This paper develops a method for adjusting structural budget balances for asset price cycles and presents estimates of structural budget balances corrected for house-price and equity-price cycles for OECD countries. The traditional cyclically adjusted budget balance indicator, which is the basis...

Port efficiency is an important indicator of port performance; more efficient ports lower transportation costs and facilitate imports and exports of a country. Despite the importance of the subject, the exisiting port efficiency studies have almost exclusively focused on container ports. This...

This paper assesses the OECD’s projections for GDP growth and inflation during the global financial crisis and recovery, focussing on lessons that can be learned. The projections repeatedly over-estimated growth, failing to anticipate the extent of the slowdown and later the weak pace of the...

Multifactor productivity (MFP) is increasingly used in economic policy, not least to compute potential output. Most measures are based on a standard production function combining labour and capital, but do not incorporate the negative by-products of the production process such as air pollution...

Now that pollution is reaching worrisome levels in some countries and at the global level, there is a growing consensus that it needs to be explicitly considered as a by-product of the production process and incorporated in economic decisions. But this is not easy in the absence of markets and...

This paper re-estimates the elasticities of government revenue and expenditure items with respect to the output gap for OECD countries. These elasticities are used by the OECD to calculate cyclically adjusted fiscal balances. The study updates the earlier 2005 study using the most recent...