In attempting to describe the OECD, one is drawn immediately to the fable of blind men describing an elephant. The OECD has a much less well-defined role than other elements of the international economic architecture, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the World Trade Organization, and as a result there are differing perceptions as to what the Organisation is exactly, and where its value lies. There is a joke among those who have had involvement with it that the acronym ‘OECD’stands for ‘Organisation for Excellent Cocktails and Dining’, encouraged, no doubt, by the attractions of its Paris location. It once might have deserved this slight. Indeed, searching the archives while researching this book, we came across a rather revealing graph in a report on the mainframe computing needs of the Organisation in the 1980s. It recorded the average number of computer terminals connected to the mainframe by time of day, and revealed a marked drop-off between about noon and 3 pm

The long lunches one might suspect are indicated by this ‘nonobtrusive measure’were not confined to the OECD in the 1980s, and austerity in the OECD’s budgetary allocations over the past 15 years especially has meant that it no longer accords with reality. Nevertheless, many have questioned the role and value of the OECD in the contemporary global system, and it has been compelled increasingly to demonstrate that it represents value for money, but many–even those who are familiar with it through involvement in its activities–do not claim to understand it fully. One such informant likened it to the Tardis, the space-craft of the television character Dr Who, in that it consisted of much more (and was more complex) than appeared from the outside. In this book, we seek to provide a look inside the Tardis. We seek to describe and assess critically what we think are the core characteristics and the sources of value of the OECD. We suggest that the Organisation has various sources of value, and one of these is indeed largely social, in that it has socialised bureaucrats in member states (and beyond) into a culture of identifying and learning from best practice and deviations from it, and it has also created international networks in various policy domains, so that it has helped form something of an international elite–a global policy network or, perhaps more accurately, a series of networks, because its