Rapid and sustained economic growth in the emerging world has brought new members, notably China, into the group of middle-income countries. Reaching this level of income, however, has historically presented countries with a new set of challenges to development, resulting in slowing growth and...

Policy efforts to revitalise entrepreneurship and investment in Spain are key to generating growth and new jobs. The government has a substantial reform program to make it easier to do business in Spain, which should in some cases be deepened. Boosting economic growth requires a new generation...

In order to promote productivity, and thus boost living standards in the long run, public policies need to focus on improving incentives, capabilities and flexibility within an economy. Such policies can be difficult for governments to devise and even more difficult for them to implement, given...

In this paper, we relate the scope and depth of regulatory reforms to growth outcomes in OECD countries. By means of a new set of quantitative indicators of regulation, we show that the cross-country variation of regulatory settings has increased in recent years, despite extensive liberalisation...

Regulatory reform efforts in a broad range of industries have resulted in increased importance of competitive forces as a means to allocate resources and improve economic efficiency. A number of indicators suggest that such forces have been stronger in the United States than in most other OECD...

Productivity growth has declined since the late 1990s, slowing the catching-up process. Structural reforms to strengthen competition, entrepreneurship and innovation would go a long way toward enhancing it. Recent competition policy reforms that strengthen enforcement of cartel law must now be...

This paper uses the OECD's indicators of product market regulation to assess the extent to which the regulatory environment affects economic performance across Indian states. The degree to which product market regulation is supportive of competition is found to vary considerably across states....

This paper assesses the implications of past and ongoing reforms in OECD product markets for the labour productivity gap, a key component of cross-country differences in GDP per capita. After a brief review of the theoretical literature, we bring together the results obtained in some of our...