose him face-to-face. By railing against European “ultra-liberals,” Macron was pointing to all the factions that have resisted his plans, articulated during his presidential campaign and during a landmark speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, to make the EU a more “protective” bloc via tighter security cooperation, taxes on digital giants and tougher restrictions on state-aid takeovers. [...]

An example of “ultra-liberal” resistance was on display this week in Brussels, where Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire was pitching a French plan to impose a 3 percent revenue tax on companies like Google and Facebook. After more than a year of high-level diplomacy, the best Le Maire was able to extract was a vow from Germany to consider enforcing the tax from 2020, only if and when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was unable to come up with its own solution for taxing digital companies.

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The Atlantic: Boys Don’t Read Enough

Developed countries like the United States have seen a remarkable transformation in education over the last century: Girls and young women—once subjected to discrimination in, and even exclusion from, schools and colleges—have “conquered” those very institutions, as a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put it. Today, for example, women comprise a growing majority of students on college campuses in the U.S., up from around 40 percent in the 1970s. [...]

But it’s not just a phenomenon in the U.K.: These trends in girls’ dominance in reading can be found pretty much anywhere in the developed world. In 2009, a global study of the academic performance of 15-year-olds found that, in all but one of the 65 participating countries, more girls than boys said they read for pleasure. On average across the countries, only about half of boys said they read for enjoyment, compared to roughly three-quarters of girls. (The list generally excludes less-developed countries where girls and women tend to have lower rates of literacy than boys and men.) [...]

Understanding why girls are so much more inclined to read might help eradicate what is proving to be a stubborn gender gap both in the U.S. and around the world: the lagging educational outcomes of boys and men. Reading for pleasure is, as the OECD has concluded, a habit that can prove integral to performing well in the classroom. “Any cognitive skill can be improved with practice,” Reilly says. “If girls are reading more outside of school”—if they’re doing so out of an intrinsic motivation rather than because they have to—“this provides them with thousands of hours of additional reading over the course of their development.”

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Vox: A radical proposal to fight poverty in the developing world: tax the rich more than the poor

But new data on taxation and spending in the world’s poorest countries suggests that progressive tax-and-transfer systems are far less common than you would think. In general, taxes are less progressive in those countries, financial transfers are much smaller, and the bulk of social spending is soaked up by broken health and education systems. The net effect is often that tax-and-transfer policies leave poor people worse off, not better. [...]

That happens in two ways: The income of the well-off is reduced by higher taxes (this accounts for about a quarter of the reduction in inequality) while the poor get payments like Social Security as well as family, housing, disability and unemployment benefits. The latter accounts for three-quarters of the reduction in inequality. The US is an outlier in seeing less redistribution than most rich countries, but even there, the net impact of taxes and transfers is to reduce inequality. [...]

The Gini coefficient measures the level of inequality in a group: A measure of 0 implies complete equality (everyone gets the same income) and 100 is perfect inequality (one person gets all of the income). Before government taxes and transfers, the Gini for the 29 developing countries in Lustig’s study is 47. (It stands at 45 in the United States). Fiscal redistribution reduces the Gini coefficient by more than 7 points in the US and European Union. [...]

In the rich world, the poorest citizens tend to be net financial recipients from the government — they get more in transfers than they pay in taxes. But that’s not true in some developing countries. First, tax regimes in those countries aren’t very progressive, partly because the revenue authorities tend to rely on indirect taxes like the value-added tax (VAT) — which fall on all consumers — rather than direct taxes on high personal or corporate incomes. (A VAT is similar to an American sales tax but applies to all firms, not just retail businesses.)  

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Business Insider: The average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant (Nov. 7, 2016)

The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes, and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labor-free Sundays, and when the plowing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too.

In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year. As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually. [...]

But Americans have long since kissed the 40-hour workweek goodbye, and Shor's examination of work patterns reveals that the 19th century was an aberration in the history of human labor. When workers fought for the eight-hour workday, they weren't trying to get something radical and new, but rather to restore what their ancestors had enjoyed before industrial capitalists and the electric light bulb came on the scene.  [...]

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) the Greeks, who face a horrible economy, work more hours than any other Europeans. In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity. 

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Salon: Why Americans are such easy targets for trolls and bots

We measure intelligence in lots of ways, but at the top of the list is literacy and numeracy. A study published in September 2017 by the U.S. Department of Education found that U.S. adults performed the lowest of all developed nations in numeracy. They also found that our literacy was on the low end of developed nations. Most interesting was the finding that young adults in their 20s from Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan who did not finish high school had the same literacy levels of U.S. high school graduates.

Study after study shows that the United States underperforms in literacy across the developed world — especially given its resources. But that isn’t even the core issue; the real problem is the way we have consistently devalued quality education across all levels for decades. Consider the fact that 14 states teach creationism in public schools.

Add to that the reality that a Pew Research Study from 2015 found that 34 percent of Americans reject evolution entirely, saying humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. [...]

Public investment in K-12 schools has fallen dramatically in a number of states over the last decade, despite post-recession economic growth. Arizona cut funding for K-12 by 36.6 percent from 2008-2015. A study of investment in education across the developed nations of the OECD found that from 2010-2014 the U.S. decreased K-12 funding by four percent. Over the same period, education spending, on average, rose five percent per student across the 35 countries in the OECD. Even more noteworthy is the fact that in some countries, spending rose at a much higher rate. Between 2008 and 2014, education spending rose 76 percent in Turkey, 36 percent in Israel, 32 percent in the United Kingdom and 27 percent in Portugal.

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The Conversation: The benefits of job automation are not likely to be shared equally

Some 40% of all jobs are predicted to disappear with automation in Australia. The jobs most likely to go first will be those that can be easily codified, those that are repetitive, simple, structured or routine: think of jobs in manufacturing or those that involve form processing or driving a vehicle. [...]

Now we are starting to see the effect of automation everywhere and especially in productivity and economic growth statistics. It’s expected that automation will make a A$2.2 trillion boost to productivity in Australia between 2015 and 2030. But whether productivity gains will be redistributed equally, remains highly questionable.

There is a general economic argument that workers’ wages should grow in line with productivity growth and in doing so improve everyone’s living standards. Although there is overwhelming data about rising economic surpluses from automation, recent evidence indicates that the growth of productivity and the growth of workers’ wages are not actually linked. [...]

Businesses also don’t have an incentive to distribute a share of the gains back to the workers. We can see this for example in pharmaceutical services, which are becoming increasingly automated, yet workers are faced with low starting salaries. In such a highly competitive industry, the businesses are instead incentivised to pass on the gains to customers in terms of lower prices of goods and services they offer, rather than wages.

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The Atlantic: The United States Is Already a Low-Tax Country

This is not a widely accepted point, granted. The share of Americans who say that their taxes are too high is at roughly 50 percent, a 15-year peak. Moreover, Republicans have sold their tax bill as an essential tax cut for America’s income-starved, tax-strangled families and businesses, promising to deliver $4,000 a year to the average family and huge boosts to corporate investment. “Today, America has one of the least competitive tax rates on planet Earth, 60 percent. Think of that, 60 percent higher than the average in the developed world. So our taxes are 60 percent higher,” President Trump said this month. “These massive tax cuts will be rocket fuel.” [...]

Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development clearly shows that the United States is not a particularly heavily taxed country at all. Indeed, out of 35 developed economies, the United States’ tax burden as a share of GDP—26 percent—is the lowest save for four others: Turkey, Ireland, Chile, and Mexico. (Turkey, Mexico, and Chile are considerably poorer than the United States, and have considerably younger populations.) The social democracies of northern Europe, like Denmark and France, take in nearly 50 percent of their GDPs and spend the money on ample welfare states, including child-care benefits and old-age pensions. “From a global perspective, [our tax rate is lower] than average,” said Scott Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. “The difference is that other countries tend to have a value-added tax, in addition to the same system we have with income taxes, payroll, and all that stuff.”

Moreover, Trump has insisted that the United States has an extremely high corporate-tax burden, one that forces businesses to keep money overseas and hurts jobs and income growth here at home. He is correct that the United States has very high statutory tax rates on corporate incomes, with a top rate of 39 percent on business’ profits. But the American corporate tax code is also full of exceptions, special provisions, and loopholes that companies use to reduce their tax bills. Factoring in deductions, credits, and so on, the effective corporate tax rate is about 19 percent—lower than the top marginal rate that Republicans would put in place. The OECD has found that the United States is about average when it comes to hitting companies with income taxes. [...]

The overall effect would be to make government far less redistributive, meaning post-tax, post-transfer inequality would become even more severe. Indeed, a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that most working families would end up with less money in pocket as a result of the Republican plans. “If you consider plausible ways of financing either the House or the Senate bill, most low- and middle-income households would eventually end up worse off than if the bill did not become law,” writes William Gale, the co-director of the TPC. “In other words, they would lose more from inevitable future spending cuts or tax hikes necessary to eventually offset the costs of the tax bill than they would gain from the tax cuts themselves.”

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Social Europe: Inequality More Than Matters

In fact, the OECD highlights that reducing inequality by one Gini point would translate into an accumulated increase in growth of 0.8% during the following five years. In this respect, Europe has moved in the opposite direction. Between 2005 and 2015, the Gini coefficient rose from 30.6 to 31 and income disparities between the top and bottom 20% have increased from 4.7 to 5.2. As the proportion of people at risk of social exclusion is closely related to income inequality, poverty has grown constantly since 2005, and between 2008 and 2014 several member states experienced an increase in inequality in terms of household disposable income.

While one of the five goals of the Europe 2020 strategy aspired to reducing by at least 20 million the number of people in or at risk of poverty and social exclusion (from 115.9 million in 2008 to 95.9 million in 2020), in 2015 these citizens already accounted for 117.6 million in the EU-28. Moreover, 32.2 million disabled people were at risk of poverty and social exclusion in 2010, as well as 26.5 million children, taking the overall percentage to unacceptably high levels (23.7%). The rise in inequality since the economic crisis has especially impacted women, exacerbating poverty among them and excluding them even more from the labour market.

Several factors have contributed to getting us into this situation. The extensive changes in the labour market should be at the centre of our worries: the proliferation of “atypical” jobs, the weakening of collective bargaining, the deterioration in working conditions, increased temporary working, and policies of internal wage devaluation. In short, the labour market has stopped being a stable source of prosperity for many people.

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Quartz: A speech by Ghana’s president calling for Africa to end its dependency on the West is a viral hit

The question by a local journalist was about whether France was going to strengthen its “support” for other African countries aside its former colonies where the majority of French aid is spent. Ghana won independence from Britain in 1957. After jokingly tossing the question between each other, Macron replied with fairly standard mundane rhetoric.

But when it was time for president Akufo-Addo to speak, knowing fully what he was about to say was controversial, he began by saying: “I hope that the comments I am about to make will not offend the questioner too much and some people around here”, the latter part widely interpreted as directed to his much younger counterpart. [...]

“We have to get away from this mindset of dependency. This mindset about ‘what can France do for us?’ France will do whatever it wants to do for its own sake, and when those coincide with ours, ‘tant mieux’ [so much better] as the French people say…Our concern should be what do we need to do in this 21st century to move Africa away from being cap in hand and begging for aid, for charity, for handouts. The African continent when you look at its resources, should be giving monies to other places…We need to have a mindset that says we can do it…and once we have that mindset we’ll see there’s a liberating factor for ourselves,” his rising tone and demeanor demonstrating his passion for this subject. [...]

Others have said, it showed the difference between Anglophone and Francophone African countries which are still closely aligned to France. For example, all of Ghana’s Francophone neighbors are members of the CFA franc, the currency of 14 African countries. The CFA and its structure, in which the countries, through two regional central banks, deposit 50% of foreign exchange reserves at the Bank of France in exchange for fixed-rate euro convertibility, are facing their most significant criticism in decades.

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Quartz: The typical political party only lasts 43 years

En Marche is the 15th political party since 1900 to be among the top two in seats won in France. Of the 14 previous political parties to accomplish this, only three remain relevant today (as defined by having finished in the top five in the previous two elections). On average, parties remained relevant for 34 years.

In order to quantify the transience of political parties, Quartz analyzed data from the ParlGov database, an elections results database maintained by Holger Dorin and Philip Manow at the University of Bremen. The database contains election results for all EU countries and most OECD countries. For comparability, our analysis only looks at results from parliamentary elections. The US does not appear in the dataset because it is not a parliamentary system. [...]

How long do parties usually last? To calculate this number, we used a statistical technique called survival analysis (pdf). It is a method for estimating a person or organization’s typical lifespan when some of the people or organizations that are part of an analysis are still in existence. We found that the median major political party lasts around 43 years, and one third of parties don’t even last 20 years. (These estimates are based on a statistical model, so not perfectly accurate, but they are likely correct to within 10 years.)

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Haaretz: Gender Wage Gap in Israel Among Highest in the West

The survey, released last week, showed that women in this country working full-time jobs earned on average just 78% of what their male peers earned in 2015, making it the fourth-widest gap among 15 countries surveyed. The average for countries belonging to the OECD – the club including most of the world’s wealthiest economies – was 86%. 

For the countries that had made the most progress toward gender equality on pay, the gap was nearly nonexistent. In Belgium, women earned 97% on average of what men earned, in Slovenia 95% and in New Zealand 94%. On the other hand, Israeli women were earning close to their American sisters’ 81% and were ahead of Japan’s 74%. [...]

The stagnation in progress toward wage equality isn’t unique to Israel, though. Only a small number of countries succeeded in reducing it, among them Ireland and Mexico. For most it remained unchanged and in a few, such as Switzerland, Japan and Brazil, the gap even widened. [...]

While Israeli women earn relatively little compared to Israeli men, their rates of education are now higher. In 2014, 19.5% more women complete high school than men, much wider that the 11.9% gender gap on average for OECD countries. Women account for 59.5% of all Israelis awarded bachelor’s degrees, compared with 58.2% on average for the OECD. At the Ph.D. level, women make up 49.8% of the degrees granted in Israel, compared with 47.4% across the OECD. [...]

In the political sphere, Israeli women are also faring poorly. They account for just 26.7% of all members of the Knesset, under the average of OECD legislators of 28.7%. Iceland, which has the most gender-balanced parliament, is close to 50-50 while in Finland and Mexico, 45% of the legislators are female.

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Jakub Marian: Average hours worked per worker per week in Europe

The following map shows the number of hours workers in each country work per week, on average, including both full-time and part-time workers. It based on the following table by OECD (2016).

Here’s the methodology used: The total number of hours worked in the year 2016 in each country is divided by the number of people who worked during that year (which is what the OECD table shows) and then it is divided by 52.14 (the number of weeks in a typical year). The result is then rounded. 

The quantity shown in the map is unusual in that it is not immediately clear whether higher or lower numbers are better. However, since the number of hours worked is negatively correlated with other economic indicators that are generally considered positive, such as GDP per capita, I decided to show low numbers in green and high numbers in red: [...]

For comparison, other OECD members scored as follows (with the same methodology): Canada 33, Japan 33, United States 34, New Zealand 34, Israel 36, Chile 38, Korea 40, Mexico 43.

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