The abuse of public office for private gains – discourages business dynamism, reducing investment and innovation, and weighs on growth prospects. It also undermines the equality of opportunities, distorts the income distribution and erodes trust in...

Productivity in Turkey has been growing stronger than in most peer countries since 2010 but has slowed down. Despite a remarkably entrepreneurial population, business dynamism has also been less vigorous in recent years. This working paper discusses...

Governments around the world have adopted unprecedented policies to deal with COVID-19. This paper zooms in on business shutdowns and investigates their effectiveness in reducing mortality. We leverage highly granular death registry data for almost...

Regions with large cities are driving growth in Bulgaria, while many rural regions suffer from depopulation and rapid ageing. Improving living standards across all regions will require better coverage and access to public services, notably in health...

Brazil spends around 15% of GDP on different social benefits, but within these expenditures, different benefits have different social impacts. While the small conditional cash transfer programme Bolsa Família is well-targeted to the poor and has a...

As Brazil is significantly less integrated into international trade than other emerging market economies, opening up to trade has significant potential to create jobs that are more productive and better paid. At the same time, this will be associated...

The recovery from the current deep recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will require raising productivity through structural reforms. This implies a number of challenges for economic policies. With large parts of the economy shielded from...

Among various barriers to increasing employment of older workers, this paper focuses on two notable ones that are relevant for the future of work. First, older workers engaged in codifiable, routine tasks are particularly prone to the risk of being...

This paper aims at investigating the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the automotive sector in Central and Eastern Europe. It details the effects of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown measures on the activity in the sector. It also discusses the...

This paper presents a simulation framework developed to assess the impact of ageing on the financial sustainability of the Czech pension system. It accompanies the publication OECD Reviews of Pension Systems: Czech Republic. The framework has two...

Differences in average wages across firms – which account for around one-half of overall wage inequality – are mainly explained by differences in firm wage premia (the part of wages that depends exclusively on characteristics of firms) rather than...

Recent technological developments linked to secure messaging and traceability present an opportunity to address certain challenges in international and domestic payment systems. From an international perspective, foreign exchange markets remain...

The rapid internationalisation of the Polish economy has helped develop competitive export-led manufacturing and services sectors fostering robust growth and productivity performance. However, the benefits of this development have been unequal. Many...

Korea is a top player in emerging digital technologies, with an outstanding digital infrastructure and a dynamic ICT sector. The COVID-19 outbreak highlighted the importance of digitalisation to contain the spread of the virus, by allowing quick...

There is considerable regional variation in incomes and poverty in the Czech Republic and gaps have grown over time. With the highest number of municipalities per head in the OECD, subnational government is very fragmented and the resulting lack of...

This paper investigates the likelihood of corporate insolvency and the potential implications of debt overhang of non-financial corporations induced by economic shock associated with the outbreak of COVID-19. Based on simple accounting models, it...

Regional differences in GDP per capita, productivity, employment and poverty in Lithuania are among the largest in the OECD, and they have increased over the last decade. This paper looks at potential reasons for persisting disparities and assesses...

Reducing poverty remains an important challenge, and the COVID-19-crisis may further reinforce social vulnerabilities. Although it has declined lately, relative poverty remains high in international comparison and is distributed unevenly across...

Population ageing will lead to a smaller and older workforce. Looking forward, this means that growth will increasingly depend on ensuring the best use of Slovenian workers. This implies keeping older and experience workers longer in employment and...

The paper investigates the financial vulnerability of non-financial firms during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic crisis. In particular, it evaluates the extent to which firms may run into a liquidity crisis following the COVID-19 outbreak and the...