After a recession of historic proportions, an export-led recovery is gaining traction in Ireland. The pace of recovery, however, varies sharply across sectors. While export-oriented manufacturing and services, led by large multinationals, have reached record-high levels of output,...

Low growth and huge current account deficits have characterised the Portuguese economy over the past decade. Easy credit in global markets, combined with the absence of incentives to limit loan-to-deposit ratios until recently, made it possible to finance internationally high levels of...

The unemployment rate among young people has reached painfully high levels, in particular among those young people with low levels of education. There are two crucial policy priorities to improve employment prospects for youth in Spain. First, in the very short term, there is need for quick...

Structural transformation towards a more knowledge-based economy will strengthen Spain’s medium-term growth prospects. To deal with long standing impediments to higher growth the government has a substantial structural reform programme touching on education, the labour market and the business...

High levels of unemployment and rising social charges have lead to considerable pressure on labour markets to adjust. Major steps in labour market reform have been implemented over the last three years. These need to be followed up in several respects in order to raise the economy’s capacity...

The centralised wage agreements have helped to contain inflation. There is evidence that wage increases were more moderate when a central agreement was concluded than in periods when no central agreement was reached. Nevertheless, there is also evidence that centralised wage setting has had some...

As in other catch-up countries inflation is likely to stay high going forward due to nominal convergence. To better cope with the risk of a too rapid pick up of wages during the convergence process on the one hand and to raise the adjustment potential of the economy to macroeconomic shocks on...

This paper explores the impact of structural policies on saving, investment, and current accounts in OECD and non-OECD economies. Since the current account effects of structural reforms are often complex and ambiguous from a theoretical perspective, new OECD empirical analysis is carried out....

Using plant-level data from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) for the fiscal years from 1998-99 through 2007-08, this study provides plant-level cross-state/time-series evidence of the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on total factor productivity (TFP) and labour...

After the onset of the crisis, unemployment in Sweden increased markedly, though much less than expected and than during the early 1990s, even as participation in the labour market held up well. The challenge going forward is to ensure that high unemployment does not become entrenched or leads...