While Mexico’s growth performance has gradually improved over the past decades, its convergence toward OECD countries has been less rapid than in several other emerging markets. The recent significant reductions in import tariffs should help the economy take fuller advantage of trade and...

This paper presents a framework to assess the impact of a wide range of structural policy reforms on GDP per capita at various horizons by linking together previous empirical studies mostly carried out by the OECD. The simple accounting framework consists of reduced-form equations and offers a...

This paper analyses the policy and institutional determinants of long-run economic growth for a sample of OECD and non-OECD countries, with two objectives. First, it assesses the extent to which the main findings from growth regressions covering industrial countries are robust to a larger sample...

As it takes time and effort to learn how to fully utilise new technology and realise its maximum potential productivity gain, adoption of new technology tends to reduce productivity temporarily, even though the potential productivity gain in the long run outweighs this short run loss. This paper...

The strength of product market competition plays an important role in economic growth as it affects economic efficiency and the allocation of resources, and can also lead to improved labour market performance. This paper examines product market competition and economic performance in the...

This paper surveys recent empirical studies exploring aggregate productivity growth based on firm dynamics, focusing on micro-data from OECD countries. Aggregate productivity growth can be analysed as a sum of two separate processes. <I>i</I>) Changes in productivity in individual firms at a given size...</i>

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...

The establishment of competitive markets has been one of the cornerstones Hungarian economic policy over the past decade, alongside a successful strategy of attracting foreign investment. Broad statistical measures show no signs of endemically weak domestic competition, though the country’s...

In this paper we present an international comparison of growth trends in the OECD countries, with a special attention to developments in labour productivity - allowing for human capital accumulation – and multifactor productivity (MFP) - allowing for changes in the composition of fixed...

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...