Browse by: "2004"

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Disputes on direct expropriation – mainly related to nationalisation that marked the 70s and 80s -- have been replaced by disputes related to foreign investment regulation ...

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.

“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 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 provides an in depth analysis of Russia’s recent growth, with a view to understanding the prospects for its continuation. It examines in detail the main drivers of growth, as well as the main developments and policies that have been underlying it. A key finding is that the role of the oil sector, and particularly privately owned oil companies, has been vastly more important in driving economic growth since 2001 than most analyses have recognised. The oil sector’s contribution to growth has hitherto been severely underestimated as official data do not account for transfer pricing and thus fail to reflect fully the importance of the hydrocarbon sector in the Russian economy. The paper further argues that prudent postcrisis fiscal policy, by balancing the federal budget over the oil-price cycle, has also been essential for creating a macroeconomic environment conducive to strong growth. Looking forward, it is argued that - given its economic structure - Russia is bound to ...

This paper focuses primarily on the issue of how to achieve high quality in the audit process. In addition to describing the types of procedures needed to achieve quality, however, it discusses basic principles and those matters of institutional management that create an environment that encourages high quality in an SAI’s work. Audit quality is obtained by a process of identifying and administering the activities needed to achieve the quality objectives of an SAI. All types of SAIs need to understand the benefits that can be realised once audit quality is made a top priority. Improving audit quality requires a systematic SAI-wide approach. Piecemeal efforts by individuals and individual audit teams are not enough and will not work. There are no quick fixes to be obtained where audit quality is concerned. SAIs need to proceed methodically in an organised way to fix each quality issue and problem in turn. As new problems will always emerge, this should be a continuous process for the SAI. It is also evident that most audit quality-related problems are mainly the result of poor management of the audit process or of the SAI itself. Ensuring high levels of quality in an audit organisation involves a succession of detailed steps that must be taken over a period of time. In fact, it is a never-ending process of continual improvement. The first requirement is to define the standards of quality and then to put quality control procedures in place that will ensure that these standards are met. These procedures need not – and should not – suppress the initiative and good judgement of the auditor in adapting to particular circumstances. However, if the auditor judges that it is necessary to depart from the usual audit techniques, it is incumbent upon the auditor to demonstrate the necessity of doing so, and to show that the approach he or she has chosen is capable of satisfying the audit objectives.

This report represents the stock-taking of the lessons learned from a series of twenty OECD case studies which examined specific market access problems arising from environmental and health requirements faced by developing country exporters. Together with a series of UNCTAD case studies and the experiences exchanged at an OECD Global Forum on Trade workshop, held in New Delhi in November 2002, the focus is on the approaches that contributed to addressing the market access difficulties. These are divided into two sections: first, those addressing information flows and capacity building needs of developing-country exporters, undertaken both by governments and non-governmental organisations; and then the procedures in developing, implementing and reviewing regulations and standards. While covering a range of natural resource-based exports and manufactures and one traded service in key OECD import markets, no generalisation can be drawn regarding the scale of the market-access problems created by environmental and health requirements.

This paper shows that China is catching up rapidly with other dynamic Asian economies and the Triad economies on a score of indicators relating to the knowledge-based economy. Taking into account that a number of measurement issues hamper international comparability to varying degrees, some of the main results are the following. • Economic growth in China has outpaced the other economies substantially. Nevertheless, GDP per capita is still considerably smaller than that of the other economies. • The main contributor to GDP in China is industry (mining; manufacturing; electricity, gas and water supply; and construction), which saw its share rise by 10 percentage points to 52% between 1990 and 2002. • Trade in goods as a percentage of GDP doubled between 1990 and 2002, reaching a level well above that of the Triad economies. The largest contribution to this expansion was made by...

In 1995, PEB published a case study on the United Kingdom’s Leith Academy. The following article examines the Academy’s original design, how the facilities have served over the 13 years since their construction and their influence on subsequent designs.

This study, that investigates two specific types of quantitative restrictions, namely import prohibitions and quotas, is part of a broad reflection aimed at learning more about the nature and scope of non-tariff measures. The analysis reviews information on these measures contained in the WTO Trade Policy Reviews, WTO notifications and in various other trade reports. The objective of the report is to contribute to discussions, particularly on market access for non-agricultural goods, at the WTO, or elsewhere. The research revealed that the use of quotas and prohibitions for economic reasons has declined, but most countries use prohibitions as part of their regulatory frameworks for protecting human safety and health or the environment, and this tendency appears to be increasing. Traders would benefit from greater transparency of these measures. Also, there are import bans hampering the international trade in used goods, whose circumstances and appropriateness in terms of regulatory efficiency merit scrutiny.

This paper analyses two factors which may cause cyclically-adjusted budget balances to give a misleading picture of underlying fiscal trends. It first explores the implications of recent large asset-market related fluctuations in government revenues for the measurement of structural budget balances. And second, it reviews the impact of the increased recourse to stopgap “one-off” measures to control deficits. The results confirm that since the late 1990s revenues have been more buoyant than would have been warranted by the registered rate of nominal output growth and the impact of tax measures. The study suggests that from 1995 to 2000 the average contribution of “unwarranted” revenues to year-to-year changes in cyclically-adjusted budget positions ranged from negligible to around ½ per cent of GDP, the main countries affected being the United States, the United Kingdom, France and some Nordic countries. Conversely, the subsequent decline in tax receipts has been sharper than could ...

The design and construction of nine schools has commenced in Australia using a Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) methodology. This is the first project in Australia where social infrastructure has been acquired in this way.

1. Macro-based effective tax rate (ETR) measures do not provide information on the level or distribution of marginal effective tax rates thought to influence household behaviour. They also do not capture differences in average ETRs facing different population sub-groups. I use EUROMOD, an EUwide tax-benefit model, to derive distributions of average and marginal ETR measures for fourteen countries. Results for each country show how many and which types of individuals face different ETR levels. I consider effective tax burdens on labour income as well as the marginal tax rates faced by working men and women. Results are broken down to isolate the influence of income taxes, social contributions and various types of social benefits ...

This background paper has been prepared to provide a broad overview of the issues associated with spam as information for participants at the OECD Workshop on Spam, to be held at the European Commission on 2-3 February 2004.

This paper examines the state of the Russian banking sector in 2004 and assesses the most important reform initiatives of the last two years, including deposit insurance legislation, a major reform of the framework for prudential supervision, steps to increase transparency in the sector, and measures to facilitate the development of specific banking activities. The overall conclusion that emerges from this analysis is that the Russian authorities’ approach to banking reform is to be commended. The design of the reform strategy reflects an awareness of the need for a ‘good fit’ between its major elements, and the main lines of the reform address some of the principal problems of the sector. The major lacuna in the Russian bank reform strategy concerns the future of state-owned banks. Despite a long-standing official commitment to reducing the role of the state – and of the Bank of Russia in particular – in the ownership of credit institutions, there is still a need for a much more ...

1. The OECD regularly produces estimates of tax burdens and benefit entitlements for a range of “typical household” situations. The results of these calculations (published in the Benefits and Wages and Taxing Wages series) are frequently used to compare countries’ tax-benefit systems and to assess progress towards specific policy objectives. This paper presents information on particular aspects of the structure of household populations across countries in order to help in the interpretation of results based on such “typical” family situations. A range of internationally comparable data sources are used to assess how relevant household circumstances such as family structure, labour market attachment and benefit coverage vary across countries. The results are used as a basis for clarifying the scope of tax-benefit indicators based on synthetically constructed household typologies.

1. “Typical household” calculations cannot be used to address essential distributional issues such as how ...

This report is intended to provide an understanding of the benefits and limitations of biometric-based technologies. It also includes information on existing privacy and security methodologies for assessing biometrics.