Browse by: "2006"

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.

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.

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.

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 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...