Browse by: "E"

This article addresses the political, social and broader economic context of public finance reforms in Angola, drawing upon historical perspectives of economic development in Africa and the country’s own experience. The article highlights changes in Angolan practices in line with generally accepted public finance principles, and demonstrates how these reforms occurred within a particular political economy and within sets of international financial, economic, trade and political relationships that influenced their design and implementation. The article illustrates how economic structures and governance systems have been directly linked to the platform of natural resources and social relationships in Angola and in the general African context.

This report reviews the literature on the effects of agri-environmental policies on environmental sustainability and economic performance in agriculture. Examining these twin impacts is essential for understanding the scope for “win-win” policies which improve both types of performance, and where trade-offs between economic and environmental objectives may arise. The review considers findings on several underlying questions: i) whether agri-environmental policy instruments successfully deliver on their objectives to improve the environmental performance of agriculture, and ii) whether agri-environmental policy instruments slow down productivity growth or if they contribute to stimulating productivity growth and improved environmental outcomes. As part of this latter question, this review considers the impacts of agri-environmental policies on innovation, economic performance and structural change in agriculture. It brings together literature from across a range of disciplines, including evidence from over 160 papers. As a whole, the reviewed literature identifies significant “room for improvement” in both the effectiveness of agri-environmental policies for improving agricultural sustainability and their economic efficiency, particularly in relation to hybrid instruments (e.g. cross-compliance) and voluntary agri-environmental schemes (AES).

Japan experienced a major change of government in September 2009. It was a remarkable political event, because Japanese politics was dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in almost all the years following the end of World War ll. The new coalition government led by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) tried to overhaul and restructure public administration and policy making in order to strengthen political leadership. In particular, they wanted to reform budgetary institutions as they fully recognised the LDP governments’ wasted public money that brought about huge fiscal deficits. They introduced new medium-term fiscal targets and planning, programme reviews, and tax expenditure report, and legislated laws to increase the rate of consumption tax from 5% to 10%. However their reforms were not successful as expected and ended in larger fiscal deficits. This paper analyses the economic and fiscal management of the DPJ Administration and why they couldn’t succeed in reforming budgetary institutions.

Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) is being used in fluoropolymer production, as surface treatment agents and for the manufacture of side-chain fluorinated polymers. However, there is evidence that PFOA and its salts have a number of hazardous properties that may cause harm to human health and the environment. This report evaluates existing economic assessments and valuations of impacts arising from PFOA and its salts.

This paper gives an overview of economic assessments of the benefits of the control of emissions of mercury compounds, discusses their completeness from a social cost point of view, and discusses the relative magnitudes of the values attached to mercury compounds in different contexts. The majority of the assessments have been conducted in the context of coal-fired electricity generation and the valuation of human health impacts linked to ingestion of methylmercury.

This study analyses the economic effects of the EU's ‘Fit for 55’ climate mitigation policies using the OECD ENV-Linkage model, a dynamic, global Computable General Equilibrium model. The model projects macroeconomic, sectoral, energy and emission trends for the EU, and for the five largest EU economies separately, up to 2035. Policy scenarios combine carbon pricing with regulations to reach the ‘Fit For 55’ emission reduction target in 2030. Additional scenarios analyse i) harmonised carbon pricing across countries and sectors, ii) different forms of revenue recycling from carbon pricing, iii) the effect of the EU’s proposed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism on competitiveness, and iv) the effect of Russia’s war against Ukraine on mitigation costs. Given the short time horizon of the analysis (until 2035), the model does not assess the positive economic benefits associated with fewer climate impacts and extreme climate events. ‘Fit for 55’ policies are projected to lead to a loss of GDP per capita of 2.1% in 2035 compared to the reference scenario (pre-‘Fit for 55’ policies), reflecting increasing production costs on the back of higher carbon pricing. Higher carbon pricing is also projected to lead to a loss of competitiveness in energy-intensive industries. The EU’s proposed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism may only partly mitigate the loss of competitiveness of energy-intensive industries. Harmonising carbon pricing across sectors would help limit the loss to GDP per capita, as a uniform carbon price is lower and allows for directing emission reduction efforts to sectors and countries with the lowest abatement costs. Finally, Russia’s war against Ukraine has not substantially increased the GDP costs of mitigation. Without the war, lower fossil fuel import prices would have led to higher fossil fuel demand, ultimately requiring more stringent mitigation action.

This paper examines the link between economic globalisation, social protection expenditure, and within-country income inequality. We examine the relationship using income inequality data from both the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID). The results based on the LIS data confirm previous findings that economic globalisation, especially economic flows, associates with higher income inequality, and that social protection expenditure are negatively associated with inequality.

Over the past few decades, economies and technologies have shifted in ways that have made people’s economic prospects more uncertain. This Policy Insights highlights the main findings from On Shaky Ground? Income Instability and Economic Insecurity in Europe, the inaugural report of the OECD Observatory on Social Mobility and Equal Opportunity. It utilises novel techniques to identify the economically insecure, those most vulnerable to income fluctuations, in European OECD countries, and explores the link between income fluctuations, social mobility, and income inequality. It also recommends a range of policies aimed at enhancing social protection timeliness to better support those with highly volatile incomes and at building financial buffers for individuals at risk of economic insecurity.

Climate change and outdoor air pollution are two of the most challenging environmental issues that modern society faces. These challenges are strongly linked through their emission sources, the sectors they affect and the policies that can be implemented to reduce emissions. They also interact in the way they affect economic growth in the coming decades, although this aspect has been neglected in the literature. This paper presents the first global analysis of the joint economic consequences of climate change and outdoor air pollution to 2060, in the absence of new policies to address these challenges. A common methodology and a consistent modelling framework is used to specify the main economic interaction effects. While this paper provides a useful framework to analyse the interactions between two environmental issues in the economic system, the results need to be interpreted carefully, because of limited data availability.

A policy reform such as trade liberalisation can accelerate structural change in an economy, causing an exogenous shift in relative factor demands. For some developing countries, the result may be an increase in skills demand associated with the adoption of newly available foreign technology and lower-cost imported capital goods. This demand shift may be permanent or only temporary, but in either case the skills supply should eventually increase in response to higher returns. One concern, however, is that with an initially highly skewed distribution of education the skilled labour supply adjustment may be prolonged; likewise any transitional increase in skill-based wage inequality.

Cyclical fluctuations in economic activity have moderated over time but the extent and dynamics of volatility remain different across OECD countries. A reason behind this heterogeneity is that countries exhibit different degrees of resilience in the face of common shocks. This paper traces divergences in resilience back to different policy settings and institutions in labour, product and financial markets. Using pooled regression analysis across 20 OECD countries over the period 1982-2003, the paper identifies the impact of policy settings on two dimensions of resilience: the impact effect of a shock and its subsequent persistence. Policies and institutions associated with rigidities in labour and product markets are found to dampen the initial impact of shocks but to make their effects more persistent, while policies allowing for deep mortgage markets lower persistence and thereby improve resilience. Combining these two dimensions of resilience, the paper then uses the estimated equations to derive indicators of resilience for the OECD countries concerned, based on their current or recent policy settings. Three groups of countries emerge. In English-speaking countries, simulations suggest shocks have a significant initial effect on activity but this impact then dies out relatively quickly. By contrast, in many continental European countries the initial impact of shocks is cushioned but their effect linger for longer, with the cumulated output loss tending to be larger than in English-speaking countries. Finally a few, mostly small, European countries combine cushioning of the initial shock with a fairly quick return to baseline.