China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

Key indicators show Germany belonging to the countries in the OECD with strong innovation activity even though some weakening in Germany’s position relative to other OECD countries has occurred recently. While the redirection of resources towards unification-related spending as well as low...

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...

Despite significant increases in spending on child care and education during the last decade, PISA scores suggest that educational performance remains static, uneven and strongly related to parents’ income and background. Better educational performance could improve labour market outcomes,...

Income inequality and relative poverty in the United States are among the highest in the OECD and have substantially increased over the past decades. These developments have been associated with a number of other worrying statistics, including low intergenerational social mobility and weak real...

This paper uses panel regressions to investigate the effects of innovation policies and framework factors on business R&D intensity and patenting for a sample of 20 OECD countries over the period 1982- 2001. Both sets of factors are found to matter; the main determinants of innovativeness appear...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the links between innovation, market structure and firm size. The review shows that there is little evidence in support of the Schumpeterian hypothesis that market power and large firms stimulate innovations: R&D spending seems to rise more or less...