OECD principles of validation of Quantitative Structure - Activity Relationships (QSAR) models for legislative purposes are given and explained. Reasons of their origination and development, like system REACH, are described. A basic impulse has come from some OECD countries followed by all (almost) other countries of the world.

Background: Across the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), pay-for-performance (P4P) programs have been implemented in the inpatient sector to improve the quality of care provided by hospitals. However, little is known about whether such programs can live up to expectations. Thus far, evaluations and reviews have focused on the ambulatory care ...

This paper discusses issues that arise in the comparison of estimates of wealth holdings and their distribution in light of data for selected OECD countries. We find large differences in the level of wealth, depending on whether the mean or median levels are compared across countries. Sensitivity of wealth estimates to survey design are evident in that even within countries, these ranking of tw...

The Size of the Shadow Economies of 145 Countries all over the World: First Results over the Period 1999 to 2003 Using the DYMIMIC approach, estimates of the shadow economy in 145 developing, transition, developed OECD countries, South Pacific islands and still communist countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) over 2002/2003 in developing cou...

The OECD research shows that there are only two factors which are consistently related to differences in economic growth across the OECD countries – trade exposure i.e. those countries which had opened up their trade to international trading grew faster, and human capital development i.e. those countries that increased the level of education in their population were the ones whose economies gre...

This article modifies the conventional two-stage DEA model to construct an analytical model for energy-related efficiency with undesirable outputs. Our proposed model relaxes the constraint that the inputs of the second process must come from the first process. As a result, our proposed model is more flexible than the original model in terms of the application of energy-related efficiency measu...

Our society’s dependence on chemicals is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The chemical industry today is a US$1.55 trillion global industry, nearly four times as big as it was just 30 years ago. World-wide, the industry employs some 12 million people. The chemical industry in OECD Member countries accounts for 76 per cent of world-wide production. Chemicals and related products represent 14 p...