International Women’s Day is a time to reflect on progress made by Latin American and Caribbean governments to advance towards gender equality and to call for greater efforts to improve women’s and girls’ lives in the region. On this special occasion, the OECD Development Centre is launching the fourth edition of the Social Institutions and Gender Index 2019 Global Report: Transforming Challenges into Opportunities. The SIGI is an innovative tool for development practitioners to understand better the barriers to women’s empowerment and gender equality. The SIGI looks at social institutions holistically by looking at the de jure and the de facto situations across 180 countries. It has also been officially recognised as an official data source to monitor progress on SDG 5.1.1. Evidence based on the newly released SIGI 2019 shows that current level of discrimination in laws and social norms induces an income loss of USD 401 billion in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Learn more about the progress made so far and the key challenges that lie ahead of Latin American and Caribbean countries in achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls in this video:

Alejandra Meneses, policy analyst for the gender team at the OECD Development Centre

Last November, the McKinsey Global Institute published its report “Digital identification: a key to inclusive growth“, analyzing nearly one hundred ways in which digital identification can be used.

The paper, which also looks at the cases of seven economies with different profiles*, recognizes digital identification as a factor that creates value, increases inclusion, promotes the formal economy and reduces fraud.

However, its use entails certain risks which require governments to adopt mitigating measures, prevent their inappropriate use and, at the same time, promote their accessibility.

The report also highlights the development of digital technologies; which makes processes cheaper and, in the last instance, increase the opportunities to create value through digital identification.

At the end of 2018, the Republic of Ecuador’s National Assembly presented the Organic Entrepreneurship & Innovation Bill, setting out a regulatory framework that provides incentives for the creation, development, growth and expansion of entrepreneurial projects, as a basis for the country’s productive development.

The bill covers the following important areas:

Public policies

The regulation recognizes that the State has the obligation to implement policies that encourage entrepreneurial development and growth, streamlining the process of setting up a company by making the paperwork simpler and by assigning public resources. To this end, the bill creates the National Council for Entrepreneurship & Innovation -in charge principally of designing a national entrepreneurship and innovation strategy- and the National Registry of Enterprises, which will classify enterprises so that they can benefit from the programs provided for in the law.

In addition, the law requires training content designed to develop the entrepreneurial and innovation-focused spirit to be included in obligatory secondary education and supports initiatives that bring young university students closer to the world of business.

Intellectual property and innovation

The bill simplifies patents and brands procedures and grants preferential access to sources of financing and investment to projects considered to be innovative, in alignment with the criteria set by the National Council for Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

Alternative sources of financing

To make access to financing easier, the law recognizes alternative sources to the traditional ones: seed capital, venture capital, angel investing, investment risk, crowdfunding platforms.

Lastly, the bill outlines certain amendments to the Companies Act and the Auditing Firms Act, adding a section on simplified joint-stock companies in the first Act, and a section on group profit and interest companies in the second.

At the end of 2018 Price Waterhouse Coopers published its report “From promise to reality: Does business really care about the SDGs?” The report analyzes 729 firms from 21 countries in 6 different sectors, assessing their current commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the extent to which companies build them into their strategies.

The report shows that there is still a gap between awareness of the importance of SDGs and actual implementation and compliance. According to this analysis, 72% of firms in the study cite the SDGs in their reports but only 27% incorporate them into their corporate strategy.

The report provides the website address which contains all the data, broken down by country and by sector.

The European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs), together with the European Securities & Markets Authority (ESMA), the European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Insurance & Occupational Pensions Authority (EOIPA) have published a joint report on innovation in the financial arena.

In the paper, the European authorities present a comparative analysis of what they call innovation facilitators established to date. They set out best practices to (i) achieve consistency across the single market, (ii) promote transparency of regulatory and supervisory policy outcomes, and (iii) facilitate cooperation between national authorities.

The two categories of innovation facilitators covered in the report are regulatory sandboxes and innovation hubs.