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This paper focuses on the scope for stabilizing Latin American economies to repatriate capital for the financing of long-term investments and economic recovery in the region. In particular, a simple two-period investment model is developed to show that a government seeking capital repatriation may be tempted to introduce investment subsidies on such long-term capital inflows. Typically, however, such a government will be facing the following trade off: small investment subsidies may not be sufficient to attract large-scale repatriation, and high aggregate subsidies may trigger inflationary expectations. A decreasing subsidy scheme is shown to be optimal. Such a scheme has the following properties: it provides an incentive for investors to repatriate their capital early, and at the same time, it keeps government spending low enough not to jeopardize stabilization programmes. A decreasing subsidy scheme could account for the success that the Chilean debt-equity-swap programmes have ...

This paper starts out reviewing and comparing the World Population Plan of Action and the UNESCO-UNEP Global Strategy for Environmental Education: the objectives, tactics, actors and institutions. Subsequently, the examination of numerous materials from the family planning field provides some examples to be emulated by community-based environmental activities in developing countries. Population, cultural and gender variables are also sought in some existing environmental education and protection efforts. It is hoped that such information will increase the ability to integrate these concerns into environmental education and public awareness programmes. The analysis builds on the author's previous research on gender issues ...

Latin America's insertion in the world trade system is entering a period of historical change. Driving that change will be the outcome, or failure, of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations; the increasing regionalisation of trade relations; and the profound liberalisation in Latin America of national trade regimes, which is also leading to a strong revival in the region of sub-regional integration schemes. The interaction between changes in the region's trade regimes and changes in the global determinants of foreign direct investment in manufacturing are affecting the locational advantages of Latin America as a recipient of direct investment flows as well.

The effects on Latin America of regionalisation in Europe and in the Western Hemisphere are, overall, benign. "EC 1992" is likely to have a positive net impact on Latin America's exports unless dramatic, and unlikely, discriminatory measures against third parties are introduced in conjunction with the creation of the ...

This paper provides estimates of labour productivity levels in OECD manufacturing, for 9 countries and 36 industrial sectors. It also provides an overview of some of the available evidence on cross-country productivity differences in the service sector. The paper uses industry-specific conversion factors to calculate productivity levels, based on available industry-of-origin studies and material from the expenditure approach to international comparisons. After a discussion of some methodological issues, the paper describes the estimation of manufacturing productivity levels in detail, while also referring to some other recent work on the issue. The variation in cross-country productivity levels appears to be quite large in the OECD area, suggesting that there may be scope for further productivity catch-up in many countries and many sectors ...

State-owned enterprise (SOE) restructuring has proceeded more rapidly in Viet Nam than, for example, in China and India. The government tightened the budget constraints facing SOEs virtually simultaneously with price liberalisation. While a large number of mostly small SOEs were liquidated soon after reform began, others were able to adjust through various cost-cutting measures, including sizeable labour force reductions. The government put in place a safety net composed of severance pay and early retirement schemes that, combined with natural attrition, yielded a reduction in the SOE workforce of almost one million people in less than a decade. While the largely voluntary nature of the schemes may have caused some adverse selection and made them more costly than necessary, the benefit has been to avoid social discontent. High private-sector employment growth has been a major contributor to the programme’s success.

Still, the process is not complete. Initial restructuring was ...

The paper evaluates the economics of foreign investment regulation for pension funds, with a focus on developing countries, where fully-funded pension systems are being started de novo. The analysis produces three observations. First, the benefits of global portfolio diversification apply particularly to developing-country pension assets because the volatility of asset returns is high while the risk tolerance of pensioners is low. Second, restrictions of foreign investment by domestic pension funds can hardly be justified on grounds of financial-development arguments: cross-country evidence which little support for the claim that the accumulation of pension assets would provide strong externalities for financial development. Moreover, the home bias generally observed in pension fund investment should translate into sufficient potential demand for domestic financial assets so as to deepen markets and develop the institutional infrastructure. Third, a case for initial localisation ...

This paper addresses the issue of whether covariation of long-term interest rates across G10 countries has increased in recent years and whether, as a consequence, interest rates have become less subject to the influence of national monetary authorities and domestic fundamentals. A conceptual framework based on the standard parity relations among country interest rates is described, and it is argued that historical trends in interest rates and their relations across countries can be understood reasonably well under this framework as the result of changing fundamentals and shifts in (internationally-priced) risk premia. The main empirical findings are that bilateral covariation of long-term interest rates has gone up in the 1990s among some European countries but there is no evidence of any substantial increase for countries with floating exchange rates. Variance decompositions and country-specific interest rate equations show little evidence of increasing interdependence of domestic ...

This SIGMA publication is made up of a general report, six country reports and several appendices, such as relevant regulations and the OECD checklist for regulatory decision–making. The general report on law drafting and regulatory management is designed as a hands-on tool for policymakers and law drafting personnel. It points out crucial issues for improving law drafting through creating and enforcing an adequate institutional framework, improving policy development, setting and maintaining law drafting standards, making fuller use of consultation, and improving access to legislation. This report also explains how procedures and standards should be applied to parliamentary initiatives and secondary legislation, as well as discussing the training of law drafters. The country reports offer a full account of law drafting regulations and drafting practice in Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. While reforming regulatory programmes in any democracy is a major endeavour replete with potential pitfalls, central and eastern European countries confront even greater challenges in this area. They must build up regulatory frameworks for economic and political conditions radically different than those which existed just a few years before. In particular, these countries must align their regulatory practices with those of the European Union. This implies the creation of new institutions, and control and monitoring systems.

This paper examines the growth performance of Indian States during 1970-94. We, first, propose a grouping of States according to differences in the availability of physical, social, and economic infrastructure, using principal components analysis. Then, combining principal components analysis and panel data estimation techniques, we assess the contribution of various infrastructure indicators to growth performance. The analysis tackles endogeneity issues in the provision of infrastructure by way of instrumental variables estimation for many of the infrastructure indicators. We do find evidence of conditional convergence across States. This does not rule out persistent income inequalities due to the dispersion of steady-state income levels. Such disparities are accounted for by differences, first, in the structure of production, second, in infrastructure endowments, and, third, in Statespecific fixed effects in the growth regression. Consequently, economic policy measures aiming at ...

PEB, in co-operation with the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE), hosted an experts meeting to determine how existing libraries for tertiary education may be adapted and new ones conceived to meet the future needs of the students, institutions and communities concerned.

In recent years, as China’s reform of state–owned enterprises (SOEs) has gathered momentum, the number of workers made redundant has been rising. Until now, the dismissals have affected only a fraction of the “surplus labour”, which has been estimated at 20–25 per cent of total industrial employment in SOEs. If concerns for social stability have so far dictated a gradual approach to SOE restructuring, the heavy fiscal and financial burden of loss–making SOEs has forced an acceleration of the process. Thus, far more sizeable layoffs from state enterprises could be expected in coming years.

The growth of the non–state sector has opened new job opportunities for some SOE laid–off workers. By easing the re–employment of redundant workers, a further development of the non–state sector is an important condition for a smooth restructuring of the state sector. Measures to promote further development of the non–state sector include removing remaining discrimination against the private ...

Latvia is a parliamentary republic first established on 18 November 1918, whose constitution (Satversme) was adopted on 15 February 1922. Its de facto sovereignty and independence ended with the USSR’s occupation as from 1940 and were restored by the Declaration of the Renewal of the Independence of the Republic of Latvia dated 4 May 1990 and the 21 August 1991 declaration re-establishing de facto independence, both of which proclaimed the authority of the Satversme. The Satversme was fully reinstated on 6 July 1993 when the parliament (Saeima) convened after the first democratic elections since the 1930s. On 17 June 1999, the 100-member Saeima cast 53 votes for Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who became the first woman to be elected president in the former Soviet Union.

On 11 March 1990, the Supreme Council adopted the Provisional Basic Law of the Republic of Lithuania, which was viewed as the constitution, thereby suspending the former constitution of 12 May 1938. However, the Provisional Basic Law was only a constitutional Act of a transitional character; it did not change the structure of state power, and not all of the institutions characteristic of a democratic state were re-established. The Provisional Basic Law remained in force until the autumn of 1992. On 25 October 1992 citizens voted in a referendum to approve the constitution of the Republic of Lithuania, which re-established all the traditional state institutions, i.e. the Seimas, the presidency, the government, and the judiciary. In addition, the constitution introduced some new institutions to support the democratic functioning of the state, including the constitutional court, the ombudsman, and the state control department. The constitutional court’s status and procedures for executing its powers are established by the Law on the Constitutional Court of Lithuania, which the parliament adopted on 3 February 1993. The constitution also introduced the principle of independence for local governments.

The present study was prepared in the third quarter of 1999 as a background study to a Conference organised by the OECD Committee on International Investment and Multinational Enterprises (CIME), in collaboration with the Centre for Co-operation with Non-Members and with the support of the Estonian Investment Agency, on the subject of “Foreign Direct Investment Policy and Private Sector Development in the Baltic States”. This event took place in Tallinn on 17 November 1999. Its objective was to provide an overall assessment of the contribution of foreign direct investment (FDI) to the economic transformation of the three Baltic states since their independence in 1991-1992.

The conference was one of the main activities organised in 1999 under the auspices of the OECD Baltic Regional Programme. Within the framework of the same programme, it was followed up by a Conference on Fiscal Incentives and Competition for Foreign Direct Investment in Vilnius in Spring 2000 organised in ...

This paper provides a link between the degree of entrepreneurial activity in a country and the growth performance. While a recent wave of empirical evidence suggests that the extent to which countries have shifted towards an increased role of entrepreneurship varies considerably across countries, virtually nothing is known about the consequences of lagging behind in this process. Do countries that have shifted towards a greater role for entrepreneurship enjoy greater growth? This question is crucial to policy makers, because if the opportunity cost, measured in terms of forgone growth, of a slow adjustment towards a greater role for entrepreneurship is relatively low, the consequences of not engaging in a rapid adjustment process are relatively trivial. However, if the opportunity cost is high, the consequences are more alarming. This paper offers two distinct approaches, based on two different measures of entrepreneurship – the relative share of economic activity accounted for by ...

In November 2000, the City of Bologna, Italy, welcomed a conference entitled “Living as Students”. The event was part of the European Capital of Culture project which examined the major role Bologna has played and continues to play as a university city. It also looked at the role of cities that host major universities, in and outside of Europe, as centres for the development and dissemination of culture and advanced professional training. In parallel with the conference, an international competition on student housing was organised

In this paper we present comparative evidence from OECD countries concerning the impact of product and labour market regulations on innovation. While product and labour market policies usually aim at objectives other than innovation, they may have important consequences for the profitability of firms’ innovative strategies. Our regression analysis provides some cross-country evidence that enhancing competition in the product market -- while guaranteeing intellectual property rights -- seems to have a positive impact on the innovation performance of a country. Conversely, the relationship between innovation and job protection does not seem to be univocal. The sign and magnitude of the effect of the latter crucially depends on the systems of industrial relations and the specific characteristics of each industry. Indeed, the larger the scope for resorting to internal labour markets, the lower the adjustment costs imposed by labour market regulation. Moreover, in industries with a ...

This document addresses the extent to which existing legal provisions in OECD countries impact recourse to alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in relation to disputes arising out of business-to-consumer electronic commerce.

Using two waves of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) for the Netherlands, this paper integrates recent lines of research to estimate the contribution of innovation to manufacturing multifactor productivity (MFP) growth. The model uses CIS data to control for the complementarity between internal and external knowledge bases, and investigates the importance of within-firm time interdependencies for inputs into innovation and innovation output. The results show the benefits of including more information on the technological environment of firms. Furthermore, the model shows that tracking the innovation performance of the same firms over time leads to a lower persistence of innovativeness when measured from the output side than when measured from the input side through use of R&D. Moreover, the contribution of innovation to MFP increases when estimating a static innovation model that uses the data obtained after pooling the two waves of CIS. The latter result reflects the ...

In Italy, as well as in other Southern European countries, low labor market participation rates of married women are observed together with low birth rates. Our proposed explanation for this apparent anomaly involves the Italian institutional structure, particularly as reflected in rigidities and imperfections in the labor market and characteristics of the publicly-funded child care system. These rigidities tend to simultaneously increase the costs of having children and to discourage the labor market participation of married women.

We analyze a model of labor supply and fertility, using panel data from the Bank of Italy which have been merged with regional data describing the available opportunities in each sample household’s environment. The empirical results show that the availability of child care and part time work increase both the probability of working and having a child. Policies which would provide more flexible working hours choices and greater child care availability ...