OECD’s PISA publications highlight the impact of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS) on students’ results within countries. The focus here is to investigate whether ESCS measures could contribute to differences in aggregate educational outcomes between countries. There is some...

Since the transformation following the Communist era, Poland has matched improvements in health outcomes of the most developed OECD countries, although without catching up the ground lost during the 1970s and 1980s. The health status of the population remains relatively poor, although after...

The economic situation of young people is unsatisfactory. Educational inequalities have been widening for over a decade, due to a sharp decline in the results of the most highly disadvantaged students. The unemployment rate for the 20-24 age bracket has not dropped below 16% for nearly 30 years....

This short paper analyses the decline of France’s trade balance over the past 15 years. While the loss in export market shares is comparable to that of the major OECD countries except Germany, it is one of the largest among the countries of the euro area. The determinants of this outcome seem...

This paper analyses the age structure of employment rates across OECD countries with a focus on France. The statistical contribution of each age group to total unemployment-rate differentials is also computed. An estimate of the sensitivity of age-specific unemployment rates to the economic...

Poor labour-market outcomes remain one of Poland’s major structural weaknesses, impeding firms’ competitiveness and the nation’s potential output. Boosting employment prospects is also critical, as the country will soon be ageing at a fast pace. Despite long working hours, labour...

This paper examines how much of the dispersion in economic performance across OECD countries can be accounted for by economic geography factors. More specifically, two aspects of economic geography are examined, namely the proximity to areas of dense economic activity and endowments in natural...

There is widespread evidence that a better access to markets contributes to raising income levels. However, no quantification of the impact of distance to markets has been made on the basis of a sample restricted to advanced — and therefore more homogeneous — countries. This paper applies...

This paper examines shifts in labour productivity growth in the United States and in Europe between 1970 and 2007 based on econometric tests of structural breaks. Additionally, it makes use of time-series-based projected labour productivity growth up to 2009 in order to detect any recent break...

This paper formalises the analysis of the employment-productivity trade-off by extending the framework developed by Gordon (1997) to account for labour heterogeneity. The extent of the trade-off is determined by the extent of the adjustment of capital to effective labour and by the changes in...