Word: oecd
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Rapid social change has not helped. Family and community life have been redrawn in most rich countries, and none more so than Britain, where marriage rates are down to a 146-year low. A study in 2000 by the OECD found that British parents spend less time with their children compared to other nationalities, leaving them more open to influence from their peers and a commercially driven, celebrity-obsessed media. Elder Britons too often see their youngsters as a problem. Dominique Jansen, a Dutch mother living in England, says she recently took her two toddlers to her local church...
...Despite the procedure's pitfalls, there have been few official attempts to reduce Asia's high cesarean rates. One of the more notable instances was in South Korea in 2004 - three years after the country's rate hit an OECD high of 40.5%. A chastened government launched a campaign to encourage natural childbirth, and the number of prenatal classes was also increased, allowing more women to learn about the pain-management techniques essential in vaginal delivery. "Overall, Korean women are much more educated about the issue," says Kim Jae Sun, an official at the government's Health Insurance Review...
...birth rate. The country's student body is shrinking. The number of 18-year-olds - a group that accounts for 90% of first-year college students - plunged 35% between 1990 and 2007, from 2 million to 1.3 million, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Simply put, there are fewer and fewer Japanese students to support a system that was built for heavier class loads. As a result, Japan's famously Darwinian educational environment, in which high school students crammed day and night so they could beat their peers on standardized tests and get into...
...These problems are well known. Kiyoshi Shimizu, director general of the Education Ministry's higher-education bureau, acknowledged shortcomings in the system during recent meetings to establish an OECD-administered mechanism for measuring the performance of universities worldwide. Some schools are trying to adapt. In November, Tokyo University - or Todai, the 130-year-old "Harvard of Japan" - partnered with Yale to increase its visibility abroad. Tokyo University President Hiroshi Komiyama says he wants to double the proportion of graduate courses taught in English to 20%. (About 8% of Todai's students are foreigners, compared with an average...
...conceivable, at least, that the monthly tax could go even higher without incurring too much consumer fury, since France currently enjoys one of the cheapest ISP markets in the developed world. Average monthly Internet access in France costs around $37, which is 37% below the norm for OECD members. That comfort margin may be one reason Sarkozy dared to challenge received thinking on taxing...