Social safety nets protect citizens against hardship. By offering compensation, social safety nets may help overcome the political resistance to trade liberalisation and structural reform, but they can also weaken the incentives to work and save. Depending on their design, safety nets may also...

At its meeting in May 2003, the Ministerial Council asked the OECD to analyse the contribution made by the services sector to employment growth, productivity and innovation, and to identify factors, institutions and policies that could enhance the growth prospects of this sector. In response to...

The OECD Measuring Productivity Manual is the first comprehensive guide to the various productivity measures aimed at statisticians, researchers and analysts involved in constructing industry-level productivity indicators. This Manual presents the theoretical foundations to productivity...

Productivity measurement and analysis are the main topics addressed in this book, which brings together contributions presented and discussed in two international workshops organized by the Statistics Directorate and the Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry (DSTI) of the OECD. The...