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Legal systems provide the basic institutions for firms and markets to operate. Their quality can have important consequences on the size distribution of firms, who rely on them for contract enforcement. This paper uses the variation in legal system quality across states in Mexico to examine the relationship between judicial quality and firm size. Although the country has a single legal system, its implementation and procedures vary widely, while development outcomes there are more imbalanced and unequal than in any other country of the OECD. The effect of the legal system on inter-state firm efficiency is therefore examined. Building on Laeven and Woodruff (2007), this study uses economic census microdata and contract enforcement ratings to examine the impact of state-level legal institutions on firm and industrylevel outcomes. A robust effect of judicial quality is observed on the firm size distribution and efficiency, instrumenting for underlying historical determinants of institutions. Indicative evidence is found that the effect is strongest in more capital-intensive industries. Market size and distance-to-market are also found to matter for firm size outcomes, consistent with the new trade literature.

Nuclear power plants are typically designed to operate for 30 to 40 years. Between 2010 and 2020 a large number of nuclear power plants in the world and in OECD member countries, in particular, will reach their 30th or 40th anniversary. 1 As of June 2011, out of 440 nuclear power plants operating in the world, approximately 81% had been in operation for more than 20 years and about 35% for more than 30 years.2 In OECD member countries there are at present 339 nuclear reactors in operation, of which 135 reactors (39.8% of the total number) are over 30 years old and 15 reactors (4.4% of the total number) are over 40 years old. All nuclear reactors in Finland have reached their 30th anniversary while in the United States 56% of all reactors are beyond 30. In the United Kingdom and Germany about 42% of nuclear reactors are older than 30 years while in Canada, France and Japan, the respective percentages in this age bracket amount to 22%, 34% and 30%.

French

It is generally recognised that illicit trafficking of nuclear and other radioactive materials is a serious problem, and one that must be tackled with a comprehensive response involving national governments as well as a number of intergovernmental organisations including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA notes that 1 773 incidents were reported to its Illicit Trafficking Database, or ITDB, between January 1993 and December 2009, and that 351 of these involved “… unauthorized possession and related criminal activities” such as “… illegal possession, movement or attempts to illegally trade in or use nuclear material or radioactive sources”.

French

The OECD Global Action “Promoting Social and Solidarity Economy Ecosystems”, funded by the European Union, through its work stream on legal frameworks, endeavours to: 1) increase knowledge and understanding on legal frameworks for the social and solidarity economy; 2) explore approaches and trends of legal frameworks to regulate the social and solidarity economy as a whole and social economy organisations; and 3) understand how legal frameworks can be used to promote and develop the social and solidarity economy in different contexts. This paper defines the legal notions, traditions and approaches to better understand legal frameworks that regulate the field. It presents and analyses the diversity, relevance and implications of legal frameworks that regulate the social economy; takes stock of the processes that lead to their design and implementation; identifies possible criteria for assessing their performance; and highlights the crosscutting issues and policy examples that could inspire countries.

This paper examines the role of businesses in the tax system. In addition to being taxed directly, businesses act as withholding agents and remitters of tax on behalf of others. Yet the share of tax revenue that businesses remit to governments outside of direct tax liabilities is under-studied. This paper develops two measures of the contribution of businesses to the tax system and applies both these measures for 24 OECD countries. The results show that businesses play an important role in the tax system, both as taxpayers and as remitters of tax. However, care should be taken in interpreting any measure of the business tax burden, which must be understood against the backdrop of economic incidence. This paper highlights that the economic incidence, or burden, of a tax is not necessarily borne by the person on whom the tax is imposed under legal statute, but may be passed on to others in the economy, whether it be owners of capital, workers or consumers.

This document provides an unofficial translation of legislation on lobbying in Poland, Hungary and Lithuania.

This paper presents updated estimates of the OECD employment protection indicators for 30 OECD countries and 10 emerging economies and considers important aspects of employment protection other than those provided in legislation. Collective agreements often contain provisions relating to employment protection, but in most OECD countries, severance pay and notice periods in collective agreements are similar to those set out in legislation. Where bargaining takes place largely outside individual firms at the national, regional or sectoral level and collective agreements include provisions substantially more generous to employees than those in legislation, they are incorporated into the OECD indicators. Many OECD countries exempt some groups of firms or workers from employment protection rules. Such exemptions have mixed success in promoting employment among exempted groups, but do not have a large impact on the accuracy of the OECD indicators. More than half of OECD countries have specialised courts or procedures to handle unfair dismissal cases, reducing the time taken to deal with cases and improving satisfaction with legal outcomes. Resolving disputes early (either through pre-court dispute resolution procedures or pre-trial conciliation) saves time and money compared with waiting for a court decision. More research and cross-country comparable data are needed on the efficiency of conciliation procedures and the cost of pursuing or defending dismissal cases.

As the pandemic hit, governments asked legislatures to set aside or modify established budget practices and adopt solutions to expedite emergency responses. At the same time COVID-19 presented serious operational challenges for legislatures. They responded with creative solutions for swift action while maintaining effective oversight and accountability. Legislatures in most OECD countries were also supported with information and analysis from independent parliamentary budget offices and fiscal councils

Reforming budgetary institutions for effective government is a critical task for emerging economies. Strengthening the role of parliament in the budget process is an integral part of the restoration of democracy throughout Latin America, which requires a re-equilibration of executive and legislative prerogatives in public policy. The role of legislatures in public budgeting and public finance management has nevertheless been largely overlooked in the first stage of economic reform. This is starting to change, as the contribution of legislatures to the budgetary process is currently being re-evaluated, both in developed and, more recently, in developing countries.1 It is increasingly being recognised that parliaments have a critical role to play to strengthen economic governance, improve transparency in public finances and ensure government accountability. Enhancing legislative scrutiny of the budget and oversight of its execution is increasingly considered as a means to strengthen government accountability and curb corruption (OECD, 2002; G8, 2003).2 The international financial institutions are particularly keen to promote greater transparency in public finance management and to improve governmental financial information systems in emerging economies...

French
One of the particular features of poor countries’ economies is their volatility, due mostly to their dependence on commodities. The paper shows that this volatility is a prime factor behind the debt crises of the poorest countries. It advocates the adoption by donors of a new lending instrument: the countercyclical loan (CCL). The key idea is to reduce the grace period of a typical concessional loan, from 10 to 5 years, and to keep the remaining grace periods as an asset that the country can draw upon, when a bad shock occurs. If no such bad shocks happen, or infrequently enough, the “floating grace” is redeemed to the country at the end of the loan as a repayment in advance without penalties.
Countries differ widely with respect to the level of labour income inequality among individuals of working age. Labour income inequality is shaped by differences in wage rates, hours worked and inactivity rates. Individual labour income inequality is the main driver of household market income inequality, with family formation as well as self-employment and capital income dispersion playing a smaller role. Household disposable income dispersion is lower in all OECD countries than household market income inequality, due to the redistributive effect of tax and transfer systems, but redistribution differs widely across countries. This paper maps income inequality for all OECD countries across various inequality dimensions and summarises them in inequality outcome diamonds. It also provides a cluster analysis that identifies groups of countries that share similar inequality patterns.
This paper explores the role of macroeconomic factors and structural policies in shaping the distribution of labour income. Technological change and globalisation play at least some role in driving inequality patterns, but structural policy can also have an important influence on inequality outcomes, in particular through education and labour market policies. Drawing on empirical analysis of the links between structural policies and the distribution of labour income, the paper looks at potential policy trade-offs and complementarities with respect to the two policy objectives of lowering income inequality and raising economic growth. It concludes that many policies yield a double dividend in the sense that they contribute to achieving both goals simultaneously. This relates in particular to policies that facilitate the accumulation of human capital, that make educational achievement less dependent on personal and social circumstances, that reduce labour market dualism and that promote the labour market integration of immigrants and women.
Taxes and transfers reduce inequality in disposable income relative to market income. The effect varies, however, across OECD countries. The redistributive impact of taxes and transfers depends on the size, mix and the progressivity of each component. Some countries with a relatively small tax and welfare system (e.g. Australia) achieve the same redistributive impact as countries characterised by much higher taxes and transfers (e.g. Germany) because they rely more on income taxes, which are more progressive than other taxes, and on means-tested cash transfers. This paper provides an assessment of the redistributive effect of the main taxes and cash transfers based on a set of policy indicators and a literature review. It also identifies empirically four groups of countries with tax and transfer systems that share broadly similar features. The paper then assesses potential trade-offs and complementarities between economic growth and income redistribution objectives associated with various tax and transfer reform options.
Over the past decades, top incomes have soared, especially in the English-speaking countries. Despite a considerable amount of research on top income developments, there is still substantial disagreement about the causes for their rapid increase. Potential explanations include changes in taxation, technical progress, globalisation and changes in way the remuneration of top income recipients is set.
Poverty is an important policy issue in OECD countries and the recent crisis has made it even more pressing. This paper highlights poverty rate differences across countries and reviews the various policies to tackle it. The OECD-wide poverty rate has drifted up, reaching around 11% in the late 2000s. In the majority of OECD countries, children suffer from a higher poverty rate than working-age people and poverty is more wide-spread among women than men. Albeit boosting employment is essential to reduce poverty rates durably, work alone does not suffice to eliminate it as in-work poverty is a problem in many countries The redistribution system is effective in reducing poverty. Countries achieving a greater reduction in market-income poverty tend to redistribute more towards people at the bottom of the income distribution. Policies aiming at facilitating paid work along with employment-conditional cash transfers to top-up the income of low-wage workers can offer effective ways to combat poverty. Child poverty is also a major concern because of its adverse long-term effects. Countries with low levels of child poverty combine low levels of joblessness among parents with effective redistribution policies towards children. This suggests these two policy approaches are complementary and relying exclusively on only one of them is likely to be insufficient to reduce poverty among children significantly.
The wealth distribution within OECD countries is very concentrated and much more so than the income distribution. Wealth dispersion is especially high in the United States and Sweden. The latter illustrates that the most wealth unequal countries are not necessarily the most income unequal. Wealth inequality came down since the beginning of the 20th century until the 1970s, but has since been on the rise. Major explanations for this development are soaring financial markets in the aftermath of financial market deregulation in the 1970s, a lighter taxation of top incomes and wealth, which has favoured the accumulation of wealth, and the rising importance of inheritances and inter vivos gifts.
Unconditional and conditional quantile regressions are used to explore the determinants of labour earnings at different parts of the distribution and, hence, the determinants of overall labour earnings inequality. The analysis combines several household surveys to provide comparable estimates for 32 countries. The empirical work suggests that, in general, a rise in the share of workers with an upper-secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary degree, a rise in trade union membership, a rise in the share of public employment and a rise in the share of workers on permanent contracts are associated with a narrowing of the earnings distribution. By contrast, a shift in the sector composition of the economy is not found to have a large impact on overall earnings inequality. As for tertiary education, the impact remains ambiguous as there are several offsetting forces.
Despite a general trend of increasing labour income inequality, there have been differences in the timing, intensity and even direction of these changes across OECD countries. These stylized facts have led to numerous studies about the main determinants of labour income inequality and, as a result, a significant revision of the previous consensus about the key drivers. The most researched channels include skill-biased technological change, international trade, immigration, education as well as the role of labour market policies and institutions.

State and local governments in OECD countries have access to various fiscal resources. Discretion over them varies considerably, and so does sub-central governments’ power to shape their budget and to determine outcomes like public sector efficiency, equity in access to public services or the long term fiscal stance. Data on the revenue structure of sub-central governments (SCG) would therefore be helpful. But indicators have long insufficiently reflected the way state and local budgets are funded. The most frequently used indicator is the ratio of SCG to total tax revenue, which is a poor measure for assessing the true autonomy SCGs enjoy. Since the power over fiscal revenue is a critical determinant for government finance, a set of more refined indicators for assessing fiscal autonomy should be established.

French
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