Membership of the European Union has contributed to the economic prosperity of the United Kingdom. Uncertainty about the outcome of the referendum has already started to weaken growth in the United Kingdom. A UK exit (Brexit) would be a major negative shock to the UK economy, with economic...

World trade growth was rapid in the two decades prior to the global financial crisis but has halved subsequently. There are both structural and cyclical reasons for the slowdown. A deceleration in the rate of trade liberalisation post 2000 was initially obscured by the ongoing expansion of...

The economic and financial crisis was the catalyst for a fiscal crisis that engulfs many OECD countries. Consolidating public finances in order to address the consequences of the crisis, underlying weaknesses and also future spending pressures creates important challenges. Fiscal consolidation...

The structure of a country’s external liabilities, as well as the extent and nature of its international financial integration are key determinants of its vulnerability to financial crises. This is confirmed by new empirical analysis covering OECD and emerging economies over the past four...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the effects of structural policies on household disposable incomes at different income levels. More specifically, it investigates the extent to which structural policies have differential long-run impacts on GDP per capita and on household incomes at...

This paper identifies and analyses some key challenges that OECD and partner economies may face over the coming 50 years if underlying global trends relating to growth, trade, inequality and environmental pressures prevail. For example, global growth is likely to slow and become increasingly...

Policy reforms aimed at boosting long-run growth often have side effects – positive or negative – on an economy’s vulnerability to shocks and their propagation. Macroeconomic shocks as severe and protracted as those since 2007 warrant a reconsideration of the role growth-promoting policies...

This report presents descriptive evidence of specialisation trends and investigates empirically their causes and consequences, analysing the role of policies in this process. Then, based on the insights from the backward looking analysis, it draws global trade and specialisation scenarios up to...

This report presents the results from a new model for projecting growth of OECD and major non-OECD economies over the next 50 years as well as imbalances that arise. A baseline scenario assuming gradual structural reform and fiscal consolidation to stabilise government-debt-to GDP ratios is...

Well functioning judiciaries are key to economic development. Combining existing information with a newly collected dataset, the paper provides cross-country comparisons of measures of judicial performance, and investigates how cross-country differences in trial length are related to the...