What OECD is and how it works

The word that was taken out

The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation was created on 16 April 1948 to administer American and Canadian aid under the Marshall Plan, formally the European Recovery Programme, and it brought together eighteen countries in Western Europe. The convention that replaced it was signed at the Chateau de la Muette in Paris on 14 December 1960 by twenty governments, Canada and the United States among them, and it came into force on 30 September 1961. The preamble describes what those governments agreed to as the reconstitution of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Article 15 makes the continuity literal. On the day the convention came into force the reconstitution took effect, the legal personality of the older body carried into the new one, and every decision the OEEC had already taken required the approval of the Council to stay effective afterwards. Article 18 puts the headquarters in Paris unless the Council agrees otherwise.

What the members undertake

Article 1 sets three aims: the highest sustainable economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in member countries while maintaining financial stability, sound economic expansion in member and non-member countries in the process of economic development, and the expansion of world trade on a multilateral, non-discriminatory basis. Article 3 turns the aims into a routine. Members keep each other informed, furnish the Organisation with the information it needs for its tasks, consult on a continuing basis, and take co-ordinated action where appropriate.

The instruments are in Article 5. The Organisation may take decisions binding on all members, make recommendations, and enter into agreements with members, with non-member states and with other international organisations. Article 6 sets the arithmetic. Decisions and recommendations are made by mutual agreement of all the members, each member has one vote, and an abstention does not invalidate the act: it stays applicable to everyone else and does not apply to the member that abstained. No decision binds a member until that member has complied with its own constitutional procedures. Article 17 lets any party end the convention's application to itself on twelve months' notice to the depositary.

What joining costs

Article 16 gives the Council the power to invite any government prepared to assume the obligations of membership, and that decision must be unanimous. Accession then takes effect on the deposit of an instrument of accession with the depositary named in Article 14, the Government of the French Republic.

Between the request and the deposit sits the process the Organisation publishes. The Council decides by consensus to open discussions and adopts an accession roadmap setting the terms and conditions. The candidate submits an initial memorandum, a self-assessment of its legislation, policies and practices against OECD legal instruments. Up to 25 technical committees then review it in depth, each adopting a formal opinion once it is satisfied, and the reviews commonly recommend changes to law and practice before that point is reached. The Council decides by unanimity whether to invite, an accession agreement is signed, and the country becomes a member on the day its instrument is deposited.

The recent accessions show the length of that. Discussions with Costa Rica opened on 9 April 2015 and its instrument was deposited on 25 May 2021, after technical reviews by 22 committees and changes that included a competition law overhaul, a redesigned national statistics system, criminal liability of legal persons for foreign bribery and a register of shareholders. Colombia acceded on 28 April 2020, Lithuania on 5 July 2018, Latvia on 1 July 2016, and Estonia, Israel, Slovenia and Chile during 2010. Discussions are open with Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Peru and Romania, all from 25 January 2022, with Indonesia from 20 February 2024 and with Thailand from 17 June 2024.

What membership does not settle

The convention carries no tariff schedule, no customs union, no common currency and no defence commitment. Members overlap heavily with groupings that do carry those things, and on the records in this catalogue every member of this group also holds a seat at the United Nations and a membership of the World Trade Organization, but each of those is a separate instrument with its own accession.

The Organisation's own standards run past its membership in both directions. The Anti-Bribery Convention, in force since 1999, requires its parties to criminalise the bribery of foreign public officials and to investigate and sanction it, and its parties outnumber the members of the Organisation. The OECD and G20 Inclusive Framework on base erosion and profit shifting brings in well over a hundred countries and jurisdictions on an equal footing, and more than 90 countries and economies are taking part in the 2025 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment. Running the other way, the Development Assistance Committee, which adopted official development assistance as the standard measure of foreign aid in 1969, seats members and associates of its own rather than the whole membership, so acceding to the convention does not put a country on the DAC.

Where the edges are argued

The second aim in Article 1 points at non-member countries by name, and the Organisation describes itself as working with over 100 countries. Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa take part in its daily work as Key Partners, sit in policy discussions, answer its surveys and appear in its statistical databases without being members, and two of them are simultaneously accession candidates. The European Union participates under Supplementary Protocol No. 1 to the convention, a form of representation written in at the signing rather than a membership: the same protocol was the answer to how the European Communities established at Paris in 1951 and Rome in 1957 would be represented.

Two names differ between the Organisation's own list and the roster here. The Organisation lists Korea and the Slovak Republic where these records read South Korea and Slovakia. The countries are the same in both and the naming is not settled here.