The manufacturing sector has contributed little to income growth and its share in total merchandise exports has been declining. Manufacturing has not brought much new employment, and most of the recent rise in manufacturing employment has been in the informal sector, where workers are not...

New variants of the virus are spreading which, together with seasonal effects, are estimated to be able to raise effective reproduction numbers by up to 90%. Meanwhile, many countries are rolling out vaccination programmes, but at varying speeds. Hence the race is on to beat the variants with...

The longer run consequences of the pandemic will partly hinge on its impact on high productivity firms, and the ongoing process of labour reallocation from low to high productivity firms. While Schumpeter (1939) proposed that recessions can accelerate this process, the nature of the COVID-19...

Cross-country analysis of the economic effects of environmental policies is limited by the lack of reliable, comparable measures of the stringency of environmental policies. This paper attempts to fill this gap, by constructing new quantitative indexes of environmental policy stringency (EPS)....

Environmental policies seek to address market failures related to the protection of the environment. However, they may also increase barriers to entry and distort competition. If stringent environmental policies can be designed in a way that minimises such economic burdens, they can facilitate...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in the stringency of environmental policies on productivity growth in OECD countries. Using a new environmental policy stringency (EPS) index, it estimates a reduced-form model of multi-factor productivity growth, where the effect of countries'...

Environmental policies address wellbeing and sustainability objectives, affecting firm and household behaviour. A newly developed, cross-country composite proxy of environmental policy stringency (EPS) shows that stringency has been increasing across OECD countries over the past two decades....

This paper is making use of the OECD product market regulation (PMR) database to measure the heterogeneity of product market regulation across countries for the whole economy, for the main subcomponents of the PMR indicator and for the internet economy. The heterogeneity within EU countries is...

The landscapes of housing loan markets vary considerably across OECD countries, reflecting differences in preferences and policy settings. This paper first draws a topography of disparities in mortgage structure, documenting considerable variation across OECD countries in key features such as in...

Inter-regional migration – the movements of the population from one region to another within the same country – can be an important mechanism of spatial economic adjustment, affecting regional demographic and growth patterns. This paper examines the economic and housing-related factors that...