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This paper examines the prospects for reform of Russia’s healthcare system. It begins by exploring a number of fundamental imbalances that characterise the current half-reformed system of healthcare provision before going on to assess the government’s plans for going ahead with healthcare reform over the medium term. The challenges it faces include strengthening primary care provision and reducing the current over-reliance on tertiary care; restructuring the incentives facing healthcare providers; and completing the reform of the system of mandatory medical insurance.
  • 31 Jul 2023
  • Yan Bai, Jill Bouscarat, Kristina Sokourenko, Philipp Heinrigs, Koffi Zougbédé
  • Pages: 34
  • in West African Papers

The Sahel and West Africa region is facing a serious food and nutrition security crisis with high rates of acute malnutrition, combined with high rates of malnourishment and over-nourishment – the “triple burden of malnutrition”. Poor-quality diets are the root of all forms of malnutrition, as well as common non-communicable diseases, and are responsible for an estimated one in five adult deaths globally. The high cost of food is a key barrier to accessing a healthy diet. Even before the recent global inflation in food prices, West Africa’s food prices were 30%-40% higher than other regions in the world of comparable income levels. The paper analyses the costs of healthy diets in 17 countries in the Sahel and West Africa and which food groups drive up costs. The observed high cross-country variability in costs and cost composition points to a need for more targeted and nutrition-sensitive food system policies as well as the need to invest in better food price data and monitoring capacities.

French
Every house is different. It is important that house price indexes take account of these quality differences. Hedonic methods which express house prices as a function of a vector of characteristics (such as number of bedrooms and bathrooms, land area and location) are particularly useful for this purpose. In this report I consider some of the developments in the hedonic methodology, as it is applied in a housing context, that have occurred in the last three decades. A number of hedonic house price indexes are now available. However, it is often difficult to see how these indexes relate to each other. For this reason the paper attempts to impose some structure on the literature by developing a taxonomy of hedonic methods, and then show how existing methods fit into this taxonomy. Also discussed are some promising areas for future research in the hedonic field, particularly the use of geospatial data and nonparametric methods for better capturing the impact of location on house prices. The main criticisms of the hedonic approach are evaluated and compared with the repeat sales and stratified median methods. The overall conclusion is that the advantages of the hedonic approach outweigh its disadvantages.
This paper sets out a framework to estimate quality-adjusted price levels and price changes for fixed broadband services in OECD countries. We extend and adapt existing hedonic frameworks for international and interarea comparisons and consider the extended country product dummy approach. Hedonic pricing studies often are context and data dependent, and this study is no exception. We find that the multilevel structure of international broadband price datasets suggests modeling hedonic functions at the company level. This not only mitigates efficiency loss due to lack of subscriber information on individual plans but also allows for company costs and markups to influence estimates of hedonic function coefficients. Incorporating random variation in hedonic slope coefficients at the ISP level produces results that statistically dominate standard models where slope coefficients are the same across countries, and we suggest how price comparisons based on random coefficient hedonic models might be useful in telecommunications policy analysis.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an area of research and technology application that can have a significant impact on public policies and services in many ways. In just a few years, it is expected that the potential will exist to free up nearly one-third of public servants’ time, allowing them to shift from mundane tasks to high-value work. Governments can also use AI to design better policies and make better decisions, improve communication and engagement with citizens and residents, and improve the speed and quality of public services. While the potential benefits of AI are significant, attaining them is not an easy task. Government use of AI trails that of the private sector; the field is complex and has a steep learning curve; and the purpose of, and context within, government are unique and present a number of challenges.

Large-scale natural disasters can have long-lasting effects on the labour market in affected areas in addition to their humanitarian and economic cost. Mass evacuations and disruptions to housing, transport, social services and infrastructure can impede labour market participation. Firms may need to lay off workers, permanently or temporarily, as they deal with physical damage and loss of customers. Even if employment levels return to their pre-disaster levels, the mix of jobs and workers may have changed, so that skills shortages coexist with relatively high unemployment rates. Governments have an important role to play in helping prevent unnecessary job losses, providing income support and re-employment assistance to displaced workers while they find new jobs and creating the environment to encourage job creation as the recovery takes hold. This paper examines the labour market impact of recent natural disasters in six OECD countries, outlines labour market and income support policies implemented to help those affected and discusses the challenges of implementing such policies in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in generating economic activity and employment in developing and developed countries. However, partly due to remaining at-the-border trade costs, SMEs continue to be less represented in international trade – as direct exporters or importers – than larger firms. Drawing on cross-country data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES), together with the OECD Trade by Enterprise Characteristics (TEC), this paper looks at the relationship between the trade facilitation environment – as measured through the OECD Trade Facilitation Indicators (TFIs) – and various measures of international engagement of SMEs. While there are differentiated impacts across firm size for different trade facilitation areas, the analysis shows that firms of all sizes across both developed and developing economies benefit from improvements in the overall trade facilitation environment, helping them export and import. However, on aggregate, smaller firms benefit more from improvements in the overall trade facilitation environment relative to large firms. The analysis also suggests that some trade facilitation measures matter more in addressing fixed versus variable costs for SMEs and provides some guidance as to what trade facilitation policy reforms might be prioritised.

French

The economic shock induced by the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating structural changes and is posing new challenges. Austria faces wider growth opportunities and new adjustment challenges related notably to two major structural transformations: transition to carbonless growth and the generalisation of more advanced forms of digitalisation. These imply new entries and exits in the business sector, more capital and labour re-allocations and greater geographic mobility of labour. A better activation of the existing talent pool, in particular female, elderly and migrant workers is also needed to address the ageing of the society. In this context public policies should aim at further stimulating business dynamism by facilitating market entries; supporting firms’ capacity to invest by helping strengthen their balance sheets; better adapting skills to jobs for all categories of workers; and providing the right incentives to R&D to boost long-term innovation.

Aid ineffectiveness, fragmentation, and volatility have already been highlighted by scholars and OECD studies. Far fewer studies have been devoted to another problem of capital flows: herding behaviour. Building upon a methodology applied to financial markets, where herding is a common feature, this article attempts to measure herding behaviour in the allocation of foreign aid, proposing different indexes that try to capture the specific features of aid allocation. Of course, herding can also be beneficial. When a country faces an earthquake, a tsunami, or any humanitarian disaster, the rush of donors is a positive factor. Excluding such cases of beneficial herding, we attempt to focus on pure herding behaviour, creating pendulum swing effects comparable to those in financial markets. . Our different indexes all detect donor herding, its exact size depending on the measure adopted. Our preferred index, relying on threeyear disbursements, indicates a significant level of herding, similar to that which is found on financial markets. We also uncover major differences across different types of donors, with no, or very limited, herding among multilateral donors, in contrast to bilateral donors, always subject to herding behaviour. We then follow by investigating the empirical causes of herding. We find that while political transitions away from democracy are accompanied by herding out, transitions towards democracy do not affect herding levels. Finally, we show that observable determinants actually explain little of the herding levels, leaving a large part of herding unexplained.

Business tendency survey indicators are widely recognised as a key instrument for business cycle forecasting. Their leading indicator property is assessed with regard to forecasting industrial production in Russia and Germany. For this purpose, vector autoregressive (VAR) models are specified and estimated to construct forecasts. As the potential number of lags included is large, we compare full-specified VAR models with subset models obtained using a Genetic Algorithm enabling “holes” in multivariate lag structures. The problem is complicated by the fact that a structural break and seasonal variation of indicators have to be taken into account. The models allow for a comparison of the dynamic adjustment and the forecasting performance of the leading indicators for both countries revealing marked differences between Russia and Germany.

JEL classification: C52, C61, E37
Keywords: Leading indicators, business cycle forecasts, VAR, model selection, genetic algorithms

This report explores the impacts that the introduction of higher capacity vehicles has on road freight transport markets, modal shift, infrastructure and safety. It investigates how appropriate regulation together with ITS measures could be applied for relaxing the weight and dimension restrictions and allowing the use of these vehicles in specific geographical areas or on specific routes.

In 2007 the Portuguese government launched a major school modernisation programme, and has taken steps to ensure the long-term sustainability of facilities. Projects now anticipate use by the broader community, allow for possible income-generating opportunities during the design phase and include custom-designed energy management systems.

The European railway industry continues to undergo reform and liberalization due to European law incentives. Recent events in Italy give the country a special place in this process: a new competitor has commenced operations in the high-speed rail (HSR) market based on a private initiative. This paper aims to investigate this rail transport innovation looking for the driving forces and obstacles and to identify the main impacts for the Italian consumers. We also try to provide some interesting results helpful for other countries regarding passenger rail reforms. Based on the Italian case, it seems that open access competition in the HSR market is able to produce significant improvements in favour of passengers and also a ‘win-win’ game between all railway actors.

Unemployment has emerged as one of the most pressing economic concerns in the majority of OECD countries. However, experiences differ across countries as regards the level, volatility and composition of unemployment. Nevertheless, a common feature in many countries is that given levels of wage acceleration, capacity utilisation and vacancy rates are now associated with much higher levels of unemployment than used to be the case two decades ago. Countries seem to differ in the extent to which rising trend unemployment reflects a rise in equilibrium unemployment ("the natural rate") or slow adjustment towards an equilibrium level which is lower than trend unemployment. A number of factors can be pointed to as affecting either equilibrium unemployment or the speed of adjustment in labour markets. Such factors comprise both labour market institutions and policies as well as features that are outside the realm of structural policies. A review of the literature as well as the examination ...

This STI Working Paper deals with this group of rapidly expanding firms. It does so by placing the discussion into a context of entrepreneurship, arguing that there are two main aspects to this notion: one of business start-ups and market entry, and another one of innovation. Evidence is based on results from five OECD countries (Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden) as well as from Quebec (Canada). Each of these studies used a firm-level data set to identify high-growth firms and their differentiating characteristics. High-growth firms are those firms that rank first according to a measure that combines relative (percentage) and absolute rates of employment expansion.

Despite considerable differences in the underlying data and some of the methodologies, number of common findings emerge:

  • High-growth firms account for a disproportionately large part of gross jobs gained.
  • Small firms exhibit higher net job creation rates than large firms do. At the same time, significant flows ...
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