Rudiger Ahrend is Head of the Economic Analysis, Data and Statistics Division in the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities. In addition, he also oversees the activities of the OECD Laboratory for Geospatial Analysis. In these capacities, and in his previous role as Head of the Urban Programme, he has been supervising numerous projects in a wide area of subjects, including on industrial transition, regional and urban innovation and development, subnational finance, spatial productivity, metropolitan governance, land use, land value capture, housing, green growth, climate change, transport, metropolitan governance, and national urban policies. He has also supervised numerous reviews and case studies of regions and major metropolitan agglomerations, and is the main author of “The Metropolitan Century: Understanding Urbanisation and its Consequences”. During his time as Head of the Urban Programme, Dr Ahrend was also in charge of the OECD Working Party on Urban Policies, as well as the OECD Roundtable of Mayors and Ministers.

Boris Cournède serves as Deputy Head of the Public Economics Division of the OECD. He is currently co-ordinating an extensive OECD project to advise governments on ways to make housing more economically affordable, socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable. He recently co-authored Brick by Brick: Building Better Housing Policies. He previously led a project investigating how public finance reforms can support strong, inclusive economic growth. He has conducted studies on monetary policy, financial regulation, fiscal policy, European economic integration, structural reforms and climate change. A graduate in mathematics and economics of Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris rue d’Ulm, University of Paris VI, Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and University Paris IX, he has also been associate professor in economics at  ENA, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and ENSAE.

Paolo Veneri is the Deputy Head of the Economic Analysis, Data and Statistics Division at the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities, where he leads the work on subnational statistics and the OECD Laboratory for Geospatial Analysis. He has been working primarily on urban and regional development, including understanding and measuring urbanisation, well-being and spatial inequalities. He led several OECD flagship publications including “Cities in the World. A New perspective on urbanisation” (2020), “Regions and Cities at a Glance” editions, “Divided Cities” (2018), “The Geography of Firm Dynamics” (2017), “Making cities work for all” (2016), “How’s Life in your Region?” (2014) and “Rural-urban partnerships: an integrated approach to economic development” (2013). He holds a PhD in Economics and he has published numerous papers in academic journals within the field of urban economics and regional studies. He teaches Urban and Regional Economics at the Paris Dauphine University.   

Volker Ziemann is an economist with the OECD's Economics Department. Since 2011 he has held several positions at the OECD, including at the Austria/Turkey country desk and the Public Economics Division. Before his time at the OECD, Mr Ziemann served as an economist with the French Treasury and a research engineer with Edhec Business School. He published several academic articles in internationally renowned scientific journals and taught classes in financial econometrics. A German and French national, Mr Ziemann holds Master's degrees in Economics from Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany) and ENSAE (Paris, France) and a PhD in Finance from University Aix-Marseille (France).