Browse by: "G"
Index
Title Index
Year Index
This paper is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the relationship between economic growth and the environment. Through a contrast of the experiences of two regional groupings of countries — East Asia and Eastern Europe — that have both experienced rapid industrialisation, it makes clear the importance of sound economic policy in encouraging efficient resource use. At the same, by contrasting the experiences of different East Asian countries, it demonstrates that economic policy is not sufficient. In the absence of reinforcing and enforceable environmental policies, rapid urban and industrial growth can cause severe environmental degradation.
The paper addresses indirectly the question: what are the costs and benefits of delaying environmental expenditures until late in the development process as some of the high performing East Asian economies have done? It finds that those countries which invested early in environmental improvements experienced virtually no tradeoff in ...
Scale-ups, i.e. firms that grow fast over a short period of time, significantly contribute to job creation and economic growth. This study uses granular firm, establishment and employee data to understand how relocations, domestic expansions or foreign acquisitions impact the life cycle of scale-ups. Around 95% of scale-ups remain in their “home” region over the 2014-20 period, reflecting the importance of their personal local business networks in driving growth. Instead of relocating, many scale-ups create new plants or branches in different regions to serve new customers, tap into new markets, or to gain access to new resources and capabilities. Scale-ups that relocate or expand continue to grow. However, relocations and expansions can be a challenge for talent retention, as they may lead existing employees to find other opportunities in new places. Foreign capital appears to support the scale-ups’ growth process. Across the five Nordic countries, between 6% and 20% of scale-ups became foreign owned between 2014 and 2020.
Across OECD countries, governments, policy makers and university managers are examining the future of higher education and questioning the role of educational research. These discussions are taking place against the backdrop that knowledge production and the contribution of higher education to the economy and the prestige and standing of nations is rapidly transforming the once benign higher education system into a competitive market place. Moreover, many governments believe the existing system of funding and/or organisation is no longer sustainable. Should research funding be spread equitably across many institutions or should only a few concentrate on research and the rest focus on teaching and training? If massification was a major force on higher education in OECD countries in the latter half of the 20th century, then competition driven in part by institutional research capacity is playing a similar role in the early 21st century. These forces are influencing in a very directive way how individual institutions are organising and managing themselves. This article looks at the specific challenges faced by new and emerging higher education institutions of growing research from a “fragile base”. In the process, their experiences raise wider questions for both higher education institutions and governments...
This paper surveys the empirical literature on the growth effects of education and social capital. The main focus is on the cross-country evidence for the OECD countries, but the paper also briefly reviews evidence from labour economics, to clarify where empirical work on education using macro data may be relatively useful. It is argued that on balance, the recent cross-country evidence points to productivity benefits of education that are at least as large as those identified by labour economists. The paper also discusses the implications of this finding. Finally, the paper reviews the emerging literature on the benefits of social capital. Since this literature is still in its early days, policy conclusions are accordingly harder to find ...
This paper presents a new data set on human capital. It is based upon data released at the OECD for a subgroup of 38 member and non-member countries, and an effort performed at the Development Centre to expand this data set to other developing countries. The key to our methodology is to minimise the extrapolations and keep the data as close as possible to those directly available from national censuses (in the spirit of the work of De la Fuente and Doménech for OECD countries). We then use this new data set to test a neo-classical model in which human capital follows the Log-Linear formulation which is favoured by Mincerian approaches. We find both in levels and in first difference that the model performs extremely well. No externalities seem to manifest themselves, either on physical or on human capital accumulation. Total factor productivity (output net of the contribution of human and physical capital), however, do appear to be smaller, by about 45 per cent in average, in the ...
This paper surveys the empirical literature on the growth effects of education and social capital. The main focus is on the cross-country evidence for the OECD countries, but the paper also briefly reviews evidence from labour economics, to clarify where empirical work on education using macro data may be relatively useful. It is argued that on balance, the recent cross-country evidence points to productivity benefits of education that are at least as large as those identified by labour economists. The paper also discusses the implications of this finding. Finally, the paper reviews the emerging literature on the benefits of social capital. Since this literature is still in its early days, policy conclusions are accordingly harder to find.
- Economic growth is, ultimately, the result of the myriad of transactions which take place in a market economy. Similarly, the distribution of income depends on who has ownership of factors of production, how much they can sell them for, and whether the resultant income is redistributed or not. It would be surprising were economic growth and income distribution not to be linked. But how exactly they might be linked has been the topic of many competing theories and empirical evaluations. Unfortunately, the studies have not led to a convergence on a common view that there is, or is not, a trade-off between the two goals of an equitable society and a rich one.
- This lack of enlightenment becomes less surprising once the empirical studies are examined in detail. Many empirical studies have looked at the final distribution of income, when some of the theories make stronger predictions about the links between growth and the distribution of income before taxes and transfers; similar ...
Guarantees have become the preferred instrument to address many financial policy objectives. The incidence of financial sector guarantee arrangements that address specific policy objectives, such as supporting financial stability, protecting consumers and influencing credit allocations, has increased markedly over the past decades and additional schemes are under consideration. This report identifies considerations regarding consistency and affordability that policymakers should take into account before introducing additional guarantee arrangements. One of them is that the safety net cannot be expanded without limits. In fact, as regards the strength of the net of government-supported guarantees for financial promises, the wider that net is cast (without altering its other key parameters), the thinner it becomes.
This booklet is a practical guide for managers of joint evaluations of development assistance programmes. It is a revision and update, in view of new experiences, of the DAC publication Effective Practices in Conducting a Joint Multi-Donor Evaluation (2000). The omission of the words "Multi-Donor" from the new title reflects the momentum in development cooperation towards broader partnerships and, specifically, joint evaluations undertaken with the participation of non-donor agencies. The update is based on the findings and recommendations in a DAC Evaluation Network Working Paper prepared by consultant Horst Breier in 2005.2 It also draws on the outcomes of a workshop: "Joint Evaluations: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom - the View from Developing Country Partners" (Nairobi, 2005) and on inputs and feedback from members and partners of the Evaluation Network.
Biorefineries present an alternative to fossil-based production, and can create employment, wealth and the ecosystem needed to make them function. Thailand is establishing a bioeconomy with widespread biorefining as a strategy for future economic growth. There is political will to establish in Thailand, if feasible, small, decentralised biorefineries to which farmers can locally deliver biomass as feedstock, which can then be processed into bio-based products. This would help to relieve rural poverty, which is still a problem in some areas of Thailand despite progress. Developing a biorefining roadmap will help to assess the feasibility of such an initiative.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, a number of tax administrations have already published domestic guidance on some of the transfer pricing implications of COVID-19. While this is an important first step in setting taxpayer expectations, facilitating co-operative compliance and delivering greater tax certainty, the two-sided nature of transfer pricing means that it is only by agreeing a common approach that tax administrations can enhance tax certainty. This Guidance clarifies and illustrates the practical application of the arm’s length principle as articulated in the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines to the unique fact patterns and specific challenges implied by the COVID-19 pandemic. Four priority issues were identified and are covered in the Guidance: (i) comparability analysis; (ii) losses and the allocation of COVID-19 specific costs; (iii) government assistance programmes; and (iv) advance pricing agreements (“APAs”). This Guidance was developed and approved by the 137 members of the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS. While it is recognised that some Inclusive Framework members may also follow the United Nations Practical Manual on Transfer Pricing for Developing Countries (2017), this Guidance should be helpful in such circumstances where the UN Manual follows a similar analytical framework and allows for similar conclusions as the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines.
The goods and services we buy are composed of inputs from various countries around the world. However, the flows of goods and services within these global production chains are not always reflected in conventional measures of international trade. The Trade in Value-Added (TiVA) indicators address this issue by considering the value added by each country in the production of goods and services that are consumed worldwide.
This guide presents the TiVA indicators published by OECD. The latest indicators were generated using the 2021 release of the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables which cover the period 1995 to 2018. The indicators are provided for 66 economies and the rest of the world (including all OECD, European Union, ASEAN and G20 countries) and a selection of region aggregates and, for 45 unique industries and related aggregates (such as total manufactures and total services) based on the ISIC Rev. 4 classification.