This paper analyzes key factors that led to rising global energy demand in recent decades. In addition to income and price elasticities traditionally examined, this research takes into account the effects of structural, demographic, technological and temperature changes on energy demand. Using...

This chapter assesses how models with search frictions have shaped our understanding of aggregate labor market outcomes in two contexts: business cycle fluctuations and long-run (trend) changes. We first consolidate data on aggregate labor market outcomes for a large set of OECD countries. We...

Investment Climate surveys (ICs) are a recent instrument used by the World Bank to identify key obstacles to country competitiveness and to guide policy reforms and government interventions in developing countries. In this paper, panel data from four ICs of four South East Asian (SEA) countries...

Many empirical studies have applied the Hodrick-Prescott filter in cross-country comparisons of business cycle fluctuations. The Hodrick-Prescott filter involves the smoothing parameter l, and standard practice in the literature is to set this parameter equal to 1600 (in quarterly data) for all...

Composite synthetic indicators of the technological capabilities of nations have been used ever more frequently over the last few years, creating a sort of Olympic Games medal table of the innovation race. Such measurement tools have been formulated at the macroeconomic level by the European...

There is a growing body of cross-country comparisons in health systems and policy research. However, there is little consensus as to how to assess its quality. This is partly due to the fact that cross-country comparison constitutes a diverse inter-disciplinary field of study, with much...

There is a fundamental gap in the evidence base on quantitative cross-country comparison of mental healthcare systems due to the challenges of comparative analysis in mental health including a paucity of good quality data. We explore whether existing limited data sources can potentially be...

The three important research domains, nanotechnology, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, integratedly breed a promising multidisciplinary domain in the post-genomic age, which was recently defined by the term “nanobiopharmaceuticals”. In this paper, we firstly investigate its general...