The opening of the Joint OECD-KoreaCentre on Asian Social and Health Policies is a fantastic opportunity for countries to learn from each others’ experiences. This goes to the core of the OECD’s function in the world economy: it exists to help countries to learning from one another. Our day-to-day work consists of putting information about policies and outcomes into a form that enables the experience of different countries to be compared. The 30 OECD Member countries have a huge variety of policy approaches and outcomes, and that means that the comparisons that we can do are very rich and informative. They will be even better if we can also take into account the experience of other countries. That is why the opening of the Joint OECD-Korea Centre is so exciting existing OECD members can learn from other Asian countries, and vice versa.
In practice, OECD work on social and health policy can be divided into three parts. First is data collection and standardisation. This takes up the majority of resources devoted to social and policies. Second is analysis of this data to identify key trends and policy developments. Third, this analysis forms the basis for exchanges of views by policymakers on the strategic direction which policy should take.
This paper is structured in the opposite way. First, it considers the ’strategic’direction of policies across the OECD in the area of health andsocial policy, as recently discussed in meetings of OECD Ministers. Then it moves on to look at some key policy challenges in the areas of health and social policies. Finally, it emphasises the importance of the data work upon which all objective discussions of social and health policies must be based.
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