A creative economy requires innovation-friendly conditions. Korea’s innovation system should be improved by upgrading universities and expanding their role in business R&D, while increasing international collaboration in R&D from its current low level. The returns from Korea’s large...

The Korean government has made fostering a “creative economy” a top priority. The goal is to shift Korea's economic paradigm to one based on innovation in which new start-ups and venture businesses play a key role. However, the venture capital market is still at an early stage of...

This paper presents evidence on firm demographics and firm survival for a group of ten OECD countries. For each country a dataset of sectoral indicators of firm dynamics has been created using information from business registers. The patterns of firm entry, exit, survival and employment growth...

Europe is putting in place a new system of fiscal rules following the euro area sovereign debt crisis and decades of rising government to debt-to-GDP ratios. These include the so-called “six pack” to upgrade the Stability and Growth Pact to a new Treaty incorporating the “fiscal...

The financial crisis revealed flaws in pre-crisis policy frameworks. Particular gaps included the failure of monetary and financial policies to incorporate fully the implications of the rapid pro-cyclical growth in financial leverage and risk-taking, especially across national borders, and the...

Substantial fiscal consolidation was achieved under the aegis of the 2003 Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act. While deficits widened anew in 2008 and 2009, against the backdrop of the global financial and economic crisis, efforts to reduce them have resumed since. To ensure...

Ireland’s banking crisis, one of the most severe in the OECD area, and the associated economic recession have taken a heavy toll on public finances. Large public deficits have accumulated since 2008 and net public debt, which had been eliminated, has soared once again. The rapid deterioration...

The global economic and financial crisis exacerbated the need for fiscal consolidation in many OECD countries. Drawing lessons from past episodes of fiscal consolidation, this paper investigates the economic environments, political settings and policy measures conducive to fiscal consolidation...

During the economic and financial crisis, fiscal positions across the OECD countries deteriorated sharply. This raises the question of what level of primary deficit would ensure long-term sustainability and what degree of consolidation is needed. The purpose of this paper is to gauge the scale...

The differential between the interest rate paid to service government debt and the growth rate of the economy is a key concept in assessing fiscal sustainability. Among OECD economies, this differential was unusually low for much of the last decade compared with the 1980s and the first half of...