This paper delivers new evidence on the individual and policy drivers of residential mobility, covering a wide range of housing-related policies and conditions but also other relevant policy areas. The analysis uses household-level micro datasets...

This study empirically assesses the impact of energy prices and environmental policy stringency (EPS) on manufacturing employment in OECD countries over the period 2000- 2014. At the sector level, increases in energy prices and in EPS have a negative...

By combining fresh estimates of housing supply and prices with recent long-term projections for their fundamental drivers such as population, income and interest rates, this paper produces scenarios for residential investment and real house prices up...

Having access to credit is essential for households to address the volatility of their personal finances over time and for firms to fund their investments. Accessing financial services at affordable cost on the other hand, is crucial to ensure...

Greece’s labour market entered the COVID-19 shock following several years of sustained employment growth and with wages picking up. Unemployment remained high and employment rates were low, especially among women, the young and older workers. The...

South Africa has turned towards tourism development to jump-start its weak economy. As tourism is a labour intensive sector that can also bring foreign currency into the country, the sector was identified as priority area by the South African...

South Africa has an incomplete social protection system without a mandatory pension savings scheme. Designing a universal insurance pension system would allow to reduce the important government funded pension grant system and ensure that the old-age...

Theoretical and empirical studies on multi-product firms have shown that firms adjust their product mix in response to trade liberalisation. This paper uses the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and National Treasury (NT) firm-level panel to...

Portugal has notably increased its international openness over recent decades, with exports’ share of GDP rising by 20 percentage points since 1993. This analysis couples microdata with panel regression techniques to investigate the drivers of...

While services account for almost 80% of GDP in the United States and a growing share of global trade, regulatory barriers to services trade around the world are still high. Using a hypothetical liberalisation scenario, this paper assesses the...

Many OECD governments have enacted, or are contemplating, future increases in statutory pension ages, sometimes provoking vociferous political opposition. Empirical cross-country estimation work consistently finds that coefficients on statutory...

Regulations of product markets serve legitimate objectives but, when ill-designed, can impose unnecessary restrictions on competition, and therefore on business dynamism, productivity and ultimately well-being. A recent update of the OECD’s Product...

Potential economic benefits of integrity and anti-corruption policies seem large. Nevertheless, much of the existing empirical evidence lacks precise and actionable policy indicators that could guide policy makers on tangible improvements of...

In a financially interconnected world, individual countries’ policy choices affect other economies and can become a source of international shocks. Leveraging on a new quarterly dataset of capital control adjustments, we find renewed evidence that...

Housing is key for well-being and for spatial and social mobility. In India, the housing market is characterised by excess demand for affordable dwellings, a small rental market and an oversupply of high-end housing, especially in urban areas.

Ambitious environmental policies are necessary to enable the transition to a greener economy. However, these policies could impose economic burdens on firms through different channels. They may increase barriers to entry and distort competition. They...

Technological change is transforming Ireland’s economic structures, leading to new jobs and innovative products that benefit consumers. Adoption of new technologies by businesses has been high relative to many other OECD economies, but it has been...

Measuring the quality of governance and regulation in various ways and focusing on energy, transport and telecommunications, this paper shows that both sound governance of infrastructure investment and pro-competitive regulation in network industries...

The rate of homeownership is close to the OECD average in Luxembourg. However, strong house price increases, mainly driven by population growth and limited housing supply, led to a deterioration in affordability of housing, in particular for the...

The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid post-war industrialisation was not sustained beyond the mid-1960s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during...