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This paper examines how import penetration affects firms' productivity growth taking into account the heterogeneity in firms' distance to the efficiency frontier and country differences in product market regulation. Using firm-level data for a large number of OECD countries, the analysis reveals non-linear effects of both sectoral import penetration and de jure product market regulation measures depending on firms' positions along the global distribution of productivity levels. The heterogeneous effects of international competition and domestic product market regulation on firm-level productivity growth are consistent with a neo-Schumpeterian view of trade and regulation. Close to the technology frontier, import competition has a strongly positive effect on firm-level productivity growth, with stringent domestic regulation reducing this effect substantially. However, far from the frontier, neither import competition nor its interaction with domestic regulation has a statistically significant effect on firm-level productivity growth. The results suggest that insufficient attention has been made in the trade literature to within-firm productivity growth.
This paper presents a new system for the consistent determination of import and export prices of manufactured products for use in the world trade block of the OECD INTERLINK model. It uses a system design which directly couples the bilateral determinants of export prices with the bilateral determinants of import prices. The results, however, will be obtained without the need for specific bilateral information other than the bilateral exchange rate. The model allows for price discrimination between different markets for the same exporter and features less than full pass-through of exchange rate movements into import prices ...
Oil is the main component of transport fuel. As for now, however, crude oil price (FOB-Free on board) accounts for less than a fifth of transport costs. Operating costs, wages and taxes cause the remaining four fifths. Nevertheless, oil scarcity may raise fuel costs to such a level that transport companies and citizen may suffer significant adverse impacts. A multiplication by 8 of the price of oil (compared to 2007) would double road transport cost. Yet, the rise would be global, which would enable operators to shift the cost to their clients without suffering changes in competition. Still, small operators that would not be in a position to optimize truck loads and routes would be threatened. Major oil price rise would mainly affect two aspects of mobility: aviation and private motoring. Air companies have added a special oil charge to ticket cost while changes in private motoring, which uses approximately as much fuel as air per passenger – kilometre, may lead to a situation where only the wealthiest citizens may keep driving.
Imports are often perceived as a threat to employment. However, access to imported intermediate inputs can be essential to stimulate innovation and generate employment. We investigate this question based on a unique dataset of Ecuadorian manufacturing firms, their final products and intermediate inputs. Using fixed effects instrumental variable estimation we find that firms' importing activities lead to product innovation, increase firms' product scope, reduce production costs and create employment. These impacts arise not only for producers in high-tech industries but also for firms in more traditional sectors. Employment effects are much stronger several years after the country's economic crisis.
This report attempts to assess whether -- and to what degree - better care coordination can improve health system performance in terms of quality and cost-efficiency. Coordination of care refers to policies that help create patient-centred care that is more coherent both within and across care settings and over time. Broadly speaking, it means making health-care systems more attentive to the needs of individual patients and ensuring they get the appropriate care for acute episodes as well as care aimed at stabilising their health over long periods in less costly environments. These issues are of particular interest to patients with chronic conditions and the elderly who may find it difficult to "navigate" fragmented health-care systems that are often found in OECD countries. Interest in coordination of care issues is increasing Growing interest in these issues has reflected a shift in the demands placed on health-care services. Chronic conditions have become progressively more important and are absorbing a growing share of health-care budgets. Since most of the chronically ill are elderly, this share can be expected to rise as populations age over coming decades. At the same time, many reports suggest that the quality of care that the chronically ill receive may need improvement. With these developments occurring in a context of tight public finance, some countries have been attempting to improve both the quality of care provided to the chronically ill and reduce cost pressures via changes to the architecture of health-care systems that encourage greater care coordination...
Education has been given high priority by India’s central and state governments and continues to grow fast. School access has been expanded by investment in school infrastructure and recruitment of teachers. In higher education too, the number of providers continues to rise rapidly. A new law enshrining the rights of all children to free and compulsory education will further lift enrolment, bringing closer the government’s goal of universal elementary education, which comprises eight years of schooling. Nevertheless, high drop-out rates and low attendance continues to be a challenge at lower levels and enrolment at higher levels remains modest by international standards. Private sector involvement is on the rise. While it helps expand education infrastructure, particularly in higher education, access has not always been assured and the availability of student loans for higher education needs to improve. Poor learning outcomes amongst school students and mediocre higher education provision call for more effective government regulation and funding arrangements. Expanding resources will help but they need to be deployed more effectively, while incentives and professional development systems for teachers need to be strengthened. In higher education the government has proposed reforms which have the potential to bring about much-needed improvements in regulatory effectiveness. Efforts should focus on reducing micro-regulation and improving institutional autonomy, in order to stimulate innovation and diversity. Increasing the number of institutions subjected to quality assessments will be important for lifting standards across the higher education system, while reform of recruitment and promotion mechanisms could help attract and retain talent in academia.
Mexico, like most OECD countries, is under pressure to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending. An important step in this process is to obtain objective information on the performance of programmes and agencies. Performance information allows governments to measure progress towards achieving their goals and to know what programmes and policies are working and those that are not. The majority of OECD countries are seeking to improve the development and use of performance information through performance management and budgeting reforms. These reforms aim to shift the emphasis of budgeting and management away from a focus on controlling inputs and following rules and regulations towards a focus on results.
Overall, health outcomes in China have improved tremendously over the past three decades, especially thanks to the reduction in some traditional infectious diseases. However, death rates from chronic diseases have been on the rise, not least owing to changes in life styles and deteriorating environmental conditions. Supply of health care is overwhelmingly provided publicly and hospitals have been absorbing a growing share of the resources. The number of doctors has increased fast but the level of qualification of incumbent doctors is often modest. Demand for care has risen rapidly, in line with incomes, and the relative price of care soared through the early 2000s. Hospital budgets and their doctors’ pay are partly based on the pharmaceuticals they prescribe and sell, whose prices are regulated and involve considerable cross-subsidisation. Faced with these problems, the government has launched a number of reforms. New insurance schemes have been rolled out both in rural and urban areas. As a result, coverage and use of medical facilities has increased a lot, except for migrants. In practice, however, catastrophic but also chronic illnesses continue to push people into poverty, especially in the poorer regions, given limited risk pooling at the national level. A new set of reforms was announced in 2009, aiming at universal, safe, affordable and effective basic health care by 2020. They involve investment in medical infrastructure, generalising coverage, more focus on prevention, a new essential drugs system and far-reaching reorganisation, including hospital reform. It will be important to make sure that primary care plays a greater role and that hospitals are managed more efficiently with less of a hierarchical structure. Progress will also require changes in the relative prices of treatments and higher doctors’ wages and tobacco prices.
The OECD Competition Committee debated improving competition in real estate transactions in February 2007. Real estate transactions are subject to a variety of potential limitation of competition that can have significant effects on ordinary consumers. In fact, because of the annual volume of transactions and the fact that real estate expenses (mortgage payments and rent) constitute a significant portion of spending out of available revenue to spend (often exceeding 25%), the impacts of anti-competitive action i this sector may have larger financial value than in most other sectors. Practices of real estate agents vary significantly across countries, but a common trend appears to be the introduction of listing services that may provide a platform for anti-competitive practices to spread, at the same time as the Internet potentially provides improved opportunities for real estate sellers to reach buyers directly. In many countries, the operation of transferring legal title to properties is subject to cartel-like prices. Competitive problems have also been identified in the mortgage markets, with cartel activity having been found in a least one case and a lack of non-bank sources of finance in some countries.
Health outcomes and the quality of health care in Iceland are very good by international comparison, while income-related health inequality appears to be smaller than in most other countries. However, the health-care system is costly and, according to OECD estimates, public expenditure on health and long-term care could reach 15% of GDP by 2050 if no restraining measures are taken. This highlights the importance of raising cost-effectiveness and spending efficiency more generally. To this end, it would seem advisable to remove impediments to private provision and open up the health sector to competition. At the same time, the introduction of cost-sharing should be considered where it does not exist (as in hospitals), although concerns about equity need to be taken into account. This would relieve the burden on public finances, as would the introduction of spending ceilings, cost-efficiency analysis and activity-based funding arrangements. The high cost of pharmaceuticals should be reduced by promoting competition and the use of inexpensive generic drugs.
Improving education achievement in Luxembourg is a priority for strengthening productivity growth and enhancing residents. employment prospects in the private sector, where employers mainly hire cross-border workers. Student achievement in Luxembourg is below the OECD average according to the 2003 OECD PISA study, with the performance gap between immigrant and native students being above average. A factor that makes learning more difficult in Luxembourg than in other countries is the use of three languages of instruction (Lëtzebuergesch, German and French). New empirical evidence presented in this paper based on the PISA tests suggests that the reforms over the past decade or so to attenuate these difficulties have had considerable success: the adverse impact of immigrant status on PISA test scores is around the OECD average. The fact that the performance gap between immigrant and native students is nevertheless greater than average reflects other factors, notably the relatively large difference in socio-economic background between immigrant and native students. The paper also discusses further reforms that are underway or planned to improve achievement of immigrant students. Another feature of Luxembourg.s education system is that it is highly stratified, with children being sorted into a large number of parallel tracks at an early stage and there being a high rate of grade repetition. International evidence suggests that stratification increases the impact of socio-economic background on student achievement. Reforms to reduce stratification are discussed in the remainder of the paper, together with reforms to enhance achievement more generally by improving teaching skills and basing school programmes on key competences. This paper relates to the 2006 Economic Survey of Luxembourg (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/luxembourg).
Improving education outcomes is important for Germany’s long-term economic performance and social cohesion. While student achievement is above the OECD average in science and at the OECD average in reading and mathematics according to the 2006 OECD PISA study, weaker students tend to do badly by international comparison and socio-economic and/or immigrant backgrounds have a large impact. Another problem is that the proportion of younger people that completes tertiary education is relatively low. The authorities are undertaking wide ranging reforms touching all levels of education to tackle these problems. Nevertheless, there is scope to go further by: increasing participation in early childhood education and care of children from less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds and improving the quality of such education; improving teaching quality; reducing stratification in the school system; and making tertiary education more attractive and responsive to labour-market requirements. With the reforms underway or suggested, Germany would be able to look forward to higher education achievement and attainment and, especially, greater equality of education opportunity.
Improving education outcomes is vital for achieving convergence with GDP per capita levels in Western European countries and for reducing income inequality. While some education outcomes are favourable, such as the low secondary-school drop-out rate, others have room for improvement: education achievement is below the OECD average and strongly influenced by socio-economic background; Roma children, who are mainly from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, have particularly poor achievement; labour-market outcomes are poor for graduates of secondary vocational programmes not leading to tertiary education; and tertiary attainment is low, albeit rising. Reforms have been made in recent years or are planned to address many of these weaknesses, but much remains to be done. In particular, more progress needs to be made in increasing participation in early childhood education and care, reducing stratification in the education system, helping Roma children to integrate into the education mainstream, and in attracting high quality graduates to teaching, especially in socio-economically disadvantaged schools. In addition, secondary vocational education not leading to tertiary education needs to be made more pertinent to labour-market requirements. Tertiary education also needs to be made more attractive for technical secondary school graduates.
South Africa has achieved remarkable progress in educational attainment relative to other emerging countries, but the quality of basic education for a large fraction of the Black African population is still very low. This study identifies several hurdles to the upgrading of basic education quality, such as the lack of investment in school infrastructure and learning materials in disadvantaged areas, uneven administrative capacity at the local level, low teacher quality and poor teaching of English among Black Africans. Bold action is recommended to empower schools with more physical resources, more competent school leadership and an accountable teacher workforce. Skill mismatches of supply and demand on the labour market may be further addressed by vocational education reforms and an alleviation of credit constraints at the tertiary level.
Overall, the education system fares well by international comparison. Slovenia has one of the highest shares of the population aged 25 to 64 to have completed at least upper secondary education, and ranks high in international educational achievement tests. Nevertheless, in some areas, reforms could significantly improve performance and equip the labour force with the skills most in demand in a rapidly changing economy. In particular, low student-teacher ratios, small class sizes, and a high share of non-teaching staff suggest that there is room for improving spending efficiency. Rationalising teaching and non-teaching staff would also free up valuable public resources that could be redirected towards underfunded aspects of the education system. Low enrolment rates in short vocational education programmes and in certain higher education fields, such as science and engineering, contribute to a skill deficit in some occupations, underlining the need to make such programmes more attractive. At the tertiary level, completion rates and spending per student are low by international standards, and students take too long to complete their studies. The combination of low student fees and access to generous financial support, coupled with the preferential treatment of student work until recently, creates “fake students”; it also provides genuine students with an incentive to remain in the tertiary education system too long. Introducing universal tuition fees along with loans with income-contingent repayment would help to address such issues. This Working Paper relates to the 2011 Economic Survey of Slovenia (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/Slovenia).
The unemployment rate among young people has reached painfully high levels, in particular among those young people with low levels of education. There are two crucial policy priorities to improve employment prospects for youth in Spain. First, in the very short term, there is need for quick action to target welldesigned active labour market programmes to the most disadvantaged youth and provide more job-search assistance and guidance for all youth experiencing difficulties in finding a job in the current labour market. Second, the current crisis is an opportunity to tackle some of the structural weaknesses in the Spanish youth labour market. This implies in particular reforms to prevent youth from dropping out of education at a very early stage and to improve the school to work transition of young people. Key issues are to better match skills acquired in education to those asked for by businesses, as well as to establish an effective system of vocational education, and to reduce remaining demand side barriers, notably labour market duality and a rigid collective bargaining system, which both have prevented an efficient allocation of labour resources in the past and a flexible adjustment during the crisis. This Working Paper relates to the 2012 OECD Economic Survey of Spain (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/spain).
While employment growth has accelerated, allowing unemployment to fall significantly since 2005, many low-skilled workers are still unemployed and the duration of unemployment spells is still long. The introduction of an in-work benefit for workers in low-income households, subject to a minimum of hours worked, could lower barriers to higher employment which result from a relatively high tax wedge on lowskill workers, as would the elimination of poverty traps in the pension system. Measures to improve mobility of workers across regions, notably housing policy reform, would lower long unemployment durations, as would the provision of more training to the unemployed. Impediments to higher labour market participation of young women and older workers need to be removed.
A carbon intensive energy system in the Czech Republic contributes to one of the highest ratios of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to GDP in the OECD. While EU emission reduction commitments provide the most visible and binding motivation for changing the way in which the country produces and uses energy, action is also required to improve energy security and public health and to avoid an adverse impact of emission reduction on economic growth and living standards. Energy system transformation requires ensuring a comprehensive, consistent and stable policy framework with stronger ex ante and ex post evaluation. A single carbon price should be achieved through the Emission Trading System (ETS) and carbon taxation. Excise tax rates on all fossil energy sources and products should be realigned, based on their carbon content and other environmental externalities, notably by increasing the relative taxation of diesel. Sectoral policies that complement carbon pricing in promoting greener energy sources, energy efficiency and less fuel intensive transport need to be strengthened.
In 2003, the OECD established the Financial Education Project in response to the increasing interest of its member countries in improving the financial literacy of their consumers. Phase one of this project has culminated in the publication of the first major study of financial education at the international level. This book, Improving Financial Literacy: Analysis of Issues and Policies (OECD, 2005, forthcoming), contributes to the development of consumer financial literacy by providing information to policymakers on effective financial education programmes and by facilitating the sharing of experience in the field of financial education and awareness.
Mexico has achieved a high degree of decentralisation in public services, but the Mexican fiscal federal system has important shortcomings. States and municipalities have become heavily dependent on federal transfers to finance a growing share of public spending. This leaves the burden of raising tax revenues falling almost exclusively on the federal government and reduces incentives for efficient spending and active tax collection at the subnational level. It can also lead to moral hazard and fiscal slippages. The federal government should harden the budget constraint on sub-national governments by limiting further increases in transfers and avoiding extraordinary transfers. Promoting the implementation of stronger fiscal rules, such as rules on deficits and debt ceilings, could also help to harden budget constraints and to ensure greater fiscal discipline. States should be given more taxing powers, if they are to collect a larger share of total revenues. Greater accountability and clarification of spending responsibilities could also contribute to improve the efficiency of spending among states and municipalities.