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- This report discusses the impact of care allowances on women care-givers. These programmes, involving some payment for care in informal care settings, have recently been introduced in several OECD Member countries. While their primary goal has been to help older persons in need of care, their consequences for the persons providing care also deserve to be analysed. The bulk of informal care is provided by women care-givers. In this respect, long-term care systems involve a partnership between formal care systems, the state, and the family, in order to provide a continuum of care. This also renders the analysis very complex. The main objective of the paper is to answer the question: what is the impact for women care-givers of various models of care allowances for the frail elderly?
- These care allowances have been primarily instituted to address the needs of older persons for care, as well as to offer some compensation for caring responsibilities. Apart from these initial goals ...
Motivated by the recent experience in the Russian Federation, this paper examines the implications of imposing central control on the budgetary activities of a subnational government. In a highly stylised multi-task principal-agent model (Holmstrom and Milgrom (1991)), a central government cannot directly monitor the informal budgetary operations of a regional administration, but seeks to improve fiscal policies by exerting control over a “formal” regional budget and imposing (limited) costs on informal behaviour. In the static case of the model, the control of subnational budgetary operations by a benevolent central government may increase social welfare, but at the expense of higher (implicit and explicit) taxation of economic organisations in the region, lower output, and a strong orientation of informal policies toward rent seeking activities. The additional imposition of costs on regions for conducting informal budgetary operations has multiple (indeterminate) effects in ...
In the ongoing public debate on globalisation, concerns have been expressed about the economic, social and environmental impacts of deepening international trade and investment ties and about the activities of the multinational enterprises. These concerns focus on a variety of issues including labour relations, human rights, environment, corruption, control of technology and consumer protection. The high profile of this debate means that most multinational enterprises now pay close attention to public perceptions of their activities in the societies in which they operate.
Globalisation has also brought with it additional management challenges for firms in area that has come to be called “legal compliance”. Multinational enterprise are often present in dozens of jurisdictions covering many legal and regulatory areas. These companies need to keep themselves informed about the regulations affecting them and must take steps to ensure that they comply with law and regulation. Compliance ...
The recent period of sustained high growth in the United States has drawn attention to its financial system and the efficiency with which it seems to be able to channel funds to new productive investment projects, particularly in hi-tech industries. This study examines the role played by the financial systems in OECD countries and how they affect resource allocation and growth. It provides evidence suggesting that legal and regulatory framework conditions for financial systems, and particularly their enforcement and transparency, support innovation and investment in new enterprises. In addition, using dynamic panel regression techniques, the study finds significant relationships between investment and financial development, as measured by indicators of the scale of financial activity. Evidence is also found of significant relationships between financial development and growth — over and above the links via investment — indicating impacts via overall economic efficiency ...
Based on a slight extension of the inventory of 233 codes of corporate conduct collected for an earlier study (TD/TC/WP(98)74/FINAL), this paper takes a more in-depth look at the contents of the codes with respect to issue coverage and code implementation procedures.
The main findings of this investigation of 246 voluntary codes of conduct are:
The codes examined differ considerably in terms of their content and degree of detail. This reflects the underlying diversity of the organisations issuing the codes, which differ in terms of size, sector and regional affiliation. All the firms subscribing to the codes covered in this study are based in the OECD (most of the 29 member OECD countries are covered in the inventory). The firms operate in a variety of sectors including high technology, mass retailing, heavy manufacturing, light manufacturing, primary production and financial services. Some codes in the inventory are issued by business associations and others by NGOs.
The codes ...
Corporate governance matters for national development. Case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Malaysia and South Africa suggest that it has a role of growing importance to play in helping to increase the flow of financial capital to firms in developing countries. Equally important are the potential benefits of improved corporate governance for overcoming barriers, including the actions of vested interest groups, to achieving sustained productivity growth. Improved corporate governance, however, cannot be considered in isolation. In the financial sector, attention must also be given to measures to strengthen the banking sector, and a country’s financial institutions as a whole. In the “real” sector, close attention must be given to competition policy and sector–specific regulatory reform.
Forces working in favour of improved corporate governance in developing countries include those operating both on the demand and on the supply side of domestic and international ...
With the aid of a computable general equilibrium model, this paper estimates for India the magnitude of spillovers from limiting growth of greenhouse gas emissions to local air quality and the health of the urban population. The most important spillovers are reductions in emissions of particulates with associated declines in mortality and morbidity. By valuing these spillovers (or ancillary benefits), we can compare them with the welfare costs of climate policy, estimating that — on conservative assumptions — emissions could be reduced by somewhat more than 10 per cent from their 2010 baseline level without incurring net costs. With central estimates of substitution elasticities and willingness-to-pay for health improvements, “no regrets” abatement could reach around 17-18 per cent of baseline emissions. The analysis also permits assessment of the inter-regional variation in costs and benefits, finding that abatement costs are relatively low and ancillary benefits high in North and ...
This paper reviews recent studies on the links between competition, innovation and productivity growth in the long run. From a long-run perspective, one can see that gains from competition-enhancing regulatory reform are likely to exceed static gains observed in the short run since firms will continue to innovate in ways they would not have under regulation. By taking a dynamic perspective on competition and efficiency, one can also understand better the new modes of competition observed in “dynamically competitive” industries. This paper also attempts to cover some of relatively new research areas including: i) measuring welfare gains from product innovation; ii) competition and efficiency in e-commerce, education, and health care; and iii) interactions between product- and factor-market competition ...
Population ageing will reduce economic growth and increase the amount of resources that need to be transferred to the elderly, putting pressure on retirement-income- and healthcare insurance systems. The Netherlands is better placed than most OECD countries to meet these pressures because it has a large, funded occupational pension system in place. This advantage will be reinforced if the government adopts the policy that it is considering of pre-funding ageing-related budget outlays, which would entail paying off government debt over the next quarter century. Increasing labour force participation, notably for older persons would also attenuate the economic pressures associated with population ageing. In this regard, it will be important to reduce incentives for economic inactivity, especially by reforming early retirement schemes and disability insurance. Finally, raising productivity growth could also help ease these pressures by facilitating a de-coupling of government ...
This paper seeks to improve understanding of the links between innovation and competition policy. It is intended to help OECD Member countries identify ways in which they can design and implement policies that best promote innovation while protecting against anti-competitive behaviour. Special attention is given to the need for firms to co-operate during the innovation process, e.g. by forming joint ventures and by engaging in co-operative standard setting activities, and the special challenges such co-operation poses for competition policy. The paper specifically addresses competition challenges that arise from inter-firm co-operation that aims to commercialise inventions, diffuse innovation more broadly throughout the economy, or extend and elaborate on existing technology. Although the economic principles articulated here apply across the entire economy, the paper focuses attention on the information and communications technology sector, where the opportunities for innovation ...
Two contemporary developments are buffeting legislative work on the budget.
One is the drive to discipline public finance by constraining the fiscal aggregates;
the other is the effort to enlarge the legislature’s role in revenue and spending
policy. Whether these trends turn out to be complementary or contradictory will
shape the budgetary role of national legislatures in the years ahead. One scenario
is for the legislature to reinforce fiscal discipline by taking responsibility for the
budget’s totals; another is for it to undermine discipline by bombarding the budget
submitted by the government with legislative amendments that trim revenues
or boost expenditures...
All over the world governments withdraw from full funding of their universities. Nowhere this world-wide trend is illustrated more sharply than in Russia. The share of higher education in the gross domestic product has declined drastically. This has led to a dramatic reduction of the higher education budget in real terms. A consequence is the growing share of non-governmental money in the yearly budgets of the higher education sector. The basic sources for this new funding are national, international and private. They come as well from foundations as from multinationals. Their distribution over the institutions and, within the institutions, over the different departments seems extremely unequal. Therefore old academic traditions only survive in fewer and fewer schools and, within these schools, in fewer and fewer centres of excellence. For a great number of institutions the basic educational subsidy does not permit a decent remuneration of their academic staff. This forces a majority of them to look for a second and even a third job outside the university. This again weakens the institution and leads to a widening range of quality of institutions and, within each of them, of departments and centres. At the same time the field is wide open for the development of private schools, which often only select types of educational activities which are remunerative in the market...
This paper reviews the extent to which OECD countries have opened the provision of publicly funded services to competition among public and private suppliers. The paper lays out an analytical framework identifying the inherent incentive and efficiency issues associated with the provision of publicly funded services and outlines how they may be addressed via performance-related funding, benchmarking, contracting-out by public agencies and voucher schemes which allow users to choose among suppliers while maintaining public funding. Also, the empirical literature on contracting-out of technical and support services and on school choice is reviewed. In compulsory education, the provision mode is relatively uniform across OECD countries with most students by far attending public schools. However, the involvement of private institutions increase with education level and orientation towards occupational skills, and in many countries funding arrangements for public institutions are being ...
This paper examines economic challenges posed by the combination of an ageing and declining population in Hungary and develops policy-oriented recommendations for addressing them. The authors identify the scale and specific properties of the demographic problem in Hungary where the population started to decline earlier than in any other OECD country. Public support for the elderly is provided by the social-security pension system and the healthcare system. While the former was reformed with partial success in the late 1990s, the latter developed less successfully, threatening to generate massive deficits in the long run. Projections indicate that even the public pension system may become unsustainable, unless the authorities restore the parameters of the original reform and encourage successfully higher labour force participation. In this context, measures to improve employability of the numerically strong and growing Roma minority are particularly pertinent. The healthcare sector ...
The Mexican banking crisis of 1994/95 necessitated a major government rescue operation - estimated to have cost about 20 per cent of GDP. Since then, financial sector reforms have been implemented and the performance of the Mexican financial system has markedly improved, as shown by indicators of the solidity and profitability of the banking sector. This has also been helped by a large infusion of foreign capital, as international banks entered the Mexican market through mergers and/or acquisitions. Nevertheless, several challenges remain. The banking sector is still relatively inefficient and the level of non-performing loans, though fully provisioned, remains quite high by international standards. The stateowned financial intermediaries, either in the form of development banks or trust funds, still play a large role, overlapping with commercial banks in some parts of the market. And the regulatory framework is often complex and characterised by a high cost of compliance. All ...
Latin American sovereign bonds represent a significant share of the emerging debt class (50 per cent by early 2001) and so have considerably shaped the dynamics of this market. Recent financial turmoil, contagion episodes and investors’ renewed concerns with debt default call for a better understanding of sovereign bond pricing (spreads) and its determinants, either macro fundamentals, contagion or other external variables. This paper addresses two important questions not fully tackled in the existing literature: i) to what extent do permanent or transitory changes in fundamentals affect sovereign risk perception, i.e. default risk, once contagion is controlled for? ii) how can a relatively high and volatile spread be the cause of unsustainable public debt accumulation? In order to answer these questions, we estimate long-term structural equations to pin down country risk determinants for Argentina, Chile and Mexico, using a time series framework spanning 1994-2000. Unlike former ...