Although Canada remains in an advantageous fiscal position relative to many other OECD countries as the global economy recovers from the 2008/09 recession, the deterioration in the country’s public finances has been substantial. Years of spending...

The financial crisis and economic downturn are going to weigh on fiscal positions in OECD countries over the short to medium-term, both through the operation of automatic stabilisers and the enactment of discretionary fiscal stimulus packages....

Despite relative affluence, workplace stress is a prominent feature of the US labour market. To the extent that job stress causes poor health outcomes – either directly through increased blood pressure, fatigue, muscle pain, etc. or indirectly...

Malaysia has sustained over four decades of rapid, inclusive growth, reducing its dependence on agriculture and commodity exports to become a more diversified, modern and open economy. GDP per capita is now higher than in a number of OECD economies,...

This paper reviews first the fiscal policy recommendations by the EU, the IMF and the OECD for Finland, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. All these countries had inflation above the euro area average in early 2001,...

Ireland is recovering from an extremely large banking crisis born of over-exuberant property lending. The government has taken a wide range of measures to tackle the crisis over the past 3 years. Larger bad property loans have been transferred to a...

The global financial crisis that emerged in mid 2007 has caused considerable economic disruptions in the United States and elsewhere, and exposed major flaws in the global financial system. After examining the origins of the crisis, this paper...

Unemployment insurance is a key tool for risk sharing and redistribution and also a prominent automatic stabiliser. It is a volatile spending item by design, which can lead to vulnerabilities. This paper explores various shocks and sources of...

Demographic developments are unfavourable for the financing of pension schemes in most OECD countries, implying continued growth in pension expenditure in virtually all OECD countries. This paper examines the vulnerability of pension systems, with an...

This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of health care systems in OECD and BRIICS countries to adverse secular trends and large macroeconomic shocks. It identifies policies that can ally vulnerabilities considering the institutional setting of...

This paper reviews key policy messages and warnings about developments in the run-up to the global financial and economic crisis that began in mid-2007 which are contained in the main publications of the IMF, the OECD and the BIS and discuss issues...

The government’s health reform programme since 2000 has covered many aspects of the organisation of health care and was accompanied by a sizeable increase in spending on healthcare. Many of these reforms have the potential to improve the efficiency...

Social safety nets protect citizens against hardship. By offering compensation, social safety nets may help overcome the political resistance to trade liberalisation and structural reform, but they can also weaken the incentives to work and save....

This paper presents a set of indicators to assess health care system performance. It also presents new comparative data on health care policies and institutions for OECD countries. This set of indicators allows the empirical characterisation of...

Le présent document étudie l'influence des conditions du marché du travail, des revenus réels et des transferts publics sur l'évolution des taux d'activité, à l'aide d'un modèle néo-classique de maximisation de l'utilité. Le modèle de base est...

Ces dernières années, le niveau des taux d'intérêt réels est apparu relativement élevé dans la plupart des pays de l'OCDE. Cela n'a pas empêché la reprise économique de se développer (à un rythme plus rapide aux Etats-Unis et au Japon qu'en Europe)...

Following Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comments before Congress that the FOMC may ‘take a step down in the pace of asset purchases if economic improvement appears to be sustained’, US 10-year interest rates picked up sharply and gross capital flows to...

This study analyses the economic rent generated by the exploitation of a non-renewable resource, and the taxation of this rent. We present a synthetic model of a non-renewable-resource sector where deposits must be costly developed before they are...

Slovenia’s living standards measured in GDP per capita are currently some 20% below the EU15 average and have not yet reached their pre-crisis level. Given that most of this gap comes from differences in labour productivity, the paper looks at...

To investigate how public finances could best be designed to promote long-run growth and address inequality, it is essential to have comprehensive, cross-country comparable data on government spending and revenues, along with structural and policy...