The United Kingdom is preparing a modern industrial strategy to boost labour productivity across the whole country and to narrow regional gaps in living standards. This raises the question of the optimal allocation of scarce resources in meeting these targets. This study identifies industrial...

The personal tax system has a large influence on incentives to work, save and invest and hence growth. At the same time it is a key policy lever for income redistribution. This paper analyses how income distribution patterns changed in Spain before and after the crisis using the personal income...

Forecasts of GDP growth are typically over-optimistic for horizons beyond the current year, particularly because they fail to predict the occurrence or severity of future downturns. Macroeconomic forecasters have also long been under pressure to convey the uncertainty surrounding their...

This document describes the OECD’s new Structural Policy Indicators Database for Economic Research (SPIDER). The database compiles data from various existing databases. It contains indicators capturing structural policies (including institutions, framework condition policies and policies...

Austria’s transition to a digital economy and society is slower than in other high-income small open European economies. The rate and pace of utilisation of eight main ICT applications shows that Austrian firms follow peer country counterparts with a gap, which has widened in most areas in...

Digitalisation is one of the megatrends affecting societies and labour markets, alongside demographic change and globalisation. The fourth industrial revolution will redesign production processes and alter the relationships between work and leisure, capital and labour, the rich and the poor, the...

Higher living standards and well-being, as well as convergence with more advanced economies, will depend on achieving higher productivity, which in turn would be boosted by more investment in capital. In particular, investment in knowledge-based capital and greater inward FDI can help Slovenia...

This paper explores the connection between “zombie” firms (firms that would typically exit in a competitive market) and bank health and the consequences for aggregate productivity in 11 European countries. Controlling for cyclical effects, the results show that zombie firms are more likely...

This paper focusses on the link between urbanisation and consumption behaviour in China. Urbanisation is defined here as rural people moving to cities to work and migrant workers in cities obtaining urban residential status, against the backdrop of government plans to settle 100 million rural...

Assuming that immigrants select destinations according to absolute returns to their observable and unobservable human capital, I present a human capital model of migration accounting for taxes, transfers and limited portability of skills. The model predicts both segmented sorting of migrants to...