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...

Environmental policies seek to address market failures related to the protection of the environment. However, they may also increase barriers to entry and distort competition. If stringent environmental policies can be designed in a way that minimises such economic burdens, they can facilitate...

Germany’s manufacturing sector, which plays an important role for exports, has been performing well over the past decade in terms of labour productivity growth and international competitiveness. However, the services sector has had much slower growth rates. Competition often appears to be...

Improvements in the macroeconomic policy framework over the past two decades and prudent regulation of the financial system have contributed to reduce output volatility in Mexico relative to other OECD countries. The sharp recession in 2008-09 illustrated that output volatility has nonetheless...

Prices for many goods and services in Belgium are higher than in other countries, reflecting generally weak competitive pressures. The government has recently introduced several reforms to strengthen the competition policy framework. Nevertheless, to reap the full benefits of competitive...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the role that policy and institutional settings in both product and labour market play for productivity and firm dynamics. It exploits a new firm-level database for ten OECD countries and industry-level data for a broader set of countries, together with...

In contrast to what has happened throughout the 1960s and 1970s, some of the largest EU countries and Japan are no longer closing the income gap vis-à-vis the United States. Worse, the gap may even be widening since the mid-1990s. While in the case of Japan the gap in GDP per capita is...

This paper assesses the importance of taxation on foreign direct investment contributing to the literature in two ways. First, it relates bilateral FDI among OECD countries over the 1990s to a new set of estimates of corporate tax wedges that include many relevant aspects of FDI taxation....

The economic crisis in the early 1990s prompted action on reforming the Swedish welfare state and its institutions, including deregulation of a wide range of product markets. In that way, Sweden took early action compared to other OECD countries currently struggling with how to make public...

This paper reviews trends, outcomes and issues in regulatory reform in OECD countries. First, it summarises the evidence on the evolution of regulatory environments and the economy-wide and sectoral effects of reforms (including privatisation) in both competitive and non-competitive industries...