India’s growth performance has improved significantly over the past 20 years, but has been uneven across industries and states. While some service industries, notably in the information and communications technology sector, have become highly competitive in world markets – yielding...

As a result of reforms and financial sector development, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) now exerts significant control over money market interest rates. With money market conditions increasingly influencing effective commercial lending rates, the PBoC is also able to affect the cost of...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the role that policy and institutional settings in both product and labour market play for productivity and firm dynamics. It exploits a new firm-level database for ten OECD countries and industry-level data for a broader set of countries, together with...

Investment in network infrastructure – the energy, water, transport and telecommunication networks – which performs a vital role for the functioning of the economy, can contribute to raising growth and social welfare. But more is not always better. While the paper shows that investment in...

In contrast to what has happened throughout the 1960s and 1970s, some of the largest EU countries and Japan are no longer closing the income gap vis-à-vis the United States. Worse, the gap may even be widening since the mid-1990s. While in the case of Japan the gap in GDP per capita is...

This paper addresses the question of whether and how long-term financial trends may have modified the transmission mechanism from monetary policy decisions to economic activity. The focus is on longterm changes, abstracting from the disruptions created by the 2007-08 financial turmoil which are...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse regulatory developments in the road freight and retail distribution industries of OECD Member countries. For each industry, the analysis is divided into four parts. First, structural developments in the industry are outlined. Second, the main features of...

In this paper we present comparative evidence from OECD countries concerning the impact of product and labour market regulations on innovation. While product and labour market policies usually aim at objectives other than innovation, they may have important consequences for the profitability of...

This paper assesses the importance of taxation on foreign direct investment contributing to the literature in two ways. First, it relates bilateral FDI among OECD countries over the 1990s to a new set of estimates of corporate tax wedges that include many relevant aspects of FDI taxation....

Chile’s regulatory framework is working reasonably well. The country’s structural reforms since the 1980s, with the privatisation of utilities and deregulation of product and labour markets, have improved resource allocation and increased the population’s access to basic services, while...