Browse by: "2006"

This paper describes and assesses pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement policies in Canada, considering them in the context of the broader policy and market environment in which they operate, and investigating their role in contributing to Canada’s achievements in meeting a range of objectives relating to the pharmaceutical policy. The federal government regulates prices of patented pharmaceutical products with the objective of protecting consumers against excessive prices. Regulation has very likely been responsible for bringing Canada’s prices for patented medicines roughly in line with European comparators. Prices of generic products, which are not regulated, are relatively high although high...

This report looks at the effects on the distribution of household income of those government-provided services that confer a personal benefit to users. While most of the comparative evidence of the size and evolution of income inequalities in OECD countries relies on the concept of household disposable income, integrating the effects of these government services is important for both conceptual and practical reasons: first, as the tax burden levied on households represent a deduction from their disposable income, it is important to account for the services which governments provide...

This technical paper analyses the role of business services in selected OECD and non-OECD economies using recently published input-output tables for 32 countries in or close to the year 2000. Business services have long been recognised as important drivers in the global economy, and this study reinforces that view with a comprehensive, quantitative cross-country analysis of how the manufacturing and business services sectors interact in the production process. Our analysis suggests that...

This paper reviews, for a number of OECD economies, macroeconomic developments in household balance sheets over the past two decades. The main findings show that the rise in household debt to historical levels has been driven by a combination of favourable financial conditions and buoyant housing markets. There have also been a number of supply-side innovations in credit markets that have eased the access to credit for lower income borrowers and reduced financial constraints for first-time homebuyers. Total household net wealth has risen and provided households with a financial cushion against a negative shock. That said, households in a number of countries have leveraged balance sheets and the sensitivity to house price and interest rate developments has likely increased. The paper then examines micro level information which suggests that most of the debt is held by households better able to manage it. In particular, the major part of debt is held by higher-income households, who also spend a smaller proportion of their disposable income servicing debts. Lower-income households, with less ability to service debt, do not hold that much and, as such, the spill over effects from this group to the rest of the economy are perhaps not large. Whether the situation remains benign or not is discussed in the final section of the paper. Estimates presented point to significant effects of changes in net wealth on household saving rates in a large number of the countries studied.

The OECD developed a System of Composite Leading Indicators (CLIs) for its Member Countries in the early 1980?s based on the ?growth cycle? approach and up to 2006 the Organisation compiled composite leading indicators for 23 of the 30 Member countries. Country coverage has now been expanded to include recently new OECD member countries (Korea, New Zealand1, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovak Republic) and the major six OECD non-member economies (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russian Federation and South Africa) monitored by the organization in the OECD System of Composite Leading Indicators. The expansion of the OECD System of Composite Leading Indicators to include the new CLIs for the six recently new OECD member countries has implications for the calculation of the OECD total area and the OECD Europe area aggregates. In addition, the inclusion of the new CLIs for all of above twelve countries opens the possibility to calculate new area aggregates such as Major Asian economies, Eastern Europe including or excluding the Russian Federation and a World proxy to give information on the overall global development. The importance of such new regional or area aggregates is of course very much dependent on the existence of different cyclical patterns between these new aggregates and the established ones. However, the calculation of a World proxy aggregate is important in itself in so far that it will represent global development better than the OECD total area aggregate.

Recent social security reform has significantly improved the long-run sustainability of the pension system. However, the pension system continues to serve as an important barrier to a more rapid expansion of the formal-sector economy in two ways. First, early-retirement incentives (including severance payments) continue to push many incumbent formal sector workers into the informal sector, often at ages as young as 40-45. While new labour force entrants face a much higher retirement age, policies for incumbents are fiscally expensive, inequitable, and serve to swell the ranks of the informal sector. Second, even when the transition to the new pension rules is complete, net replacement rates will remain very high by OECD standards, requiring high social security contribution rates that make it too expensive for firms to employ low-skilled labour in the formal sector. Thus, further pension reform is one of the keys to overcoming Turkey’s economic duality. Finally, since the pension system does not cover the informal sector, it does little to alleviate poverty among the wider population of older people. This paper discusses a number of reforms that would increase the retirement age, reduce inter-generational inequities, and permit a significant cut in the tax wedge on labour, while better addressing old-age poverty concerns at all levels of income.

1. This paper analyses the income situation of older women living alone and examines the role of pension entitlements from derived rights for their income security. The data shows that the share of elderly women living alone is expected to increase substantially due to population ageing and women’s longer life expectancy. Many of them are at greater risk of poverty than aged couples. Taking into account that poverty among older women living alone has been on the rise in many OECD countries, old age income security of widows and divorcees will remain a challenge for policy makers. 2. The analysis of income sources shows that survivors’ pensions and divorcees’ benefits form the largest share of the incomes of elderly women living alone. It also finds a relatively strong negative relationship between the size of the pension benefit and the poverty level of older women living alone. Thus, the structure and level of public pension schemes play an important role for income adequacy and poverty risks of this group. Most OECD pension systems offer protection for widows and divorcees through contributory or non-contributory benefits. Entitlements derived from the rights of an income-earning spouse are usually calculated as a percentage of the insured worker’s rights. Preliminary calculations show that in the OECD countries examined here, non-working widows and working widows receive an average pension level of 36 and 50%, respectively, compared to an average level for couples of nearly 60% of average earnings. 3. The high poverty rate of older women living alone suggests that survivors’ pension schemes or pension benefits for divorcees are not entirely successful in providing old-age income security for this target group. As an increasing number of women work and earn their own pension entitlements, derived pension rights may become less important. However, adequate pensions will require full-time work over the whole career. In countries where women work more part-time and experience longer career interruptions due to caring for children or elderly relatives, pensions based on own contributions may be quite low. Whether poverty prevention for this group is best addressed by benefits from derived rights or by the general old-age safety net will depend on the degree of full-time female labour force participation and the evolution of poverty of older women living alone relative that of the overall older population.

Strategies to 'activate' the unemployed with the help of high-quality employment services have continuously gained importance in the policy debate. The purpose of this report is to examine how activation strategies and the performance of employment services are addressed in three countries which have undertaken considerable reforms in recent years, namely Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. All three review countries have implemented a 'mutual obligations' approach.

Product market regulation in the non-manufacturing sectors of OECD countries: measurement and highlights This paper describes a new set of indicators that measure differences in the regulation of non-manufacturing sectors of OECD countries over the past three decades. The indicators focus on regulations that affect competitive pressures in areas where competition is economically viable and on the potential costs that these regulations entail for economic activities that use the output of regulated sectors as intermediate inputs in production. The paper illustrates the methodology used to compute the indicators and the patterns of product market regulation and regulatory reform that emerge from the analysis. The robustness of results is assessed in three ways: comparing the indicators to other available data covering the same areas; computing confidence intervals around the indicator values; and listing econometric results obtained by linking the indicators to measures of competition and economic performance.

Brazil's main challenge in innovation policy is to encourage the business sector to engage in productivity-enhancing innovative activities. At 1% of GDP, R&D spending (both public and private) is comparatively low by OECD standards and is carried out predominantly by the government. Most scientists work in public universities and research institutions, rather than in the business sector. Output indicators, such as the number of patents held abroad, suggest that there is much scope for improvement. Academic patenting effort is being stepped up and should be facilitated by the easing of restrictions on the transfer and sharing of proceeds of intellectual property rights between businesses and public universities and research institutions. Innovation policy is beginning to focus on the potential synergies among science and technology promotion, R&D support and trade competitiveness. To be successful in boosting business innovation, these policies will need to be complemented by measures aimed at tackling the shortage of skills in the labour force; this shortage is among the most important deterrents to innovation in Brazil, particularly against the backdrop of a widening gap in tertiary educational attainment with respect to the OECD area.

This paper reviews the main elements of social security reform in Brazil since 1998 and discusses areas where further policy action is yet to be taken to ensure the sustainability of the social-security system over time. Outlays on pensions paid to private-sector workers have risen as a result of population ageing and the increase in the value of the minimum wage in real terms, to which the minimum pension is linked. Some features of existing social protection programmes, including means-tested old-age and disability-related benefits, reduce the incentives facing workers to seek social security coverage. At the same time, an expansion of the base of contributions to social security has been constrained by widespread labour informality. Further reform will therefore need to focus on options for containing the rise in social security spending while tackling labour informality so as to broaden the base of contributions.

This paper provides a revised measure of regulatory restrictions on inward foreign direct investment (FDI)for OECD countries and extends the approach to 13 non-member countries. The methodology is largely similar to that adopted in the previous version of the OECD indicator and covers three broad categories of restrictions: limitations on foreign ownership, screening or notification procedures, and management and operational restrictions. The FDI restrictiveness indicator captures statutory deviations from "national treatment", i.e. discrimination against foreign investment. When combined with other factors having an influence on foreign investment decisions, it has proven to be a good predictor of countries’ inward FDI performance.

Labour force participation is comparable to the OECD area for prime-age males. It is somewhat lower for females and is trending down for youths as a result of rising school enrolment. The labour market is placing an increasing premium on skills, making it particularly difficult for the less educated to find a job. Labour informality is pervasive and turnover high, especially for the less educated, discouraging investment in labour training and the acquisition of job-related skills, and perpetuating income disparities. The main policy challenge is to improve labour utilisation by reducing informality and fostering human capital accumulation on and off the job. A stable macroeconomy is a pre-condition for reducing unemployment, but a greater focus on activation within the current policy framework would be advisable. To close the remaining gender gap, female labour force participation in full-time jobs could be encouraged by increasing the supply of affordable child care and pre-school education. Labour turnover can be reduced by mitigating the incentives for negotiated separation, which currently arise from the design of severance insurance (FGTS) in the event of unfair dismissal. Skill marketability can be enhanced through the introduction of a national skills certification system, and labour training can become more cost-effective through increased contestability in existing programmes.

According to Becker [1964], when labour markets are perfectly competitive, general training is paid by the worker, who reaps all the benefits from the investment. Therefore, ceteris paribus, the greater the training wage premium, the greater the investment in general training. Using data from the European Community Household Panel, we compute a proxy of the training wage premium in clusters of homogeneous workers and find that smaller premia induce greater incidence of off-site training, which is likely to impart general skills. Our findings suggest that the Becker model provides insufficient guidance to understand empirical training patterns. Conversely, they are not inconsistent with theories of training in imperfectly competitive labour markets, in which firms may be willing to finance general training if the wage structure is compressed, that is, if the increase in productivity after training is greater than the increase in pay.

Brazil has made considerable progress in recent years towards consolidating macroeconomic stability, which is a key framework condition for sustained growth. Monetary policy continues to respond swiftly to changes in the inflation outlook, anchoring expectations. Fiscal policy has been guided by debt sustainability considerations, delivering primary budget surpluses that have often exceeded the end-year targets. Nevertheless, while the public debt-to-GDP has been reduced, it remains high, especially in comparison with other emerging-market economies. Brazil?s overarching macroeconomic challenge is therefore to continue to reduce the public debt overhang while improving the quality of fiscal adjustment, which has so far been underpinned by revenue hikes, rather than a retrenchment of expenditure commitments. To do so, measures will need to be taken to arrest the increase in current spending, especially on pensions, paving the way for subsequently removing distortions and reducing the tax burden over the medium to longer term, once the debt-to-GDP ratio has been reduced in a sustainable manner. The favourable domestic macroeconomic environment, with falling inflation and improving growth prospects, appears propitious for reform towards the gradual phasing-out of directed credit and a reduction in compulsory reserve requirements.

1. Economists and policymakers increasingly use the word “actuarial” in the analysis of pension systems and retirement incentives. But the debate is often confused. “Actuarial fairness” and “actuarial neutrality” are promoted loosely as desirable goals of pension reform. This paper distinguishes two actuarial concepts and discusses their importance for defined-benefit, defined-contribution and notional accounts pension plans. • Actuarial fairness, which requires that the present value of lifetime contributions equals the present value of lifetime benefits. Actuarial fairness relates to the entire lifetime of contributions and benefits • Actuarial neutrality, which requires that the present value of accrued pension benefits for working an additional year is the same as in the year before (meaning that benefits increase only by the additional entitlement earned in that year). Conversely, retiring a year earlier should reduce the pension benefit both by the entitlement that would have been earned during the year and by an amount to reflect the longer duration for which the pension must be paid. Actuarial neutrality is a marginal concept, relating to the effect of working an additional year. 2. The discussion shows that it is very difficult to design pension systems around these actuarial concepts alone. Most retirement income systems have several components; some of these may be actuarially fair or actuarially neutral but others, notably safety-nets to protect retirees from poverty, will by definition not fulfil the conditions of actuarial fairness or neutrality. Finally, both concepts are defined across the population, regardless of the systematic differences in life-expectancy between women and men or between low-income groups and richer workers. People who expect to live longer will get a better deal out of the pension system than those who are expected to die earlier.

Sustainable development requires well co-ordinated and functioning formal and informal institutions. In developing countries, courts, regulations and formal conventions are often observed in the breach or fail to function. By default, informal institutions – tradition, culture, family structures and general social norms – play a crucial role. Trust, solidarity and social cohesion make up the tripod of community identity which can even promote development, as the Nobel Committee recognised by awarding its 2006 Peace prize to the micro credit pioneering Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammed Yunus.

Les institutions informelles – traditions, normes sociales, pratiques religieuses…– peuvent tantôt favoriser développement, tantôt lui faire obstacle. Tout effort pour faciliter le changement de ces institutions nécessite de prendre la pleine mesure des réalités locales et d’apprécier finement l’équilibre entre le cadre institutionnel formel et les institutions informelles en place. Faire la paix avec la tradition requière des choix politiques contre intuitives, et d’accepter que parfois « le mieux est l’ennemi du bien ».