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The debate on whether there are wider economic benefits from transport infrastructure investments continues to cause debate and controversy. This debate occurs both between analysts seeking to find a robust method for identifying and measuring the size of such benefits and between policy makers seeking to justify or refute the need for a particular investment. It is timely to review progress on arriving at a consensus view of the contribution of infrastructure to the wider economy which is consistent with best practice in appraisal. This paper will review progress and try to bring out some common themes for discussion. The main aim of this paper is to bring together the various alternative methodological approaches to this problem which differs not just in the detail of the analysis, but more significantly in the scale at which the analysis is undertaken. It is argued that it is of particular importance to understand the way in which changes in the provision of transport affect microeconomic decisions, including those within firms and households, and to understand the operation of markets as well as to model the resultant flows and their macroeconomic consequences.
In the vast majority of OECD economies, house prices in real terms have been moving up strongly since the mid-1990s. Because of the important role housing wealth has been playing during the current upswing, this paper will look more closely at what is underlying these developments for 18 OECD countries over the period from 1970 to the present, with a view to shedding some light on whether or not prices are in line with fundamentals. The paper begins by putting the most recent housing price run-ups in the context of the experiences of the past 35 years. It then examines current valuations against a range of benchmarks. It concludes with a review of the links between a possible correction of housing prices and real activity. The main highlights from this analysis are as follows: 1) The size and duration of the current real house price increases; the degree to which they have tended to move together across countries; and the extent to which they have disconnected from the business cycle are unprecedented. 2) Overvaluation of real house prices may only apply to a relatively small number of countries. However, the extent to which these prices look to be fairly valued depends largely on longer-term interest rates remaining at or close to their current low levels. 3) If house prices were to adjust downward, the historical record suggests that the drops might be large and that the process could be protracted, given the observed stickiness of nominal house prices and the current low rates of inflation.
Crude oil prices have trended up since the end of the 1990s, peaking at a historic high in mid-2008 that was followed by a steep price correction with a subsequent rebound. This paper considers major forces behind the evolution of the oil price, using a simple model of supply and demand elasticities as a benchmark, highlights implications for inflation and economic activity and draws some conclusions for macroeconomic policy. The analysis suggests that the run-up in crude oil prices since 2003 was due to both vigorous oil demand growth by emerging markets and, from the middle of the decade onward, a weaker than expected oil supply response to rising prices. Prices are unlikely to fall back to levels seen in the first years of the decade either over the short or medium term.
This paper examines shifts in labour productivity growth in the United States and in Europe between 1970 and 2007 based on econometric tests of structural breaks. Additionally, it makes use of time-series-based projected labour productivity growth up to 2009 in order to detect any recent break according to a central scenario as well as high and low scenarios, both derived from a 95% confidence interval. The identification of structural breaks in US labour productivity growth is far from obvious. A statistically significant break date is found in the late 1990s only if the upper scenario materialises in the future, which means that despite a clear pick-up in productivity growth in the second half of the 1990s, the size of the hump is not still large enough compared with past variation to make this change a statistically significant break. However, a significant breakpoint is detected in the mid-1990s for the difference in labour productivity growth between the United States and the EU15 based on observed data, which seems to be due to both the initial catch-up of Europe and the halt of the convergence process in the mid-1990s. Finally, European ICT-intensive countries are shown to have structurally performed better in terms of productivity growth than non-ICT-intensive countries.
Over the past 10 to 15 years, the growth of passenger vehicle travel volumes has decelerated in several high-income economies and, in some, growth has stopped or turned negative. Drawing from work presented to and discussions at the ITF Roundtable on long-run trends in travel demand, held in November 2012, this paper presents evidence on known causes of this change in growth rates and discusses knowledge gaps, hypothetical explanations and policy implications.
Prices for commodities such as minerals and metals have increased significantly over the past few years. At the same time, there has also been an increase in restrictions on the export of raw materials which has led policy makers and business people to address free trade of raw materials. This paper provides information on the present situation regarding the use of export restrictions and international disciplines on these measures. Export restrictions are maintained to achieve diverse policy objectives, including environmental protection or conservation of natural resources, promotion of downstream processing industries, controlling inflationary pressures, and for fiscal receipts reasons. Export restrictions take various forms such as export duties, quantitative restrictions, and licensing requirements. The number of countries applying export duties over the period 2003-2009 was higher than in previous years and that such duties were introduced primarily by developing and least developed countries. Under the current WTO rules, unlike quantitative export restrictions which are in principle prohibited, there is no substantive discipline on export duties, although there have been efforts to revise this at the multilateral and bilateral levels. The WTO accession process imposes several disciplines. Export restrictions have also been discussed during the DDA negotiations in both NAMA (Non-Agricultural Market Access) and agriculture negotiations. Several regional trade agreements (RTAs) went beyond the WTO by including prohibition of export duties. Export restrictions, by creating a differential between the price available to domestic processors and the price charged to foreign processors, provide domestic processing industries with an advantage. Although several governments apply export restrictions to achieve diverse policy objectives, not all rely on such restrictions. Alternative policy options with different trade impacts are used. In view of the significant impacts of export restrictions on global supply chains, transparency on the use and implementation of such measures should be substantially improved.

In the wake of the Balkan crisis, the Central and East European transition countries have been put into two groups, the seven South-East European countries (SEEC-7) and the five Central European countries (CEEC-5). SEEC-7 have not only been more immediately affected by the crisis but also show several common features of economic underdevelopment and distorted transition to a market economy. In order to help their future development, the Balkan Stability Pact has been set up. One of the aims of this internationally funded programme is to reduce investment risk in the region and lay the foundations for the inflow of private capital. This section looks at the main characteristics of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the region in comparison with CEECs. Further sections of the paper will provide a deeper insight into some crucial areas – foreign ...

This paper documents some features of recent trends in bond yields and discusses the drivers of these trends. This includes a discussion of the relationship between fiscal balances and interest rates -- with a summary of key empirical results from the literature provided in the Appendix. The main points to emerge from this analysis are as follows. First, cyclical and portfolio-allocation factors seem to have been the main driving forces behind the decline in long-term real interest rates over 2000-2003. However, in some European countries, declining (inflation, exchange-rate, and sovereign) risk premia suggest that the equilibrium real interest rate may now be somewhat lower. Second, the weight of recent evidence suggests a causal relationship from fiscal positions to long-term interest rates, at least for the United States. Thus, the actual and projected deterioration in US fiscal positions might have contributed to the recent rise in bond yields, although part of the ...

This article describes the changes that have taken place in the work of the Budget Office of the central government as a consequence of the transition from the traditional budget process, often referred to as “incremental budgeting”, to top-down budgeting. This transition has taken place in most OECD countries in the course of the last three decades and has generally led to the end of the century-old trend of growth of the public sector relative to GDP. As a consequence of this transition the role of the budget office has shifted from operational expenditure control to supervision on the maintenance of the medium term expenditure framework. In general this has led to a more co-operative relationship between the Budget Office and the financial divisions of the line ministries. This article is based on case studies in three countries, namely the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Slovenia and highlights the differences in their budgeting procedures and the extent to which the transition to top-down budgeting has been implemented.

This paper documents recent extensions and revisions made to the model underlying the long-run global macroeconomic scenarios that are published every few years. First, a fiscal block is added for 11 countries that previously lacked one. Second, public pension expenditure projections are made endogenous to the projected ratio of retirees to workers and to a hypothesis on the future evolution of benefit ratios. Cross-country differences in projected public pension expenditure thus reflect many factors, including the speed of population ageing, the evolution of employment rates for older people, especially females, and rules regarding the evolution of statutory retirement ages. Third, revised public health expenditure projections introduce a higher income elasticity in middle-income than high-income countries and makes the excess of health care inflation over GDP inflation (Baumol effect) endogenous to the projected labour productivity growth rate. And fourth, the determination of long-term interest rates is revised to associate the fiscal risk premium to net, as opposed to gross, government debt, and make its size conditional on euro area membership, the quality of public governance and the occurrence of systemic banking crises, while allowing a flight-to-safety effect during such crises to lower bond yields in countries that are providers of global safe assets.

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News from the Front Lines of Nuclear Law: Proceedings of the AIDN/INLA Regional Conference 2015 in Nuremberg (2016), edited by Christian Raetzke, Ulrike Feldmann and Akos Frank
Nuclear Non-Proliferation in International Law: Vol. I, with Foreword by Mohamed ElBaradei (2014); Vol. II, Verification and Compliance (2015); Vol. III, Legal Aspects of the Use of Nuclear Energy for Peaceful Purposes (2016), edited by Jonathan L. Black-Branch and Dieter Fleck

The Law of Nuclear Energy, Second Edition (2018) by Helen Cook
Handbook on Nuclear Regulatory Framework in India (2018) by Tyson R. Smith and M.P. Ram Mohan
Euratom at the Crossroads (2018) by Anna Södersten

Data to measure and analyse the increasing role of institutional investors in capital markets has been collected and published by the OECD for a number of years.

This dataset is now integrated in the framework of the OECD Financial Accounts. This article presents an overview of institutional investors’ assets, their components and their development in the aggregate and by country.
The Chinese economy has been undergoing fundamental structural changes since the start of reforms in 1978. An increasing number of farmers first got engaged in off-farm activities and then started to migrate to cities in the 1990s in search of jobs. Such movement of labour from less to more productive jobs boosted overall labour productivity and growth. Agglomeration and scale economies further pushed up productivity. While the productivity gains from internal migration will diminish gradually over time, urbanisation is likely to remain an important source of productivity growth in the coming decade or so. This paper first decomposes labour productivity growth over 2000-11 into a within-industry, a shift and a cross effect in a number of countries and compares China with other countries over this period. This shift-share analysis also allows a comparison of within-sector productivity gains across a large number of sectors and countries. Labour productivity alongside total factor productivity is also discussed from the perspective of its gap with the United States and growth rate over 2000-11 and in comparison with other BRIICS economies. In this analysis, manufacturing and service industries are looked at separately. This Working Paper relates to the 2015 OECD Economic Survey of China www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-china.htm
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