This paper describes the EU-OECD method to define functional urban areas (FUAs). Being composed of a city and its commuting zone, FUAs encompass the economic and functional extent of cities based on daily people’s movements. The paper first presents briefly the methodological approach and...

This paper provides an assessment of the presence of migrants, their characteristics and integration outcomes across OECD regions, based on a new OECD database on immigrant integration at the regional level. It reveals the wide diversity of the presence of migrants within countries, as well as...

This paper discusses approaches to strengthen and monitor urban resilience through the use of indicators. Resilience is the capacity of a city or community to prepare for, respond to and adapt from dangerous and disruptive events, such as natural disasters, economic crises, demographic changes,...

Most developed countries now pursue policies that implicitly or explicitly aim at promoting compact urban form. This report analyses more than 300 academic papers that study the effects of compact urban form, and finds that 69% of the papers reviewed find positive effects associated with compact...

The concept of megaregions is increasingly put forward among academics and policy makers as a new scale of economic co-ordination and social organisation. A megaregion is most commonly understood as an economic unit that comprises an agglomeration of cities and its less dense hinterlands, which...

Contracts are a key tool for vertical co-ordination, enabling dialogue and capacity building across levels of government. They are frequently used for regional development policy in OECD and non-OECD countries. Drawing on contract theory and a variety of national experiences, this paper...

Public investment is one of the fiscal tools with the strongest impacts on growth over the long term. However, public investment is in decline compared to the period prior to the 2008 global financial crisis in many OECD countries, and particularly in the EU. The main explanation for the...

This working paper offers a synthesis of the current knowledge on the determinants of productivity. It carefully reviews both “spatial” (e.g. agglomerations, infrastructure, geography) and “aspatial” (e.g. human capital, labour regulations, industry-level innovation and dynamism)...

In a context marked by rapid urbanisation, growing housing demand and the worsening impacts of climate change, national governments play a vital role in delivering environmentally sustainable cities with adequate and affordable housing. This paper reviews national housing policy instruments from...

This paper estimates agglomeration economies in Great Britain. The analysis employs a definition of urban areas as functional economic units developed by the OECD in collaboration with the European Union to investigate the size and sources of productivity disparities across urban areas. It uses...