Regional inequality has increased in Sweden over the past decades, albeit from a low level. While redistribution and other public policies can narrow regional gaps in income, well-being and access to services, productivity growth is key to maintaining economic dynamism, creating job...

Productivity in Turkey has been growing stronger than in most peer countries since 2010 but has slowed down. Despite a remarkably entrepreneurial population, business dynamism has also been less vigorous in recent years. This working paper discusses the factors behind this slowdown and analyses...

This paper sheds light on inter-regional migration, housing and the role of policies, drawing on a new comparative cross-country approach. The results show that OECD countries exhibit stark variation in both levels and trends in inter-regional migration, which is found to be highly responsive to...

Using a micro-level model of investment, this paper finds that firm-debt and investment are negatively associated across firms in Austrian manufacturing industries. The finding is robust to various changes to the model specification. Moreover, in an extension of the basic model, different...

In relation to GDP, India's public debt and interest payments are high compared with most other emerging economies and rating agencies have put India's sovereign debt at the lowest investment grade. On the other hand, India benefits from strong economic growth and needs to increase spending on...

Despite significant progress made, improving skills remains one of Portugal’s key challenges for raising growth, living standards and well-being. Upskilling the adult population remains a priority and lifelong learning activities should focus more on the low skilled. While active labour market...

This paper provides an overview of labour market resilience in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-09 and the role played by macroeconomic and structural policies. The OECD unemployment rate has returned to close to its pre-crisis level, but the unemployment cost of the Great Recession has...

This paper investigates the factors that shape governments’ capacity to collect revenue. To do so, it analyses how tax revenue responds to tax rates using evidence from a panel of 34 OECD countries over 1978-2014. The estimations show that the response of revenue to rates weakens as rates...

With persisting slower growth worldwide and in China, over-capacity in some heavy industry sectors, declining profitability, and intensifying competition from other, lower-cost emerging economies, corporate behaviour in China needs to change and focus more on efficiency and sustainability. This...

Living standards in China have greatly improved over the past few decades. Both sustained economic growth and an expansion of the social security system have contributed to a sharp reduction in the number of people in poverty. However, urban-rural inequalities remain large and some of the...