Browse by: "2014"

Historically, discussions of income inequality have emphasised cross-sectional comparisons of levels of inequality of income. These comparisons have been used to argue that countries with more inequality are less healthy, less democratic, more crime-infested, less happy, less mobile and less equal in economic opportunity, but such comparisons implicitly presume that current levels of inequality are steady state outcomes. However, the income distribution can only remain stable if the growth rate of income is equal at all percentiles of the distribution. This paper compares long-run levels of real income growth at the very top, and for the bottom 90% and bottom 99% in the United States, Canada and Australia to illustrate the uniqueness of the post-WWII period of balanced growth (and consequent stability in the income distribution). The ‘new normal’ of the United States, Canada and Australia is ‘unbalanced’ growth – specifically, over the last thirty years the incomes of the top 1% have grown significantly more rapidly than those of everyone else. The paper asks if auto-equilibrating market mechanisms will spontaneously equalise income growth rates and stabilise inequality. It concludes that the more likely scenario is continued unbalanced income growth. This, in turn, implies, on the economic side, consumption and savings flows which accumulate to changed stocks of indebtedness, financial fragility, and periodic macroeconomic crises; and, on the social side, to increasing inequality of opportunity and political influence. Greater economic and socio-political instabilities are therefore the most likely consequence of increasing income inequality over time.

Germany
Federal Administrative Court confirms the judgments of the Higher Administrative Court of the Land Hesse: The shutdown of nuclear power plant Biblis blocks A and B based on a “moratorium” imposed by the Government was unlawful
List of lawsuits in the nuclear field

Slovak Republic
Further developments in cases related to the challenge by Greenpeace Slovakia to the Mochovce nuclear power plant
Developments in relation to the disclosure of information concerning the Mochovce nuclear power plant

United States
Judgment of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission resuming the licensing process for the Department of Energy’s construction authorisation application for the Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repository
Judgment of the Licensing Board in favour of Shaw AREVA MOX Services regarding the material control and accounting system at the proposed MOX Facility
Dismissal by US District Court Judge of lawsuit brought by US military personnel against Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in connection with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident

France
Conseil d’État decision, 28 June 2013, refusing to suspend operation of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant

Slovak Republic
New developments including the Supreme Court’s judgment in a matter involving Greenpeace Slovakia’s claims regarding the Mochovce nuclear power plant
New developments in the matter involving Greenpeace’s demands for information under the Freedom of Information Act

Switzerland
Judgment of the Federal Supreme Court in the matter of the Département fédéral de l’environnement, des transports, de l’énergie et de la communication (DETEC) against Ursula Balmer-Schafroth and others on consideration of admissibility of a request to withdraw the operating licence for the Mühleberg nuclear power plant

United States
Judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granting petition for writ of mandamus ordering US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to resume Yucca Mountain licensing
Judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit invalidating two Vermont statutes as pre-empted by the Atomic Energy Act Judgment of the NRC on transferring Shieldalloy site to New Jersey’s jurisdiction

This paper reviews methods that seek to draw causal inference from non-experimental data and shows how they can be applied to undertake ex-post evaluation of transport interventions. In particular, the paper discusses the underlying principles of techniques for treatment effect estimation with non-randomly assigned treatments. The aim of these techniques is to quantify changes that have occurred due to explicit intervention (or ‘treatment’). The paper argues that transport interventions are typically characterized by non-random assignment and that the key issues for successful ex-post evaluation involve identifying and adjusting for confounding factors. In contrast to conventional approaches for ex-ante appraisal, a major advantage of the statistical causal methods is that they can be applied without making strong a-priori theoretical assumptions. The paper provides empirical examples of the use of causal techniques to evaluate road network capacity expansions in US cities and High Speed Rail investments in Spain.

This paper presents new information on trends in family and child outcomes and policies over the past decades, in order to assess whether there has been any convergence over time across OECD and EU countries. Important drivers of population structure such as life expectancy and fertility rates are becoming more similar across countries as are marriage and divorce rates. Increased educational attainment has contributed to greater female employment participation and convergence therein across countries. Child well-being outcomes show a more mixed pattern with improvements and convergence in infant mortality, but varying trends in child poverty across countries.

In many OECD countries debt has soared to levels threatening fiscal sustainability, necessitating its reduction over the medium to longer term. This paper proposes a stylised model, featuring endogenous interactions between fiscal policy, growth and financial markets, to highlight how economic shocks and structural features of an economy can affect consolidation strategy and resulting growth and inflation developments. The fiscal authorities are assumed to choose a consolidation path from a predetermined set of possible paths by maximising cumulative GDP growth and minimising cumulative squared output gaps, with the objective to reach a given debtto- GDP level within a finite horizon and stabilise debt afterwards under the assumption of the unchanged fiscal policy stance. Illustrative simulations for a hypothetical economy show, among other things, that by requiring debt to stabilise part of the initial adjustment can be reversed; some stepping up of the fiscal adjustment can be optimal if bond yields increase due to an exogenous shock; and for some debt reduction targets, high fiscal multipliers, hysteresis effects and higher government bond yields imply protracted deflation and large negative output gaps, stressing the need to select reasonable fiscal targets consistent with market conditions.

JEL classification: E61, E62, H6
Keywords: Fiscal consolidation, sovereign debt, government budget balance, fiscal rules

Cloud computing is changing the way computing is undertaken. It provides the ability to access IT resources on demand without the need for significant capital expenditure, thereby lowering the entry barriers for new entrants in multiple sectors. Cloud computing has thus become a platform for innovation. This report presents the concept of cloud computing, the services it provides and deployment models, and thus give a clear overview of what it is and what it is not. It provides an overview of how cloud computing changes the way computing is carried out, and evaluates the impacts of cloud computing (including its benefits and challenges as well as its economic and environmental impacts). Finally, the report discusses the policy issues raised by cloud computing and the role of governments and other stakeholders in addressing these issues.

Health services account for a large and increasing share of production and expenditure in OECD and Eurostat countries but there are also noticeable differences between countries in expenditure per capita. Whether such differences are due to more services being consumed or whether they reflect differences in the price of services is a question of significant policy relevance. Yet, cross-country comparisons of health services have typically not disentangled these effects.

This paper presents the results of a joint effort between OECD and Eurostat in developing price comparisons for health goods and services. The main novel feature is the collection of comparable and output-based prices for hospital services that can then be applied to matching national accounts expenditure data so as to derive consistent price and volume comparisons of health products. The data is novel in that it reflects “quasi prices” (negotiated or administrative prices or tariffs) of the output of hospital services, instead of prices of inputs such as wages of medical personnel. The new methodology moves away from the traditional input perspective, thereby relaxing the assumption that hospital productivity is the same across countries...

This paper provides a framework for comparing a defined benefit (DB) and a defined contribution (DC) point schemes, which are both pay-as-you go (PAYG) financed. Two stylised PAYG pension schemes are modelled and simulated to compare their robustness to shocks. The same demographic developments (distribution of workers by age and revenue and distribution of survival rate by age) are applied to the two schemes. The impacts of different shocks (productivity, migration and longevity) on the two schemes are compared. Different policy reforms (increasing the contribution rate, diminishing the pension benefit, changing the up-rating and increasing the retirement age) to cope with the ageing shock are analysed and compared.

This paper describes key aspects of the frameworks for the assessment of adult numeracy and mathematical literacy in PIAAC and PISA, which are OECD two flagship programs for international comparative assessment of competencies. The paper examines commonalities and differences in how the constructs of adult numeracy and mathematical literacy were assessed in PIAAC and PISA, and sketches selected challenges associated with interpretation of results from these surveys.

Connected televisions are defined for the purposes of this report as devices that have the capability to interact with the Internet to display audio-visual content. Connected television is an important development because it permits the provision of certain new and valuable services to end-users. These services will also have implications for the activities of all of the players in the content distribution ecosystem. In addition to identifying the new services that connected television enables, the report analyses in some detail their effects on networks (i.e. the physical communication links that carry content to end-users). The impact on content producers themselves, on content distributors (such as traditional pay television companies), on hardware vendors, and on providers of support services such as advertising and programme guides is considered much more briefly. More detailed examination of these matters could be the subject of future work. The report also includes a discussion of policy implications raised by connected televisions for the actual connected television devices and for network infrastructure.

This report analyzes the specific factors that affect the competitiveness of developing countries in global value chains (GVCs), and how these factors differ across four major economic sectors: agriculture, extractive industries, manufacturing and offshore services. Although integration into GVCs allows firms in developing countries to participate in international trade without developing the full range of capabilities required to produce a product or service, it will not automatically translate into positive development gains from trade without the appropriate policies to build productive capacity and ensure inclusive growth and upgrading capabilities. In order to inform these policies, it is necessary to identify the various local factors that affected the capacity of developing countries to meet GVC and RVC requirements, including their productive capacity, infrastructure and services, the business environment, trade and investment policies and industry institutionalization. The report identifies the need for further data and analysis in many areas, in particular the trade-related policy implications of TiVA-GVCs for developing countries, including emerging economies. This would provide a starting point for the discussion of the domestic policies and actions needed to promote and support developing countries’ beneficial participation in value chains and inform aid for trade interventions promoting effective integration into markets via GVCs.

This report focuses on the effects of climate change impacts on economic growth. Simulations with the OECD’s dynamic global general equilibrium model ENV-Linkages assess the consequences of a selected number of climate change impacts in the various world regions at the macroeconomic and sectoral level. This is complemented with an assessment of very long-run implications, using the AD-RICE model. The analysis finds that the effect of climate change impacts on annual global GDP is projected to increase over time, leading to a global GDP loss of 0.7% to 2.5% by 2060 for the most likely equilibrium climate sensitivity range. Underlying these annual global GDP losses are much larger sectoral and regional variations. Agricultural impacts dominate in most regions, while damages from sea level rise gradually become more important. Negative economic consequences are especially large in South and South-East Asia whereas other regions will be less affected and, in some cases, benefit thanks to adjustments from international trade. Emissions to 2060 will have important consequences in later decades and centuries. Simulations with the AD-RICE model suggest that if emissions continue to grow after 2060, annual damages of climate change could reach 1.5%-4.8% of GDP by the end of the century. Some impacts and risks from climate change have not been quantified in this study, including extreme weather events, water stress and large-scale disruptions. These will potentially have large economic consequences, and on balance the costs of inaction presented here likely underestimate the full costs of climate change impacts. More research is needed to assess them as well as the various uncertainties and risks involved. However, this should not delay policy action, but rather induce policy frameworks that are able to deal with new information and with the fact that by their nature some uncertainties and risks will never be resolved.

Interval confidence and density forecasts, notably in the form of “fan charts”, are useful tools to describe the uncertainty inherent to any point forecast. However, the existing techniques suffer from several drawbacks. We propose a new method to represent uncertainty in realtime that is conditional upon the economic outlook, non-parametric and reproducible. Moreover, we build a Forecasting Risk Index associated with our fan chart to measure the intrinsic difficulty of the forecasting exercise. Using balances of opinion of different business surveys carried out by the French statistical institute INSEE, our GDP fan chart efficiently captures the growth stall during the crisis on a real-time basis. Our Forecasting Risk Index has increased substantially in this period of turbulence, showing signs of growing uncertainty.

Keywords: Density forecast, quantile regressions, business tendency surveys, fan charts

JEL classification: E32, E37, E66, C22

Digital content, such as e-books and apps that are available through streaming, downloads or cloud computing platforms, has become the fastest growing e-commerce product category. To support further growth, it is important that consumers, including children, understand what their rights and obligations are when acquiring and using such products. In particular, consumers need to know about the conditions under which they may copy and share products, and on which devices the products may be used. They also need to be informed about how their personal data may be collected and used, with whom it may be shared and why, and the type of redress that may be obtained when problems arise.

The OECD Committee on Consumer Policy has issued this policy guidance to boost consumer protection when using mobile and on-line payment systems and to identify ways in which policy makers and businesses can work together to strengthen consumer protection while spurring innovation in the marketplace. The guidance addresses a number of key issues in the emerging mobile and online payment area, including the need to establish minimum levels of consumer protection across payment mechanisms, enhanced privacy and child protection, and standards for transparent and accessible information disclosures