This paper explores the productivity impact of trade, product market and financial market policies over the last decade in China – a fast growing country where, despite significant reform action, regulatory stance remains still far from OECD standards. The paper makes a critical distinction...

This report finds that the U.S. is the only country among 22 countries ranked highly in terms of economic and human development that does not guarantee that workers receive paid sick days or paid sick leave. Under current U.S. labor law, employers are not required to provide short-term paid sick...

Over the past decade, the growth potential of the Hungarian economy has declined substantially. Trend productivity has ceased to increase, and investment has fallen to historically low levels. To an important extent, the explanation lies in a business environment characterised by high...

While Ireland’s economic performance has been impressive, there are too many sectors where producers are shielded from competition, at the expense of consumers. The loss in efficiency from these policies will become more noticeable as Ireland’s growth rate settles down towards more normal...

Abstract: This  document  aims  to  provide  evidence  about  the  existence  of  different patterns in equality of opportunities in academic achievement during the last ...

Abstract: This  document  aims  to  provide  evidence  about  the  existence  of  different patterns in equality of opportunities in academic achievement during the last ...

Abstract: This paper provides recent evidence about the benefits of attending preschool on future performance. A non-parametric matching procedure is used over two outcomes: math and verbal scores at a national mandatory test (Saber11) in Colombia. It is found that students who had the chance of...

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 proposes a simple Ordered Probit model to analyse the monetary policy reactionfunction of the Colombian Central Bank. There is evidence that the reaction function isasymmetric, in the sense that the Bank increases the Bank rate when the gap between observedinflation and the inflation...

We investigate the inflation rate in Colombia in terms of excess money, excess demand, deviations from PPP, and wage inflation. In contrast to previous results for a group of industrial economias, we find that domestic factors are a far more powerful influence on inflation than are external...