Health care expenditure per person, after accounting for changes in overall price levels, began to slow in many OECD countries in the early-to-mid 2000s, well before the economic and fiscal crisis. Using available estimates from the OECD’s System of...

Aggregate investment has declined markedly over the crisis and has yet to recover. Reviving domestic and foreign investment is crucial to supporting the economic recovery, deepen Greece’s integration into global value chains and raising living...

Employment is pivotal to strengthening Greece’s economic recovery, increasing social welfare and redressing poverty. Jobs are returning, making inroads into high unemployment, but their wages and skill levels are lower than many that were lost during...

This paper explores cross-country differences in the design of insolvency regimes, based on quantitative indicators constructed from countries’ responses to a recent OECD policy questionnaire. The indicators – which are available for 36 countries for...

Over the past two decades, real median wage growth in many OECD countries has decoupled from labour productivity growth, partly reflecting declines in labour income shares. This paper analyses the drivers of labour share developments using a...

This paper reviews policies to strengthen Germany’s productivity growth and prepare for changes in labour markets brought about by new technologies. This paper also discusses how social protection and the bargaining framework should be reformed for...

This study explores the impact of export shocks on firms and re-aggregates results to derive distributional effects on sectors and regions. In a first step, firm level data are used to assess the empirical relationship between exports and three...

This paper compares supply and demand to assess to what extent there can be a market for GDP-linked bonds (GLBs). For the government side, simulations illustrate the debt-stabilisation property of GLBs. These simulations consider shock persistence...

This paper exploits a new database that is unique in its scale and scope containing detailed information on over two million projects carried out by one million firms that benefited from the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social...

The discussion about a fiscal stabilisation capacity as a way of providing more fiscal integration in the euro area has strengthened in the aftermath of the European sovereign debt crisis. Among the instruments that can be used for temporary...

The paper examines the possible design and macroeconomic stabilisation properties of a euro area unemployment benefits re-insurance scheme using annual historical data from 2000 to 2016. The scheme we propose is similar in some aspects to the recent...

Since the start of the Great Recession, labour productivity growth has been weak in the United Kingdom, weaker than in many other OECD countries. The productivity shortfall, defined as the gap between actual productivity and the level implied by its...

This paper reviews empirical research on finance and labour markets. Preliminary themes in the literature follow. Finance may interact with labour market institutions to jointly determine labour outcomes. Highly leveraged firms show greater...

This paper provides robust empirical evidence that government effectiveness is a key determinant of sovereign defaults. Government effectiveness is measured by a broad-based perception index of the Worldwide Governance Indicators database (WGI)...

This paper investigates the effect of structural characteristics on debt limits of middle income countries. Two equations relate the probability of default to the interest rate. First, the probability of default is estimated with a logit model....

The euro area sovereign debt crisis highlighted important weaknesses in the euro area design. Fiscal policy did not build sufficient buffers before the crisis, which forced some countries to tighten fiscal policy too rapidly during the downturn to...

Europe’s economy is finally growing robustly. These positive developments provide an opportunity to renew efforts to meet the long-term challenges facing the European Union (EU). The EU’s record on reducing regional income disparities is mixed and...

This paper examines an industry whose economic activity uses a natural capital on which its profit also relies. When such a productive natural capital has a limited capacity to recover from its exploitation, a free market tends to over-exploit it,...

The Irish economy has experienced a decline in productivity growth over the past decade. This has mostly reflected the poor performance of local firms, with the large productivity gap between foreign-owned and local enterprises having widened. Given...

This paper provides an empirical investigation on the drivers of tax and transfer income redistribution to working-age households across the OECD over the last two decades, in a context where it has been declining in the vast majority of countries....