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Firm entry has rebounded after the drop experienced during the first COVID-19 lockdowns of early 2020, yet the recovery in entry rates is highly heterogeneous across countries, with possible long-term implications for employment and output growth. Financial support to firms’ liquidity and temporary changes to insolvency procedures have been effective in reducing bankruptcies, on average, by more than 30% relative to the pre-pandemic period. Policy measures may have protected viable and productive firms and avoided the systemic risks posed by a wave of bankruptcies, but at the risk of potentially keeping non-viable (the so-called zombie) firms afloat. Governments should implement a balanced strategy to phase out emergency support policies and pursue a gradual approach focusing on restoring the equity of distressed firms, encouraging timely debt restructuring and improving the efficiency of liquidation procedures, with the aim of fostering resource reallocation.
This study analyses measures that governments, companies and business associations are taking to prevent corruption in business transactions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This edition compares recent trends with those identified in the first study released in 2016, to identify areas of progress or regress, and shares updated best practices and policy recommendations for further promoting business integrity in the region.
There is a large variety of repositories that are responsible for providing long term access to data that is used for research. As data volumes and the demands for more open access to this data increase, these repositories are coming under increasing financial pressures that can undermine their long-term sustainability. This report explores the income streams, costs, value propositions, and business models for 48 research data repositories. It includes a set of recommendations designed to provide a framework for developing sustainable business models and to assist policy makers and funders in supporting repositories with a balance of policy regulation and incentives.
This study models the distance-to-default (DTD) of a large sample of banks with the aim of shedding light on policy and regulatory issues. The determinants of the distance-to-default in a panel sample of 94 banks over the period 2004 to 2011, controlling for the market beta of each bank, includes house prices, relative size, simple leverage, derivatives gross market value of exposure, trading assets, wholesale funding and cross-border revenue. The Basel Tier 1 ratio finds no support as a predictor of default risk. The un-weighted leverage ratio, on the other hand, finds strong support. At the macro level house prices are a powerful predictor of the DTD. At the business model level, the results appear to be consistent with an approach to policy that focuses on the apparent importance of the “size-derivativesleverage- wholesale funding nexus” in influencing the DTD of banks. While these results are preliminary, it is encouraging that the out-of-sample predictive power of the model improves systematically as each year of new observations is added. The results are also consistent with some central bank involvement in the supervision process, given the importance of the asset price cycle, identified in this study.
This report examines the work of the business ombudsman institutions of Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan in order to identify their successful practices, as well as gaps that can be addressed through mutual learning and knowledge sharing. It reviews key aspects of the work of these institutions, including the legal framework for their operations, independence and accountability safeguards, funding mechanisms and operational procedures. Based on the analysis, the report offers a number of recommendations that can help improve existing institutions and also be useful to countries that are considering establishing them.
Business registration is crucial for ensuring accountable, transparent and viable business environments. By bringing businesses into the formal economy, governments are able to provide more strategic and targeted policies for businesses and consumers. The objective of this working paper is to look at the importance of business registration for governments, businesses and citizens. It explores the this issue through a series of case studies that support good practices in customer orientation and joined-up government. Each of the different case studies fall under a pillar that aims to support countries in the development of their business registration systems.
The paper also aims to provide policy directions for countries in Southeast Asia when developing modern business registration systems and provides some background for the development of ASEAN’s regional business registration principles.
Investment treaty policy increasingly interacts with business responsibilities. This scoping paper first surveys the converging approaches to responsible business conduct (RBC) and business and human rights (BHR) as reflected in the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and core ILO standards. Legislative developments and court cases are examined. The paper focuses primarily on government action as part of a flexible “smart mix” to address RBC and maximise the positive contribution of business to sustainable development, but also examines some business and civil society action.
Three aspects of trade and investment treaty interaction with business responsibilities are considered: treaty impact on policy space for governments including for the non-discriminatory regulation of business; treaty provisions that buttress domestic environmental, labour or other law; and provisions that speak directly to business by, for example, encouraging RBC or establishing conditions for access to investment treaty benefits.
This report, part of the “Cities” collection, analyses the spatial distribution of formal enter¬prises and health infrastructure in West Africa. The analysis shows that sectors crucial for regional integration are concentrated in economic capitals rather than in border areas. These results illustrate the difficulty that many West African countries have in distributing the potential for economic development throughout the country. The mapping of health infrastructure shows that border towns have a surplus of medical centres and a deficit of hospitals and maternity wards relative to their urban populations. The report identifies several regions in which closer co-operation could favour the establishment of cross-border health facilities.
Also in this Collection:
“Regional Integration in Border Cities”, No. 20
“Population and Morphology of Border Cities”, No. 21
“Accessibility and Infrastructure in Border Cities”, No. 23
As Portugal is facing strong fiscal pressure, government spending on public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the road sector has become a main budgetary constraint. In this article, we show how the financial crisis has created a unique arbitrage opportunity that provides a solution to this problem. Since the private sector is in urgent need of liquidity, we suggest that the Portuguese government should use some of the bailout funds, borrowed at lower interest rates, to buy back the roads concessions, discounting future payments at the high interest rates currently charged to Portugal. For the roads already in operation, the purchase of the assets would significantly reduce future public payments and would also release money into banks and the economy. For the roads currently under construction, we propose that the government buys only the equity of these companies. That would also reduce future payments, and allow for the postponement or even cancelation of some of these projects, while granting private companies an exit from projects that they are no longer able to finance. This operation would save around half of PPP payments over the next 20 years.
Bond exchanges and buyback operations serve two main purposes. First, by reducing the outstanding amounts of bonds close to maturity, exchanges and buybacks help in reducing roll-over peaks and thus lowering refinancing risk. Second, exchanges and buybacks allow debt managers to increase the issuance of on-the-run securities above and beyond what would otherwise have been possible. The resulting more rapid build-up of new bonds enhances market liquidity of these securities. This in turn should eventually be reflected in higher bond prices. Hence, bond exchanges and buybacks are aimed at lowering refinancing risk. In addition these operations may also contribute to lower funding costs for governments.
This paper explains why a debtor country may be eager to spend foreign exchange reserves on the retirement of its cross-border obligations at market prices. A simple two-period framework shows that such spending can be profitable to both the debtor countries and their foreign creditors, and thereby provides an explanation as to why the so-called buybacks of LDC debt actually take place. An extended version of the basic framework shows how buybacks can be induced by having commercial creditors grant debt forgiveness, and why debt forgiveness thereby becomes an optimal strategy for creditors to follow ...
Produced as part of the OECD Global Action “Promoting Social and Solidarity Economy Ecosystems” funded by the European Union, it explores the potential of procurement from the social and solidarity economy in creating social dividends, takes stock of global trends in social procurement among both public and private buyers, identifies challenges in access to markets for social and solidarity economy entities, and finally, provides concrete recommendations for policy makers on how to overcome them.
En este documento se estudia el papel de los bonos sociales como instrumento para la inclusión social y el desarrollo local. El documento presenta una tipología de los bonos y sus objetivos, de los marcos institucionales y regulatorios vigentes, del uso que hacen de ellos los gobiernos locales y nacionales, y de la economía social (sección 1). Se analizan los retos y las oportunidades que plantea el desarrollo de los bonos en el contexto de la crisis de la COVID-19 y se proponen recomendaciones para aprovechar de forma efectiva los bonos sociales como instrumento para «reconstruir mejor» (sección 2). Por último, se exponen y analizan casos concretos de Bélgica, Brasil, Francia, Marruecos, México, la República Checa y Rumanía (sección 3).
Questo rapporto esamina lo sviluppo dell'ecosistema delle blockchain in Italia, sulla base della struttura e delle tendenze delle PMI e dell’imprenditoria nel Paese. Il rapporto analizza in particolare le caratteristiche e le tendenze delle aziende che introducono servizi basati sulla tecnologia blockchain nel mercato italiano, le opportunità e le sfide per lo sviluppo della loro attività economica, i settori e le imprese interessate e la pertinenza dell’azione volta a migliorare la digitalizzazione e la produttività nel settore delle PMI in generale. Il rapporto illustra altresì le tendenze recenti in materia di regolamentazione e di politiche pubbliche e propone raccomandazioni in merito a queste ultime.