Browse by: "PRE-2005"

It is a well recognised rule in international law that the property of aliens cannot be taken, whether for public purposes or not, without adequate compensation. Two decades ago, the disputes before the courts and the discussions in academic literature focused mainly on the standard of compensation and measuring of expropriated value. The divergent views of the developed and developing countries raised issues regarding the formation and evolution of customary law. Today, the more positive attitude of countries around the world toward foreign investment and the proliferation of bilateral treaties and other investment agreements requiring prompt, adequate and effective compensation for expropriation of foreign investments have largely deprived that debate of practical significance for foreign investors.

Disputes on direct expropriation – mainly related to nationalisation that marked the 70s and 80s -- have been replaced by disputes related to foreign investment regulation ...

This paper examines the recent slowdown in bank lending that has affected several large OECD countries. The analysis begins with a description of the importance of bank credit in the financial systems of the countries considered. The origins of the lending slowdown are analysed - - including the importance of deteriorating bank balance sheets and the BIS capital rules - - as well as its potential to depress economic activity. The paper concludes with a discussion of how monetary policy should react to unusually sluggish bank lending ...

Laval University is launching a series of major development projects aimed at meeting the needs of an institution that currently offers over 350 academic programmes to more than 36 000 students. This article will focus on three of the most important construction projects that are already under way or about to start: the Wood Processing Centre, the Optics, Photonics and Laser Centre, and Ferdinand-Vandry Hall. A brief history of the Laval University campus is provided at the end of this article.

Monetary policy affects activity, and ultimately inflation, in a number of ways. The most important of these is generally considered to be through the effect of interest rates directly on the demand for goods by households and firms. However, monetary policy can also influence activity through its impact on the value of assets that, in turn, will influence the behaviour of households and firms; e.g. by changing wealth and, through an impact on balance sheets, borrowing costs. Recent financial market developments may have made these effects of monetary policy more important but at the same time less easy to predict. In particular, the size of financial markets has risen relative to activity and readily tradable assets are becoming increasingly important relative to other financial assets. Prices of such assets tend to be sensitive to shifts in market expectations about the future course of general economic developments and in particular interest rates. With these changing financial ...

This chart compares the EC Procurement Directives and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement of Goods, Construction and Services. Most central and eastern European countries used the Model Law as the basis of their public procurement laws in the early 1990s. Now that many countries of the region are candidates for EU accession, they must adapt their laws to EC Directives. The aim of the chart is to assist in that process. The EC Procurement Directives were introduced into the European Union to further the EU’s policy of enabling enterprises from all EU states to compete fairly in public procurement markets. The most important objective of this policy is to prevent discrimination by procuring entities in favour of their own national enterprises. The EC Directives support this by, inter alia, requiring major contracts to be advertised, open to competition, and awarded through transparent procedures. These conditions make it difficult to disguise discrimination. The UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement of Goods, Construction and Services sets out procedures for the award of public contracts. It is designed for the use of countries introducing procurement laws, or reforming their procurement systems, with the aims of achieving economy and efficiency in public procurement and reducing corruption. The Model Law also seeks to promote international competition in public procurement markets. States should in general seek these objectives by advertising and holding a competition for procurements, and awarding contracts through transparent procedures.

This paper reports on the construction of an Input-Output table for the economy of Morocco. The table is calibrated to the year 1990 and details the interactions between 133 primary, manufacturing, and service sectors, relying on a combination of a more aggregate table estimated by the Moroccan government and detailed data from official sources. This table will form the core of a detailed social accounting matrix (SAM) currently under construction as part of the same work programme. Ultimately, the SAM will be incorporated into a general equilibrium model, to be used cooperatively by the Development Centre, the Moroccan government, and the World Bank for trade and resource policy analysis. This report describes in detail the construction of the Input-Output table, presents the table in its entirety, and provides some preliminary multiplier estimates elucidating the links between Moroccan agriculture and the rest of the economy ...

The Slovakian university campus usually consists of separate functional zones assembled around the campus centre. The central area allows for interaction and directs students towards other integrated centres.

This paper presents an application to Ecuador of a computable general equilibrium model with a financial component, following the lead of F. Bourguignon, W. Branson and J. de Melo. Their macro-micro model was introduced in Technical Paper No.1 "Macroeconomic Adjustment and Income Distribution. A Macro-micro Simulation Model".

The authors first review the crisis of the Ecuadorian economy, the stabilization programmes that were implemented by governments and the economic effects of these programmes. Then the model and the corresponding data base are presented and used to perform three dynamic simulations. In the first case, there is no adjustment; in the second simulation, all public expenditures are reduced by the same percentage; and in the third simulation, the annual growth in money supply is reduced. For each simulation, the authors display the effects on growth, imbalances and income distribution. Finally a sensitivity analysis has been undertaken in order to assess the impact ...

OECD Member countries have grown increasingly interested in the use of

contract type arrangements in the 1990s as a means of improving public sector

performance. This interest reflects a number of broad challenges to traditional

governance structures. These challenges include the demand for greater efficiency

through highly adaptive and flexible public sectors and the increasing pressure of

accumulated public debt and fiscal deficits. "Governments must strive to do

things better, with fewer resources, and, above all, differently."

This second edition of the Global Action Plan for Electronic Commerce published by the Alliance for Global Business (AGB) reflects a number of developments in the global discussions about electronic commerce since the first Global Action Plan was submitted on behalf of business to the OECD Ministerial in Ottawa, Canada, in October 1998.

1. During the 1980s, following the Mexican payments crisis of August 1982, a number of debt "plans" and "strategies" have been introduced, but overall progress in resolving the situation has been slow. This paper results from a project to investigate the relationship between macroeconomic developments in OECD countries and those in debtor countries. The aim is to develop tools that can help to throw light on the importance of international linkages, including those between OECD and debtor countries, in order to understand better why many of the hopes and expectations of the various debt plans have not been realised.
2. This paper presents a set of models for Latin America (DEMOD) that can be used to analyze the impact of the world macroeconomy on the economies of Latin America; these have been designed to focus in particular on growth and debt servicing capacity and to trace the development of creditworthiness indicators. In addition, debt accounting models for the highly indebted ...

“On the day we heard that there was agreement to establish an upper secondary school in the region, every house in Snaefellsnes flew the Icelandic flag,” explained one parent in the first workshop to develop the Snaefellsnes Upper Secondary School. The new school in this rural Icelandic region will be a “meeting place to learn” for students aged 16 to 20.

The Kyoto Protocol covers emissions of a range of greenhouse gases. Yet, most attempts to quantify the economic impact of implementing the Protocol’s emission targets for the period 2008-12 have focused exclusively on CO2 emissions. This paper extends previous OECD analysis confined to CO2 alone so as to cover also emissions of methane and nitrous oxide. The paper concludes that the economic costs of implementing the targets in the Kyoto Protocol are lower than suggested by an analysis confined to CO2 alone. However, over the longer term, when larger cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are required in order to have any material effect on climate, most abatement will likely have to come from CO2 and the inclusion of other gases in the analysis may not substantially alter estimates of economic costs ...

This technical paper presents the complete technical specification of the current version of the RE-GEM (Regional and Environmental General Equilibrium Model) for India. The document lists all the key structural and behavioural equations, providing a justification for the chosen model specification. In addition, a complete description is provided of the estimation methods and the sources of the Indian data used in the model; an aggregated version of the Indian regional Social Accounting Matrix we constructed is appended to this document. The object is to inform in the most detailed way possible researchers interested in building on the OECD’s modelling effort, and to provide a useful tool for informing the debate on the economics of environmental policy in developing countries ...

The newly-built library at Ireland’s Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) is innovative in design, responds to environmental conditions and identifies the campus with its location.

This paper reviews the accuracy of OECD projections over the 1982-1987 period. It is shown that, although the evolution of the economic climate was correctly projected, projection errors for economic activity and inflation varied significantly both through the period under consideration and between countries. But the average absolute error in GNP over the entire 1982/87 period was less than 1 percentage point. The biggest errors were made in the first half of the period and were more important for the smaller countries. An attempt is made to assess the likely impact of differences between assumed and realised economic policies, energy prices and exchange rates on the size and direction of the projection errors ...

This paper reviews the accuracy of the OECD Economic Outlook projections — both “current year” and “year ahead” — for output growth, inflation and current account balances (as a percentage of GDP) for the major seven countries, as well as projections for world trade growth. The sample period differs somewhat between the variables, depending on data availability, but it runs until 1998 in all cases. Several evaluation criteria were used to assess the accuracy of the OECD Economic Outlook projections. These include an inspection of projection error summary statistics; comparisons with “naive” alternative forecasts; statistical tests for unbiasedness and efficiency; and testing for directional accuracy. In addition, the paper provides an examination of the performance of OECD Economic Outlook projections over different time periods. The findings suggest that, on the basis of the conventional statistical criteria, the current year projections outperform the year ahead projections ...