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The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global health tragedy. Yet as the world inches towards the end of the health crisis, another injury threatens to leave a more enduring scar: that of entrenched economic insecurity. The 2020 round of the OECD Risks that Matter survey presents a stark picture of economic disruption and rising worries about health and financial security across 25 OECD countries. Despite massive government investments in social protection during the pandemic, people in most OECD countries are looking for more public support to lift them out of the crisis – and many report a willingness to pay more in taxes in order to fund better health, pensions, employment and long-term care programmes.

Several studies have reported a large negative effect of national borders on the volume of trade. We provide new estimates of the border effect for continental Europe using road rather than great circle – or “as-crows-fly” – distance. Road distances for 48 180 European city pairs have been extracted from Bing Maps Routing Services. As our dataset also has information on travel time, we are able to consider costs related to time in addition to those depending on distance. We find that for the same great circle distance and the same city size, the road distance between two cities located in the same country is around 10% shorter than that between cities located in different ones. Travel speed is also higher between cities in the same country. We find that by using measures based on the actual road distance rather than the great circle distance, the negative effect of international borders on goods trade in a standard gravity equation is lowered by around 15%. Time-related trade costs account for an additional 10% reduction in the border effect. Overall these results point to the importance of road networks – and road transport policy in general – to enhance market integration.

The International Transport Forum at the OECD has collected data on various taxes and charges levied on road haulage since 1998. The existing International Transport Forum database presents these results for selected years between 1998 and 2008. These data allow for comparison of road freight transport fiscal regimes in different countries in quantitative terms. They have also been used as core information in various international studies. Countries use them as a basis to study cost recovery of road infrastructure by relating all the various taxes and charges levied on transport activities to costs. The 2003 ECMT Report 'Reforming Transport Taxes' developed a methodology for making such comparisons, including in relation to the marginal costs of using infrastructure (infrastructure wear, congestion and environmental and safety externalities). The data can also be used to study the existence of possible discriminatory charges. The impact of charges on competitiveness in road haulage markets can be assessed with the data by modelling trips by Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) of different nationalities on standard hauls throughout Europe and by calculating appropriate indicators. The data have also been used in a recent study to compare the internationalisation of external effects of HGVs using a number of European freight corridors (CTS, 2012).

Standard textbook analyses of road pricing tend to assume that users are homogenous, that there is no travel time risk, and to have a view of congestion as static. The simple analysis also ignores that real pricing schemes are only rough approximations to ideal systems and that the general economic context may also have implications for optimal pricing. This paper reviews these issues and discusses how taking them into account may affect estimates of optimal tolls.

The Transport Accident Commission of Victoria (TAC) was established, and is governed by, the Transport Accident Act 1986. The TAC administers a comprehensive no-fault compensation scheme for Victorians who are injured or die as a result of a transport accident. The Act also provides the TAC with a role in accident prevention and reducing the cost of transport accidents to the Victorian Community...

Road trauma is the biggest killer of young people in the world. Reductions in the incidence and severity of road related trauma is of paramount importance to society, aimed at reducing the personal and economic burden to injured people and flow-on impact to families and the broader community...

This booklet presents measures that effectively reduce road traffic deaths and serious injuries in cities. It covers urban street design, traffic management and improving mobility options. Measures are illustrated with examples reported by cities collaborating in the ITF Safer City Streets network and include information on cost and effectiveness.

The increase in market access that the expansion of the road network and the growth of Europe created between 1990 and 2012 raised GDP, employment and attracted population. An increase in market access by 1% increases GDP in a region, on average, by 0.2%, employment by 0.7% and population by 0.6%. The positive effect of market access appears to be the strongest over long-distances, most likely based on trade links that are aided by better access to regions in other countries. Predominantly urban, intermediate and predominantly rural regions benefit equally from improvements in access, however, the investment required to create the same degree of improvement in the three types of regions varies substantially. Northern, Western and Central Europe benefited consistently from market access improvements. Southern European regions with better market access gained population and employment but lacked clear GDP improvements. Conversely, Eastern Europe lost employment and population for market access improvements that occurred in a 3-hour travel time radius but had the highest economic gains in GDP and GDP per capita, 1.7% and 2.2% respectively.

As Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) are the driving force behind the overall development strategy of many developing countries, it is essential to consider the role of infrastructure in this important poverty reduction process. This document is, therefore, presented to contribute to the discussion on infrastructure and pro-poor growth of this second workshop. Participants are invited to provide comments in preparation for the third workshop. Furthermore, this document aims at facilitating discussion among donors to improve their inputs to the ongoing PRSP revision process by providing an overview of the role of infrastructure for economic growth and poverty reduction.
The present document summarises the findings of a background research paper that analyses the role of infrastructure in the PRSPs of 33 countries that completed their report as of 1 December, 2003.  The background paper offers a stocktaking of the contribution of infrastructure interventions to poverty reduction and pro-poor growth in each of these PRSPs (see Annex 1 for the summary findings of the PRSP review by country).
The present document has two main sections: the role of infrastructure in economic growth and poverty reduction in PRSPs (see section II) and enhancing effectiveness of aid to infrastructure development (see section III)...

Agri-food sectors have been going through a remarkable transformation worldwide. This process has been accompanied by an increasing use of contracts, which raises concerns about market transparency, possible consequences for actors of the food supply chains and the role a government in this changing environment. This paper provides a brief overview of structural changes in the sector and main incentives behind the increased use of contracts in agriculture, together with identifying some emerging policy issues.

Since the revolution of December 1989, Romania has returned to democratic traditions, a multi-party system and a market economy. Democratic parliamentary and presidential elections were held in 1990, 1992 and 1996. The latest parliamentary elections of November 1996 were won by the Democratic Convention of Romania (CDR), an alliance of the National Peasant Christian Democratic Party, the National Liberal Party, the Romanian Ecologist Party, and organisations and formations of civil society.

The routing system plays a fundamental role in the operation of the Internet and its security is of critical importance to the digital security of communication networks. However, there are many examples of accidental and intentional routing disruptions and security breaches that disrupt the Internet and impact networks’ digital security. This report analyses available data to quantify the scope and scale of routing incidents occurring on the global Internet, presents some of the available security techniques to limit these incidents and considers their effectiveness. While the routing system transcends national borders, the report offers policy makers a series of concrete actions to improve routing security.

This paper explores the differences, similarities and synergies between voluntary and binding approaches to international rules. Voluntary efforts to ensure that firms adhere to appropriate standards of business conduct have been an important recent development in international business. These efforts have included the publication of codes of conduct describing the nature of a firm’s commitments in such areas as environment, labour, product safety and bribery as well as implementation of specialised management systems designed to help firms honour these commitments. Yet, some NGOs and labour unions question the credibility of these efforts and wonder whether initiatives that do not have the force of law can ever be effective.

This paper notes that all approaches to the social control of business organisations – voluntary and legally binding -- have distinctive shortcomings. These include problems of: credibility arising from imperfect monitoring and enforcement; capture of the control ...

Apart from size of population and GDP, China and Viet Nam have a good deal in common. Both are economies in transition from socialist central planning to the market. Both were largely agrarian societies on the eve of their reforms and, in both, unleashing the productive forces of agriculture was an important early reform result. Indeed, a rapid improvement in rural living standards is among the outstanding achievements of both countries.

In the case of industrial development, the differences in their post-reform experience are more striking than the similarities. In both countries, industry has grown rapidly since reforms, much more rapidly on average than agriculture. Yet, the motor force of industrial growth has been different in the two countries. In China, rural township and village enterprises (TVEs) — first collectively and more recently privately owned — have led industrial growth, with state enterprises lagging far behind. In Viet Nam, growth has been comparable in state ...