Long ago I gave up trying to break through the so-called “glass ceiling” that has kept women like me out of higher management. Instead I decided to create new enterprises in which management could be reinvented by women. On 8 March 2005, I launched a business incubator devoted exclusively to projects by female entrepreneurs.

A statue of Korea's legendary General Lee Soon Shin stands guard outside the Ministry of Information and Communications in central Seoul. A poster announcing a major international joint Korean/OECD ministerial conference on the Future of the Internet Economy to be held on 17-18 June hangs at the front of the building.

The OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials celebrated its 10th anniversary in November 2007**. A decade on, the aim of the Convention–to fight against active corruption (offering bribes)–is as pertinent as ever.

There are roughly 45 million disabled people living in Europe, but how do they and elderly people like to get around? They would call a taxi. The combination of the personal service that taxis offer, their wide availability and door-to-door operations enable them to respond particularly well to this population’s special travel needs. Although several countries have made progress in improving the accessibility of taxi services, much remains to be done.

City managers are important economic players, handling as they do billion-dollar budgets and thousands of employees. In its second territorial review in a series on competitive cities, the OECD explains that in the last few decades, city managers have recognised that inner city problems could not be resolved by throwing more money at them.

How do investors choose whether to set up shop in, say, Somalia rather than Spain, Colombia rather than Canada? Siemens, the German engineering company, and the Swiss technologies company ABB both recently stopped doing business in Sudan, claiming moral and political reasons, while many multinationals are still operating in the high-risk countries of Afghanistan, Congo and Iraq.

You cannot expect someone to be able to build a house just by giving them a saw, a hammer and some wood. Likewise, you cannot expect someone to be able to manage their finances just by giving them an income, a mortgage, a credit card and an insurance policy. People need to be taught how to use these tools in order to succeed.

An action statement to help small and medium-sized enterprises was launched at a conference on “Better Financing for Entrepreneurship and SME Growth” held in Brazil on 27-30 March 2006 (see previous edition, No. 254).

How do multinational corporations put into practice the rather higher level concepts of sustainable development and still respect the bottom line? Environment and the OECD Guidelines for MNEs relates how a pharmaceutical company, Baxter International, saved energy but also saved $50 million in operations costs by switching to the most energy-efficient lightbulb.

“Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.” Bertolt Brecht’s much quoted comment would probably capture the mood of today’s German venture capitalists, who, if recent spending trends are a sign, may only just be recovering from the fright of the new economy’s collapse in 2000-2001.

Despite the legal wrangles over online entertainment, trading in audio and video on the Internet remains high, particularly among young people. The downloading of video and other files increased sharply in 2002-2003, helped by a rise in improved file-sharing systems, and new DVD and CD burning technologies.

Tax rules which were fashioned in a more closed economic environment can discourage international activity. They can create conflict between countries as to the appropriate tax treatment of an international business and between taxpayers and governments.

For a nation to be healthy requires an ability to renew itself constantly. This applies to companies, organisations, governments, indeed everyone. The need to innovate is obviously not new. The fathers of management, be it Frederick Taylor, Henri Fayol or Joseph Schumpeter, wrote volumes on how innovation affects production and economics.

Online marketing is thriving in response to the pervasive shift to young and hip internet users from yesterday’s couch potatoes. After falling 18% during 2002, online advertising experienced an upturn, with revenues expected to have increased 12% during 2003 to around US$6.6 billion, some of the largest brands having increased their online marketing budgets.

The revision of the OECD’s corporate governance principles provides a good example of how a more open and dialogue-oriented approach can ensure the global relevance of such instruments. The review involved not only consultation with civil society, labour and business in OECD countries, but was based on five years of policy dialogue in regions around the world, as well as putting the Principles to the test.

Four OECD countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic – are among the 10 new members that joined the EU on 1 May. Government leaders from two of these recently visited the OECD: the prime minister of Hungary, Péter Medgyessy, on 8 April, and on 22 April, Poland’s foreign minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.

“Small is beautiful.” It is not unusual these days to apply this much quoted observation to the needs of small and medium enterprises. Indeed, SMEs are now very much in the public policy limelight, and when you consider that they account for over 95% of enterprises and 60%-70% of employment in OECD countries, it is easy to see why.

The potential of small and medium-sized enterprises to contribute to growth and development is a point that has not been lost in the case of Turkey. On the contrary, as in most other countries, SMEs are the dominant form of business organisation here, accounting for over 95% of the business population, and they play a key role in driving sustainable economic growth and job creation.

South Africa has become the first nonmember country to join an OECD system for sharing results of safety tests on chemicals that saves governments and chemical producers some US$60 million a year.

The newly revised OECD Principles of Corporate Governance were released on 22 April. The result is a stronger OECD instrument to help improve boardroom behaviour globally. And that means better business and stronger markets for everyone.

Burst bubble or not, the digital economy continues to grow, as mainstream businesses move transactions online and e-commerce specialists such as Apple’s Music Store, e-Bay and Amazon thrive. That makes governments keen to collect taxes on online sales.

Full convergence with international accounting and audit standards, better protection of minority investors, stronger enforcement of existing laws and regulations, and improved bank governance: these are some of the key recommendations in the white paper on corporate governance in Asia, published by the OECD in Tokyo in June.

Where I come from, government must listen to me. It’s my constitutional right. In the First Amendment to the US Constitution, it is spelled out that Congress shall pass no law that abridges the right of the people to petition for redress of their grievances.

Globalisation has made the world a smaller place and has changed the way of doing business in OECD countries. But did you know that a significant part of global integration reflects trade within transnational firms and industries?

War, terrorism, political instability and disease: these have affected the entire sector, adding to structural problems in areas like the airline industry. Yet travel and tourism are important parts of the global economy, in small and less-developed countries just as in major developed ones. What is the outlook for tourism and how can it respond in the present circumstances? We interviewed Peter Keller, Director for Tourism at the Swiss Secretariat of State for Economic Affairs, and President of the OECD Tourism Committee.

The Asian Roundtable on Corporate Governance, organised by the OECD in partnership with the World Bank, met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in March to establish regional reform priorities and to develop a White Paper on Corporate Governance in Asia. Scheduled for release in Tokyo on 11 June 2003, the White Paper will set forth a common policy agenda for corporate-governance reform in the Asian region.

How would Finland perform without Nokia? Such a question could be levelled at several countries, including some large ones. But Nokia, a leading mobile phone company, accounts for almost a quarter of total Finnish exports. However, while Nokia has a substantial impact on Finnish growth, exports and R&D, its direct impact on employment is much smaller. In 2001, the number of Nokia employees in Finland fell marginally to 23,700, around 2% of total employees in the business sector.

Globalisation has drawn serious attention to the importance of core workers’ rights on a global basis. There is a strange paradox in the treatment of labour when it comes to mainstream debates about globalisation. Survey’s on foreign investors intentions suggest that in most sectors market access, good governance, skills and education levels are more important in attracting investment than low wages or submissive workers. Yet rather than improving living and working conditions, globalisation appears to pressure governments into reducing workers’ rights to minimise labour costs and attract foreign investment.

Teamwork, goals, out-of-bounds: sport is often held up as a model for business. Now, the success of a French sports personality in Japan may hold lessons for the country’s corporate players.

Family-run firms tend to believe that principles of good corporate governance do not really concern them. This is a mistaken view. The question is how to convince them.

An opinion poll in BusinessWeek magazine shows half of the US believing that what is good for business is not necessarily good for their country. Hardly surprising, you might think – except that the poll was carried out over two years ago, before the high-tech bubble burst and well before the recent corporate scandals. And the fact that the opinion poll was in one of the US’s main pro-business magazines meant that the results simply had to be taken seriously.

Globalisation has given rise to a kind of economic “culture shock” and international business is one of the principal sufferers. Tens of thousands of companies are trying to conduct business in a global mosaic of legal, regulatory, business and social environments. Operating in all of these environments and responding to their diverse expectations of corporate behaviour is a formidable challenge, in particular as public (and market) pressure becomes more intense.

We are inundated these days with concerns about corporate governance. Corporate executives are under attack and major auditing firms are worried, as well they might be in the wake of the demise of one of their giants, Arthur Andersen. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco – what should our reaction be to these extraordinary and outrageous breaches of faith with shareholders andemployees?

The recent spate of US corporate failures and breakdowns in truthful accounting has undermined people’s faith in financial reporting, corporate leadership, and the integrity of markets the world over. The fact that the wave of scandals has come hot on the heels of a collapse in the high-tech bubble has a sharp ironic flavour.

“Bye-bye, Miss American Pie” may be how critics see the woes of the US economy right now, but was the longest boom in recent history really just pie in the sky? Pie can be confused with motherliness and apples and its homely connotations may be a clue to why politicians are so fond of wanting to slice it up and share it around. Indeed, ugly battles are fought in legislatures all over the world regarding what public priorities should receive the largest pieces.

The German Council of Environmental Advisors estimates that the drop in finite primary raw materials will significantly influence the price of products based, for instance, on crude oil from the year 2010. According to current prognoses by the Öko Institut in Darmstadt, the quantity of plastic waste produced in Germany will rise to around 6 million tonnes in 2005 due to the increased use of plastics in many branches (in 1995 it was just 3.7 million tonnes).

World trade and globalisation depend on responsible business practices, if they are to win public confidence and deliver global prosperity. That is where codes of conduct come in, whether towards the environment, labour or other ethical rules. Almost all of the world’s 100 largest multinational enterprises have issued environmental codes or policy statements on health and safety. The majority of them have also issued statements addressing labour practices. But do these codes work?

The expanding role of corporations in general and multinational corporations in particular has helped rekindle a discussion on the social role of business. Although reminiscent of the social advocacy of the 1970s, the current debate is fundamentally different in many respects. Today the focus is more on issues of corporate responsibility, with multinational corporations increasingly seen not as mere agents of profit and technological change, but as the driving force behind globalisation itself.

Since their creation in 1976, the OECD Declaration on International Investment and Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises have reflected the expectations of signatory countries and their citizens as to how international companies should operate and relate to governments. The OECD Declaration, of which the Guidelines are an integral part, aims to improve the climate for foreign direct investment. At the same time it seeks to encourage good conduct and the positive contribution that multinational enterprises can make to economic, social and environmental areas in the countries where they operate.

The review of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises concluded in 2000 was two years in the making. It was a difficult challenge, but a nonetheless successful one. There are several reasons for this.

In September 1998, Transparency International (TI) published the most comprehensive index to date on perceptions of corruption in eighty-five countries worldwide. Since its inception in 1995, the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) has encouraged debate and provided the basis for substantive anti-corruption reforms in a number of countries.