This paper assesses the potential to raise public spending efficiency in the primary and secondary education sector. Resource availability per pupil has increased significantly over the past decade in a number of countries; often in attempting to exploit the link between educational attainment...

This paper surveys recent empirical studies exploring aggregate productivity growth based on firm dynamics, focusing on micro-data from OECD countries. Aggregate productivity growth can be analysed as a sum of two separate processes. <I>i</I>) Changes in productivity in individual firms at a given size...</i>

Using plant level panel data on Korean manufacturing during the 1990-98 period, this study tries to assess the role of entry and exit in enhancing aggregate productivity, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The main findings of this study are summarised as follows. First, plant entry and exit...

This paper examines problems of entry, exit and competition in Ukrainian product markets. It finds that Ukraine still has too little of all three, and that exit mechanisms, in particular, function poorly. Since impediments to entry and exit are largely the product of excessive and ill...

There are no ready-made data on hospital outputs and inputs which would allow comprehensive international comparisons of hospital efficiency to be carried out. This paper, therefore, relies on selected evidence to compare hospital efficiency in a subset of OECD countries, based on three...

High expectations surrounded the two waves of eastward EU enlargement in 2004 and 2007, with the extension of the EU Internal Market being expected to deliver a substantial boost to economic growth in new and old member States alike. Indeed, considerable progress has been made, with existing...

This paper uses a stratified sample of firms across OECD economies over the period 1996-2004 to analyse the effects of corporate taxes on productivity and investment. Applying a differences-in-differences estimation strategy which exploits differential effects of corporate taxes on firms with...

This paper relates diverging productivity performances across OECD countries over the past fifteen years to differences in the stringency of regulations in the product market. We first summarize industry-level evidence linking these diverging patterns to delays in service markets reforms in the...

This paper provides a synthesis of what is known about the determinants of output growth based on studying microeconomic data sets. It starts with a summary of the theoretical explanations which help reconcile heterogeneous performance observed across establishments in the same sector. The...

In many industries, competition is far from perfect and managerial efficiency (or a fixed cost) varies among firms. However, traditional measurement of technological progress assumes perfect competition and no fixed cost. This paper incorporates these two factors in the technological-progress...