Israel’s tax mix is reasonably growth- and employment-friendly. Nonetheless, tax reform is needed to foster an inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and help tackle Israel’s main economic and societal challenges of high poverty, including among...

Despite being one of the smallest countries in the OECD, Israel is marked by significant socio-economic disparities, which have a clear spatial dimension. Ethnic and religious groups with weak socio-economic outcomes are not benefitting from the...

Job mobility is essential for a well-functioning market economy and for individual workers to boost their wages. This paper provides a re-assessment of job mobility in the United States during 2000-2018, based on a novel administrative data source...

The U.S. population has become increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas. However, there are striking differences in between the performances of big cities: some of them have been very successful and have been able to pull away from the...

Services are an important part of global economic activity and of international trade. Nevertheless, compared to its very large tourism sector, the sector of high-end business services in Thailand remains small. As IT and information, and...

In light of population ageing, globalisation, automation, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thailand’s labour market is being significantly reshaped, and so are the skills required for higher employability. This paper analyses the capacity of...

Private debt owed to banks and other financial institutions has been at unprecedented high levels. This paper studies the role of these high levels of debt for workers, based on an assembled micro-dataset that harmonises household surveys from 29...

Technologies such as cloud computing, software to automate supplier- and customer relations, online platforms and artificial intelligence seem to offer a vast potential to boost productivity and living standards. However, aggregate productivity...

With a newly constructed firm-level dataset combining various survey- and registry data from Statistics Estonia, this paper sheds new light on the labour productivity premium from adopting digital technologies and boosting digital skill use. The...

The COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting disruptions in supply chains of some manufacturing and medical products have renewed the debate on costs and benefits of globalisation and, particularly, on risks associated with international fragmentation of...

Building on the automatic fiscal stabilisers literature, this paper assesses how automatic stabilisers have evolved over the past two decades by analysing changes in the personal income tax and social benefit systems. In three-quarters of the 35 OECD...

This paper proposes an approach to assess the extent of automatic fiscal stabilisation of aggregate household disposable income after a specific shock. The approach is based on the national account identity of household disposable income and elements...

This paper introduces the OECD Weekly Tracker of economic activity for 46 OECD and G20 countries using Google Trends search data. The Tracker performs well in pseudo-real time simulations including around the COVID-19 crisis. The underlying model...

Empirical work described in this paper explains the daily evolution of the reproduction rate, R, and mobility for a large sample of countries, in terms of containment and public health policies. This is with a view to providing insight into the...

Investments in both human and physical capital are key drivers of economic growth and productivity gains. The United Kingdom has had a turbulent recent history, being strongly affected by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and more recently voting...

This paper quantifies the sectoral trade impact in the United Kingdom and in EU countries of the UK’s exit from the Single Market, using the OECD general-equilibrium METRO model. A comprehensive free-trade agreement could lead to a fall by about 6.1%...

This paper examines the link between barriers to trade and investment and productivity performance, in the United Kingdom and selected European countries using both firm-level and sectoral data. Barriers to trade and investment appear to be a robust...

The United Kingdom has been among the most affected OECD economies by the COVID-19 crisis, reflecting the high share of services in output and its integration in the world economy. Productivity growth in the United Kingdom has consistently...

The U.S. population is becoming increasingly urban and has gradually shifted to the south and west. Policy restrictions have played a role in preventing dynamic areas expanding, and when they do expand it can be through low-density housing sprawl....

Occupational licensing and non-competition agreements are two important types of labour market regulation in the United States, both covering around one fifth of all workers. While some regulation is needed to protect safety and ensure quality of...