Browse by: "S"

National saving ratios are generally lower now than in the 1960s or 1970s. This paper first reviews developments in national and international saving and investment trends in OECD countries since the 1960s. It then examines sectoral saving trends and considers the links between them. There are seen to be important offsets between government and private sector saving and, within the latter, between the business sector and households, so that national and private saving rates tend to be more stable than their component parts. The paper looks in particular at the reasons lying behind the volatile behaviour of household saving in certain countries in recent years ...

There are four sets of questions that fiscal indicators can help answer: (1) Of the changes in the fiscal position, what part is due to changes in the economic environment and what part is due to policy? (2) Can the current course of fiscal policy be sustained, or will the government have to adjust taxes or spending? (3) What is the effect of fiscal policy on activity, through its effects on relative prices, be it the price of labour or the price of capital? (4) What is the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policy, through deficit and debt finance?

This paper is one of three in this Working Paper Series, along with those by Chouraqui et al. and Gramlich, in which the assessment of fiscal policy is reconsidered. It argues that no single indicator can give even rough answers to all those questions. It then develops four (sets of) indicators, aimed at answering each of the questions ...

This paper reviews the influence of a variety of different monetary rules for the G3 economies on the comparative simulation properties of a recent version of the OECD INTERLINK model. The simulated shocks are typically of a "global" nature, with the main objective being to assess the relative effectiveness of alternative monetary policy settings in achieving a stable set of outcomes for main macroeconomic aggregates at the global level. Since the relative performance of different policies seems likely to depend on both the nature of the shocks and specific structural features of the model used, it also examines the extent to which these results are likely to be empirically fragile ...

The Brazilian electronics industry operates within a policy regime which has promoted excessive diversification rather than concentrating on developing strong technological capabilities in appropriate areas. The international competitiveness of most segments of the electronics industry declined sharply during the first half of the 1980s.

Four major sectors of the electronics industry are examined here: microelectronics, banking automation, colour TVs, and public digital exchanges. In microelectronics, the focus of specialisation should be on the design of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). To support those design efforts with an efficient local IC fabrication capacity, the government needs to forge a cooperative arrangement among producers to enable the establishment of a silicon foundry of efficient scale. In banking automation, which is highly software and engineering intensive, firms could be expected to diversify into point-of-sale automation, without giving ...

Saving has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Research has focused on questions about its adequacy, determinants and measurement. This paper considers the latter issue. The main trends in world-wide and OECD-area saving over the last two to three decades are reviewed. Subsequently, the appropriateness of the saving concept used in traditional national accounts is discussed. To examine the size of some of the potential problems, a number of adjustments to traditionally measured saving are made. The concluding section raises some questions about appropriate measurement of saving, saving behaviour and policy responses to perceived lack of saving ...

Four scenarios for the global trading system in the 1990s are outlined and their implications for developing countries considered: (i) further development of a GATT-based trading regime; (ii) development of a world of trading blocs -- where the critical issue is not whether they will emerge (they will) but whether they become "building blocks" for a more integrated global system or "stumbling blocks" that cause the system to fragment; (iii) development of a system of managed trade, where political forces would dominate outcomes and which could evolve out of the friction between Japan and the United States or Europe; and (iv) movement beyond GATT and dealing with international problems "at the borders" toward a system of deeper global harmonisation in such areas as competition policy, standards, regulatory practices and technology policies.

The answer to the question of which of these scenarios will predominate is of growing importance for developing countries, both because of ...

Both the process of formation of the Single European Market, which implies major economic and legal changes in Europe, and the results, which imply greater efficiency and growth, affect the Community's trading partners. Initial calculations have suggested that, in aggregate, the benefits for the rest of the world roughly balance the costs. But many developing countries are directly affected by individual sectoral changes. Because of the relatively high degree of specialisation of their economies and trading patterns, the effects on individual developing economies are therefore potentially large.

The changes which are likely to be most important for developing countries include: the removal of all barriers to intra-EC trade, which improves the competitiveness of EC relative to non-EC suppliers; the harmonisation of excise duties, which is helpful to coffee, tea and cocoa producers, and harmful to tobacco producers; the harmonisation of textile and clothing quotas, whose effects will ...

This paper reviews the process of agricultural policy reforms in Morocco in the 1980's, with particular emphasis on the cereals and sugar sub-sectors.

Agricultural policy is reviewed in historical perspective, to show that the liberalisation process which was proposed in the framework of structural adjustment reforms ran contrary to the agricultural development strategy followed by Morocco since Independence.

The macro-economic performance of Morocco is examined. It shows that the origin of the economic policy reforms can be found in the necessity to seek balance of payment ssupport. This led from a series of orthodox stabilisation measures to a process of liberalisation and structural adjustment which has affected a certain number of sectors including agriculture.

The history of proposals for agricultural reforms is outlined and the extent of actual implementation is discussed. The adequacy of policy instruments and the impact of reforms are reviewed in a more detailed form for the ...

Structural adjustment, liberalisation and the pressures of technological change are having major impact on the institutional organisation of the agro-industrial sector. In industrialised countries, the private sector is positioned to play the vanguard role in the next generation of agricultural technologies. Thus, the ability to promote and sustain new patterns of co-operation in research and development between the private and the public sectors will be a key determinant of future patterns of competitiveness.

This study of Brazil attempts to identify the main lines of technological and organisational innovation at present under way in important sectors of the Brazilian agricultural research system. It focuses on three crops -- soybeans, wheat and sugar -- which are strategic from the point of view of structural adjustment and liberalisation and at the same time involve both export and domestic markets ...

This paper presents the results of a survey of the impact of regulations and taxes on small and micro enterprises, considered here as part of the informal sector, in Thailand. The survey covered a large sample of enterprises (more than 500) in Bangkok and ten other provinces. Three sectors were studied: restaurant stalls, garment manufacturing, metal goods manufacturing. In fact, these are activities in which there are the greatest number of "manufacturing" enterprises in Thailand's urban informal sector. Their study permits a comparison of the behaviour of enterprises active in different markets.

The study shows that small enterprises in Thailand are well integrated in the economic development process, especially through subcontracting, and their growth is not particularly hindered by institutional constraints. Moreover, even though small entrepreneurs complain about the attitude of official inspectors, they often accepted the reasons for regulations, for they served to ...

Like most petroleum producing countries, Indonesia experienced a sharp deterioration in its export conditions during the early 1980s. Given the country's heavy reliance on oil taxation and relatively low per capita income, this exogenous shock seriously disrupted development plans and induced extensive structural adjustments in the economy. Indonesia has taken greater initiative than some to stabilize its economy and reduce the distortionary threat of expansionist policies inherited from the oil boom. Its success in this regard was due to an eventual willingness to implement voluntary stabilization and relatively favorable credit rating. In this study, a calibrated intertemporal general equilibrium model is used to evaluate the Indonesian adjustment policy of the period 1980-86 with particular attention to the growth and distributional implications of adjustment. The findings of this report indicate that more efficacious policies could have been implemented. These policies would ...

Electronics has become critically important in every country's attempt to restructure or build its competitiveness. The developments in electronics have given rise to an industry with an unprecedented growth record in terms of sales and exports, innovative capacity, and spin-off potential for related services. But electronics has also infiltrated into many other industries through the pervasiveness of its application potential. Instead of competing solely on cost, competitive advantage is now often obtained by those who have the (temporary) benefit of having mastered cutting-edge technology. To the fore has come a type of innovation that builds on relations with users, on interaction with suppliers, subcontractors, universities, industry associations, government institutes, and even potential competitors through various kinds of cooperative agreements. Thus, the competitiveness of a firm depends not only on its own strength, but also on the support it receives from the external environment ...

There is growing concern about the future provision of care for frail elderly people. Many countries have planned to reform services or the financing of care, but have found that the implementation of these plans has coincided with economic slow-down and fiscal constraints. This has heightened the difficult choices that have to be made in relation to new services for care.

All OECD countries are agreed in having as a main objective that elderly people should be able to stay for as long as possible in their own homes, and that they should be able to receive good residential care close to their own community ("ageing in place"). How successful have OECD countries been in pursuit of this goal? What barriers can be identified? Are services as effective as they could be?

Most policy debates have been over-shadowed by the question of how to pay for the necessary services. OECD countries currently deploy a range of financing mechanisms for relevant health and social services, involving ...

Short-term economic indicators play an important role in the assessment of current cyclical situations and in the establishment of forecasts. Broadly, two types of short-term indicators can be distinguished: qualitative indicators, reflecting businessmen’s subjective assessment of the cyclical situation (e.g., production prospects or judgements on orderbooks), and quantitative indicators, reflecting past developments of production or employment. The usefulness of qualitative indicators rests on their reliability to approximate the possible evolution of the quantitative ones.

The present document shows the results of a pilot study for six industrial sectors in seven Member countries whereby short-term qualitative indicators are used to “nowcast” a quantitative indicator, the production index. The objective is to enhance the timeliness of short-term industrial statistics through estimation of data points for the most recent periods for which they are not yet available.

From the current ...

This paper presents a new data set on the number of enterprises, employees, gross output and value added in manufacturing by size category. The figures are obtained from censuses of manufactures and industrial surveys for three years (one year in the 1960s, one year in the 1970s, and one year in the late 1980s or 1990) and five OECD countries (France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States). There are five or six size categories, which are established on the basis of the number of employees per enterprise or establishment. The level of industry disaggregation is according to that in the STAN database. The paper discusses the basic sources and presents the complete data set. It also contains a brief analysis of average firm size, relative productivity levels per size category and concentration ratios ...

High and rising unemployment rates in the early 1990s have moved the employment question centrestage in the policy debate. Among the structural aspects, the relation between firm size and employment creation has attracted policy makers’ attention, triggered by empirical work on the United States which showed that the small business sector had been a major source of net job creation. This work and the rising interest by policymakers led to further studies of the subject, the identification of important methodological and data questions and a broader body of empirical research about the relation between firm size and job creation.

This document aims at identifying common results and trends from national studies, as well as identifying “best practices” of analysis and data gathering, and thereby promoting international harmonisation of such analytical work. Principal results from a survey of national studies include: (a) both the rates of gross job creations and gross job losses are ...