Indonesia has come a long way in improving its tax system over the last decade, both in terms of revenues raised and administrative efficiency. Nonetheless, the tax take is still low, given the need for more spending on infrastructure and social protection. With the exception of the natural...

This paper seeks to assess the impact of liberalisation and privatisation on performance in the generation segment of the electricity supply industry. Regulatory indicators for a panel of 19 OECD countries over a 10 year time period were constructed to examine the influence of regulatory reform...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

The New Growth Strategy aims to create demand and jobs through regulatory reform and fiscal measures. The Strategy focuses on key challenges, notably climate change and population ageing, which can be turned into sources of growth. Given Japan’s precarious fiscal position, it is essential to...

The crisis that originated in mid-2007 in the United States and deepened in September 2008 is the largest peace-time disruption of financial markets since the Great Depression. It was triggered by a number of factors, namely the large amount of lending to subprime borrowers, the expansion of...

Reforms to modernise and strengthen the financial sector have continued in recent years. The cleaning-up of the stock of non-performing loans is largely completed and considerable progress has been made in improving commercial banks’ corporate governance structures and risk management systems....

The Mexican banking crisis of 1994/95 necessitated a major government rescue operation - estimated to have cost about 20 per cent of GDP. Since then, financial sector reforms have been implemented and the performance of the Mexican financial system has markedly improved, as shown by indicators...

While the single market has largely been achieved for the EU market for goods, the services sector has lagged behind. This has resulted in sluggish activity, low productivity growth, high prices, that show a wide dispersion and relatively high inflation in this sector. Both the OECD product...

Indonesia’s business environment is discouraging entrepreneurship and holding back private-sector growth and development. Weaknesses in the regulatory framework, infrastructure bottlenecks and poor governance continue to weigh down on investment. Policies have been put in place to address...

The financial sector has emerged as the main economic engine over the past two decades. The comparative advantages of placing financial activities in Luxembourg have mostly been in terms of an adaptive legislative and regulatory framework and low taxation. As a result, Luxembourg is today one of...