OECD article: “Value-added tax (VAT) is a consumption tax applied at each stage of the supply chain whenever value is added to goods or services. Businesses collect and remit VAT. The VAT data that are collected represent a breakthrough in studying production networks because they capture actual transactions between firms at an unprecedented level of detail. Unlike traditional business surveys or administrative data that might tell us about a firm’s size or industry, VAT records show us who does business with whom and for how much.
This data is particularly valuable because of its comprehensive coverage. In Estonia, for example, all VAT-registered businesses must report transactions above €1,000 per month, creating an almost complete picture of significant business relationships in the economy.
At least 15 countries now have such data available, including Belgium, Chile, Costa Rica, Estonia, and Italy. This growing availability creates opportunities for cross-country comparison and broader economic insights…(More)”.
Paper by Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger: “…International harmonization of regulation is the right strategy when the appropriate regulatory ends and means are sufficiently clear to reap efficiencies of scale and scope. When this is not the case, a push for efficiency through uniformity is premature and may lead to a suboptimal regulatory lock-in: the establishment of a rule framework that is either inefficient in the use of its means to reach the intended goal, or furthers the wrong goal, or both.
A century ago, economist Joseph Schumpeter suggested that companies have two distinct strategies to achieve success. The first is to employ economies of scale and scope to lower their cost. It’s essentially a push for improved efficiency. The other strategy is to invent a new product (or production process) that may not, at least initially, be hugely efficient, but is nevertheless advantageous because demand for the new product is price inelastic. For Schumpeter this was the essence of innovation. But, as Schumpeter also argued, innovation is not a simple, linear, and predictable process. Often, it happens in fits and starts, and can’t be easily commandeered or engineered.
As innovation is hard to foresee and plan, the best way to facilitate it is to enable a wide variety of different approaches and solutions. Public policies in many countries to foster startups and entrepreneurship stems from this view. Take, for instance, the policy of regulatory sandboxing, i.e. the idea that for a limited time certain sectors should not or only lightly be regulated…(More)”.
Paper by Demos (UK): “Over the past two years Demos has been making the case for a fundamental shift in the purpose of government away from firefighting in public services towards preventing problems arriving. First, we set out the case for The Preventative State, to rebuild local, social and civic foundations; then, jointly with The Health Foundation, we made the case to change treasury rules to ringfence funding for prevention. By differentiating between everyday spending, and preventative spending, the government could measure what really matters.
There has been widespread support for this – but also concerns about both the feasibility of measuring preventative spending accurately and appropriately but also that ring-fencing alone may not lead to the desired improvements in outcomes and value for money.
In response we have developed two practical approaches, covered in two papers:
Our first paper, Counting What Matters, explores the challenge of measurement and makes a series of recommendations, including the passage of a “Public Investment Act”, to show how this could be appropriately achieved.
This second paper, The Preventative Shift, looks at how to shift the culture of public bodies to think ‘prevention first’ and target spending at activities which promise value for money and improve outcomes…(More)”.
Design for Social Impact: “Too many non-profits and funders still roll into communities with a clipboard and a mission to document everything “missing.”
Needs assessments have become a default tool for diagnosing deficits, reinforcing a saviour mentality where outsiders decide what’s broken and needs fixing.
I’ve sat in meetings where non-profits present lists of what communities lack:
“Youth don’t have leadership skills”
“Parents don’t value education”
“Grassroots organisations don’t have capacity”
The subtext? “They need us.”
And because funding is tied to these narratives of scarcity, organisations learn to describe themselves in the language of need rather than strength—because that’s what gets funded…Now, I’m not saying that organisations or funders should never ask people what their needs are. The key issue is how needs assessments are framed and used. Too often, they use extractive “data” collection methodologies and reinforce top-down, deficit-based narratives, where communities are defined primarily by what they lack rather than what they bring.
Starting with what’s already working (asset mapping) and then identifying what’s needed to strengthen and expand those assets is different from leading with gaps, which can frame communities as passive recipients rather than active problem-solvers.
Arguably, a balanced synergy between assessing needs and asset mapping can be powerful—so long as the process centres on community agency, self-determination, and long-term sustainability rather than diagnosing problems for external intervention.
Also, asset-based mapping to me does not mean that you swoop in with the same clipboard and demand people document their strengths…(More)”.
Essay by Jon Askonas: “Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even breaking society itself. By subjecting their helpless users to ever more potent algorithms to boost engagement, powerful platforms distort reality and disrupt our politics. YouTube radicalizes young men into misogynists. TikTok turns moderate progressives into Hamas supporters. Facebook boosts election denialism; or it censors stories doubting the safety of mRNA vaccines. On the world stage, the fate of nations hinges on whether Twitter promotes color revolutions, WeChat censors Hong Kong protesters, and Facebook ads boost the Brexit campaign. The platforms are producing a fractured society: diversity of opinion is running amok, consensus is dead.
The second story is very different. In the 2023 essay “The age of average,” Alex Murrell recounts a project undertaken in the 1990s by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The artists commissioned a public affairs firm to poll over a thousand Americans on their ideal painting: the colors they liked, the subjects they gravitated toward, and so forth. Using the aggregate data, the artists created a painting, and they repeated this procedure in a number of other countries, exhibiting the final collection as an art exhibition called The People’s Choice. What they found, by and large, was not individual and national difference but the opposite: shocking uniformity — landscapes with a few animals and human figures with trees and a blue-hued color palette..(more)”.
Essay by Joe Mathews: “Governments around the world, especially those at the subnational and local levels, find themselves stuck in a vise. Planetary problems like climate change, disease, and technological disruption are not being addressed adequately by national governments. Everyday people, whose lives have been disrupted by those planetary problems, press the governments closer to them to step up and protect them. But those governments lack the technical capacity and popular trust to act effectively against bigger problems.
To build trust and capacity, many governments are moving governance into the digital world and asking their residents to do more of the work of government themselves. Some cities, provinces, and political institutions have tried to build digital platforms and robust digital environments where residents can improve service delivery and make government policy themselves.
However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for governments seeking to work more closely with their people.
What does fun look like in this sphere? I first witnessed a truly fun and engaging digital tool for citizen governance in Rome in 2018. While running a democracy conference with Mayor Virginia Raggi and her team, they were always on their phones, and not just to answer emails or texts. They were constantly on a digital environment called Rousseau.
Rousseau was named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher and author of The Social Contract. In that 1762 book, Rousseau argued that city-states (like his hometown of Geneva) were more naturally suited to democracy than nation-states (especially big nations like France). He also wrote that the people themselves, not elected representatives, were the best rulers through what we today call direct democracy…(More)”.
OECD Report: “This report examines how actors in Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands interact and work together to contribute to the development of emerging technologies for citizen participation. Through in-depth research and analysis of actors’ motivations, experiences, challenges, and enablers in this nascent but promising field, this paper presents a unique cross-national perspective on innovation ecosystems for citizen participation using emerging technology. It includes lessons and concrete proposals for policymakers, innovators, and researchers seeking to develop technology-based citizen participation initiatives…(More)”.
Paper by Masanori Arita: “There are ethical, legal, and governance challenges surrounding data, particularly in the context of digital sequence information (DSI) on genetic resources. I focus on the shift in the international framework, as exemplified by the CBD-COP15 decision on benefit-sharing from DSI and discuss the growing significance of data sovereignty in the age of AI and synthetic biology. Using the example of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tension between open science principles and data control rights is explained. This opinion also highlights the importance of inclusive and equitable data sharing frameworks that respect both privacy and sovereign data rights, stressing the need for international cooperation and equitable access to data to reduce global inequalities in scientific and technological advancement…(More)”.
Article by Phanish Puranam: “When Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that 25 percent of the company’s software is now machine-generated, it underscored how quickly artificial intelligence is reshaping the workplace.
The answers are not a given. They will depend on what we choose to do – what kinds of organisations we design. I make the case that successful organisation designs will have to pursue both goal-centricity (i.e. achieving objectives) and human-centricity (i.e. creating social environments that people find attractive). A myopic focus on only one or the other will not bode well for us.
The dual purpose of organisations
Why focus on organisations at a time when technology seems to be making such exciting strides? This was the very first question that INSEAD alumna Joanna Gordon asked me in a recent digital@INSEAD webinar.
My answer: Homo sapiens’s most impressive accomplishments, from building the pyramids to developing Covid-19 vaccines, are not individual achievements. They were possible only because many people worked together effectively. “How to organise groups to attain goals” is our oldest general-purpose technology (GPT!).
But there is more. To humans, organisations don’t just help accomplish goals. We are a species that has evolved to survive and thrive in groups, and organisations (i.e. groups with goals) are the natural habitat of Homo sapiens. They provide us with a sense of community and, as research has shown, help us strike a balance between our needs for social connection, individual autonomy and feeling capable and effective…(More)”.
Paper by Sara Marcucci and Stefaan Verhulst: “The increasing complexity of global challenges, such as climate change, public health crises, and socioeconomic inequalities, underscores the need for a more sophisticated and adaptive policymaking approach. Evidence-Informed Decision-Making (EIDM) has emerged as a critical framework, leveraging data and research to guide policy design, implementation, and impact assessment. However, traditional evidence-based approaches, such as reliance on Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and systematic reviews, face limitations, including resource intensity, contextual constraints, and difficulty in addressing real-time challenges. Artificial Intelligence offers transformative potential to enhance EIDM by enabling large-scale data analysis, pattern recognition, predictive modeling, and stakeholder engagement across the policy cycle. While generative AI has attracted significant attention, this paper emphasizes the broader spectrum of AI applications (beyond Generative AI) —such as natural language processing (NLP), decision trees, and basic machine learning algorithms—that continue to play a critical role in evidence-informed policymaking. These models, often more transparent and resource-efficient, remain highly relevant in supporting data analysis, policy simulations, and decision-support.
This paper explores AI’s role in three key phases of the policy cycle: (1) problem identification, where AI can support issue framing, trend detection, and scenario creation; (2) policy design, where AI-driven simulations and decision-support tools can improve solution alignment with real-world contexts; and (3) policy implementation and impact assessment, where AI can enhance monitoring, evaluation, and adaptive decision-making. Despite its promise, AI adoption in policymaking remains limited due to challenges such as algorithmic bias, lack of explainability, resource demands, and ethical concerns related to data privacy and environmental impact. To ensure responsible and effective AI integration, this paper highlights key recommendations: prioritizing augmentation over automation, embedding human oversight throughout AI-driven processes, facilitating policy iteration, and combining AI with participatory governance models…(More)”.
