Browse by: "S"

The Swedish universal welfare model relies on a high tax level to finance a variety of transfers to the workingage population both in the form of income replacements and income supplements and as services for health-, child- and elderly care. The available evidence, reviewed in this Working Paper, indicates that the system has powerful redistributive properties. However, the efficiency costs of the system are substantial. Taxes and benefits combine to face income earners with high effective tax rates and the unemployed with little reward from moving into employment, resulting in a declining intensity in the utilisation of labour. A complex tax code arising out of a significant difference in tax rates for labour and capital income impedes the establishment and expansion of enterprises. An internationally-high taxation of capital income acts as an impediment to savings and the development of the domestic market for risk capital. To these domestic distortions has to be added the ...

This paper presents a database on indicators of product market regulations and employment protection legislation for most of the OECD countries and illustrates a methodology for aggregating these detailed indicators into summary indicators of the strictness of regulations. The summary indicators are obtained by means of factor analysis, in which each component of the regulatory framework is weighted according to its contribution to the overall variance in the data. These indicators are used to assess the regulatory approaches across countries as well as the interrelations between various sets of regulatory provisions. While regulatory provisions can be classified and assessed from a variety of standpoints, this paper focuses exclusively on the relative friendliness of regulations to market mechanisms: there is no attempt to assess the overall quality of regulations or their aptness in achieving their stated public policy goals. The guiding principle inspiring the conception of the ...

The eruption of violence in society is a natural phenomenon; its rise or fall depends on complex, interrelated social processes. The same applies to violence on school premises, any study of which must address the individual characteristics of young people who perpetrate violence and the specific social context of the school. Violence is a generic term, covering violence towards property as well as people.

This paper provides a summary of an OECD workshop on the causes of economic growth, held 6-7 July 2000. The topics covered include the recent growth resurgence in the United States, the potential importance of ICT and the Internet, and the part played by continual reallocation and restructuring. The paper also discusses the growth role of education, institutions, social capital, the financial sector, international trade and foreign direct investment, and indicates how research on these topics might inform policy ...

What link can be established between successful teaching and learning, and school design? Three examples of large-scale school construction and renovation projects in France may go some way towards answering this question.

Prakash Nair of the United States proposes the list below for evaluating how a school measures up to the most important requirements of the 21^st century. It addresses architects, administrators, head teachers, pupils and others responsible for or interested in the design of a new school or the renovation of an existing building.

This paper discusses product market regulatory reforms in Italy over the past decade. Special attention is given to the underlying macroeconomic context for sectoral reforms and the role played by such reforms in consolidating the gains of macroeconomic convergence for entry into the European Monetary Union. The paper suggests that the shift towards more market-oriented and less interventionist policies, has allowed Italy’s legal and institutional framework to come closer to the mainstream of good regulatory practices in the OECD countries. With Italy having been initially a laggard on the regulatory reform front, recent achievements have been remarkable. They are, however, incomplete. A major challenge is the need to secure competition in the sheltered sectors of the economy, where inflation inertia raises costs and affects the exposed sectors, thereby weakening international competitiveness ...

The legislative framework of the Italian education system has changed radically over the past five years. After decades of announcing, discussing, proposing and experimenting with reform, the school of tomorrow is rapidly becoming a reality. Is it possible today to construct school buildings that will easily house the reformed school that is being defined? This is probably the most urgent question that the administrators, managers and experts of local authorities are now seeking to answer.

The national organisation responsible for school buildings in Greece has been converted into a public limited company. The School Building Organisation (SBO) was established in 1962 to design and construct new buildings and provide educational equipment. In 1998 the SBO was transformed into an S.A. (Société Anonyme) supervised by the Greek Minister of Education with the Greek state as the sole shareholder.

Taxation is inevitable in modern economies to finance public spending, which is aimed at meeting fundamental economic and social objectives. However, efficiency losses associated with taxation need to be taken into account when the cost and benefits of public expenditure to be funded are being assessed. The public perception of the fairness of tax systems, the practical enforceability of tax rules and the cost arising from compliance are other important considerations. Against this backdrop, the OECD has reviewed in the past two years the tax systems of a number of Member countries in its periodical Economic Surveys. The analysis and policy recommendations emerging from these reviews may provide some useful lessons for other OECD countries, and these are pulled together in this paper ...

One of the OECD Economic Department’s key vehicles for analysing effects and international spillovers of macroeconomic policy as well as assessing risks to the global outlook is the macroeconometric model, INTERLINK. In the context of the Department’s regular projection exercises the model performs a variety of functions. These include 1) contributing to the construction and co-ordination of individual country projections; 2) the production of globally consistent trade projections; and 3) simulations to explore the short- to medium-term consequences of alternative economic conditions and policy assumptions. This paper briefly describes the main features of the current version of INTERLINK and presents the results of a number of standard macroeconomic shocks. These simulation results reflect the combination of unadjusted model properties and the specific stylised policy assumptions made. In the course of more routine policy analysis with the model at the OECD, these are augmented by ...

This paper deals with the construction of statistics for area or zone totals for groups of countries. It discusses various ways to construct volume and value series and reviews some of the implications for resulting indirect price indices. The paper then takes a more specific look at the Euro area and provides an empirical example concerning the aggregation of private final consumption for the 12 countries of the Euro area ...

The paper describes the methodology elaborated and used by Statistics Denmark to produce statistics on new enterprises. Statistics Denmark has developed its statistical monitoring of new enterprises based solely on the use of administrative registers. The paper also lists the indicators developed for measuring the new enterprises, the persons behind these enterprises – the new entrepreneurs, both men and women – and their qualifications. The ultimate goal of any policy targeting new enterprise start-ups is not only the creation but also the survival of the new enterprises in order to create new job possibilities and new products and services in today’s rapidly changing economy. Statistics Denmark has developed a longitudinal database as an analytical tool enabling policy makers to evaluate the programmes for new enterprises. It includes all new enterprises and enables the identification and modelling of indicators that are significant for the survival of new enterprises ...

This paper sheds light on the importance of aggregation bias in the analysis of wage shares developments over time and across countries. We focus on five European countries and the United States and show that the trend decline in the aggregate wage share observed in these countries over much of the 1980s and 1990s partly reflects changes in the sectoral composition of the economy. The application of a fixed-weight aggregation method changes the profile of the observed wage share in a significant way: in particular there is no longer sign of an overshooting of the wage share levels of the early-1970s. Error-correction wage equations based on the adjusted wage shares generally have a better regression fit and show long-run elasticities of real wages to unemployment that vary less across countries and are substantially lower than those obtained with observed shares. These results are broadly confirmed by wage regressions using sectoral data and the Pooled Mean Group estimator ...

School Works, a not-for-profit company in the United Kingdom, has developed a secondary school design process which enables communities to create unique school buildings that cater for their own particular needs. At the heart of this process is the basic principle that it is the people who work and learn in a school building every day who really understand its ethos, its needs, its strengths and its weaknesses, and that truly involving the school community will generate an innate sense of ownership and respect for the buildings. School Works has put its participatory process into practice at an inner-city school in London.

This paper analyses the Hungarian public expenditure system and develops policy-oriented recommendations for its improvement. Despite substantial progress achieved in the management of public finances over the 1990s, the level of public expenditure and taxation relative to national income has been comparatively high while the budget process has continued to be driven by short-term considerations and remains input- rather than output-oriented. The government’s economic pre-accession programme submitted to the European Commission for the time period 2002-04 needs to be complemented by a thorough public expenditure reform in order to achieve its ambitious targets, implying significant fiscal tightening. This reform entails the development of a medium-term, output-oriented expenditure framework characterised by transparent and comprehensive budget procedures for all fiscal activities of the general government. Effective spending in areas critical for future growth performance -- ...

How do multinational firms affect both the demand for and supply of skills in host country labour markets? On the demand side, inward FDI can stimulate demand for skilled workers in host countries through several channels. Most empirical evidence indicates that these channels work mainly within multinationals themselves, rather than through knowledge spillovers to domestic firms. On the supply side, the question of how inward FDI influences the development of human capital is much more difficult to answer. There are two different modes by which multinational enterprises (MNEs) can facilitate investments in human capital. One involves short-term, firm-level activities by which individual firms interact with host country labour markets. The other involves longterm, country-level activities by which MNEs collectively contribute to an overall macro environment where fiscal policy can support and drive education policy ...