Public Policy Blog

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank, around one billion people – 15% of the world’s population – have some type of disability worldwide. According to the European Commission, “about 80 million people living in the EU have a mild to severe disability. The physical obstacles they face, such as gaining [...]

Good news for CSR! On 25th October, the European Commission published “A renewed EU strategy 2011-14 for Corporate Social Responsibility”. The communication presents the concerns of CSR, an evaluation of the impact of European policy on CSR, a modern understanding of CSR – including an updated definition- and a new agenda for action 2011-2014. But [...]

On 28 September, during an event organized in Geneva (Switzerland) by the Onuart Foundation and the United Nations Spanish Global Compact Network, Telefónica and two other Spanish companies presented their corporate responsibility policies and good practices involving the management of human rights at the United Nations. The purpose of this event, entitled “Businesses and Human [...]

This month of September, Telefónica received, for the second year in a row, the highest evaluation in the telecommunications sector in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which shows to 551 institutional investors with assets of 71 trillion Dollars the transparency and performance of companies in the subject of climate change. This achievement means the recognition [...]

Do stakeholders trust in corporations? Only 10% of consumers in USA believe in what they say. Consumers do require companies to disclose details on what they do to asses the impact that their activity has on environment and society. Additionally, investors ask for information on sustainability issues. Transparency becomes a must for companies to recover [...]

Last week I attended the 11th Corporate Responsibility Roundtable of the OECD, which was devoted to the implementation of the OECD Guidelines for MNEs 2011. I believe that these guidelines set up an effective mechanism to monitor compliance with them across all OECD member states and will be an effective tool to achieve an improved [...]

Again, welcome to Paris to follow the discussions on policies around Internet and its role for the global economy for the future! Tomorrow the OECD will host during 2 days a High Level Meeting untitled “The Internet Economy: Generating innovation and growth”, with top level speakers like Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary General, of course, or [...]

Let’s see how ‘The World’s Most Admired Companies’ is structured. On one hand, Fortune has created a sector ranking with 57 different industries. To create this 57 industry list, executives, directors and analysts of 673 companies from 32 countries were asked to rate companies in their own industry on nine criteria: Innovation, People management, Use [...]

Last year, the European Commission launched a plan, the Europe 2020 Strategy, to go out of the crisis and prepare EU economy for the coming decade. Concretely, the Union set five ambitious objectives – on employment, innovation, education, social inclusion and climate/energy – to be reached by 2020. In order to meet the targets, the [...]

Last week, The Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Commission (EC) organized a seminar-conference titled “Shared Social Responsibility: securing trust and sustainable social cohesion in a context of transition”. The event was open to public authorities, researchers, NGOs, civil society, etc. and aimed to confirm social cohesion as an objective for Europe. During the [...]