AMERICAN STUDENTS

American Students

American Students

America is a great country with great people. However, our public schools and teachers are dealing with many issues that stifle their ability to educate children. Schools are crowded. Some have to deal with violence. Red tape and paperwork keep educators busy outside of teaching the regular subjects. Our public education system in America needs help. Fixing the problems is complex. Money, government programs, hiring and training teachers can help. But, putting it all together to solve the problems can be difficult.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD

Among other areas, the OECD has taken a role in co-ordinating international action on corruption and bribery, creating the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, which came into effect in February 1999. It has been ratified by thirty-eight countries. The OECD has also constituted an anti-spam task force, which submitted a detailed report, with several quite useful background papers on spam problems in developing countries, best practices for ISPs, e-mail marketers, etc., appended. It works on the information economy and the future of the Internet economy. The OECD publishes and updates a model tax convention which serves as a template for bilateral negotiations regarding tax coordination and cooperation. This model is accompanied by a set of commentaries which reflect OECD-level interpretation of the content of the model convention provisions. This model generally allocates the primary right to tax to the country from which capital investment originates (i.e., the home, or resident country) rather than the country in which the investment is made (the host, or source country). As a result, it is most effective as between two countries with reciprocal investment flows (such as among the OECD member countries), but can be very unbalanced when one of the signatory countries is economically weaker than the other (such as between OECD and non-OECD pairings).

Since 1998, the OECD has led a charge against harmful tax practices, principally targeting the activities of tax havens (while principally accepting the policies of its member countries which would tend to encourage tax competition). These efforts have been met with mixed reaction: the primary objection is the sanctity of tax policy as a matter of sovereign entitlement. The OECD maintains a 'blacklist' of countries it considers uncooperative in the drive for transparency of tax affairs and the effective exchange of information, officially called "The List of Uncooperative Tax Havens". In May 2009, all remaining countries were removed from the list. On 22 October 2008, at an OECD meeting in Paris, 17 countries led by France and Germany decided to draw up a new blacklist of tax havens. The OECD has been asked to investigate around 40 new tax havens in the world where undeclared revenue is hidden and which host many of the non-regulated hedge funds that have come under fire during the 2008 financial crisis. Germany, France and other countries called on the OECD to specifically add Switzerland to a blacklist of countries which encourage tax fraud.

Statistics

The OECD is known as a premium statistical agency, as it ...