Oecd Quotes & Sayings

In a very humbling process, the Swiss have had to admit to their faults and compromise on secrecy, changing the law and releasing the names of bank clients to please the US, as well as signing a dozen double taxation agreements in six months to please the OECD. — Clare O'Dea

Pascal Saint-Amans, the OECD's top tax official, said the move was "very unhelpful" as it lumped jurisdictions that have signed up to global transparency initiatives together with holdouts such as Panama. He criticised the criteria as unfair, inefficient and subjective. The commission drew the "first pan-EU list of third-country non-cooperative tax jurisdictions" from blacklists provided by individual members. There were high numbers of offshore centres listed as unco-operative by some countries such as Greece and Italy, while others such as the UK, Germany and Sweden did not list any countries. — Anonymous

A 2011 OECD report showed that, over the past three decades, in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Israel, and New Zealand
all countries that have chosen a version of capitalism less red in tooth and claw than the American model
inequality has grown as fast as or faster than in the United States. France, proud, as usual, of its exceptionalism, seemed to be the one major Western outlier, but recent studies have shown that over the past decade it, too, has fallen into line. — Chrystia Freeland

Slovakia's joining the OECD in 1999 is totally dependent on meeting economic reforms required such as transparency and legislation that permits fair and open conduct of trade and business. — John Mica

Americans spend an average of about $7,200 a year on health care, compared with the roughly $2,900 average for the other market economies that make up the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and for that greatly increased outlay we get higher infant mortality, higher obesity rates, lower longevity, fewer doctors per 1,000 people (just 2.4 per 1,000 in the United States, compared with 3.1 in OECD states), and fewer acute care hospital beds (2.7 per 1,000, compared to 3.8 per 1,000 in the OECD countries). — Matt Taibbi

The most recent edition of the test - called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) - was conducted in 2012, and it found that among the OECD's thirty-four members, the United States ranked twenty-seventh, twentieth, and seventeenth in math, science, and reading, respectively. — Fareed Zakaria

Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD. — Paul Krugman

Over the past 30 years, approximately 300 million people have moved into China's middle class. And according to the OECD Development Centre, the forecast is for another 200 million people to move into the middle class by 2026. This means the Asia Pacific region, which in 2009 represented 18% of the world's middle class, will reach 66 percent by 2030. Let's repeat that. Over the next 15 years, Asia will go from 20 percent to 66 percent of the world's middle class. At the same time, the developed markets of North America and Europe, which held a combined 54 percent of the global middle class in 2009, are forecast to drop to only 21 percent by 2030. Basically, follow the money. Asia's middle class consumers are the future. Learn Mandarin. — Jeffrey Towson