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...

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...

In recent years, India has enjoyed one of the highest growth rates worldwide, weathering the global financial crisis better than many other countries. Prudent macroeconomic policies will be critical to prolonging the current expansion, given the risks associated with high inflation and volatile...

The paper analyses the role of loan guarantee programmes following the COVID-19 outbreak in alleviating firm distress as well as their broader impacts on productivity via reallocation, relying on a simulation model and econometric estimations. The simulation exercise relies on a simple cash-flow...

Regional inequality has increased in Sweden over the past decades, albeit from a low level. While redistribution and other public policies can narrow regional gaps in income, well-being and access to services, productivity growth is key to maintaining economic dynamism, creating job...

Online platform use has grown remarkably in the last decade. Despite this, our understanding of its implications for economic outcomes is scarce and often limited to case studies and advanced countries. Using a newly built harmonised international dataset of online platforms and their use across...

Intangible assets are an important driver of productivity and ultimately output growth. Yet, despite their aggregate rise in the past decades, productivity has continued to grow modestly in the majority of OECD countries. This is in part because many firms – particularly young and small ones -...

The recovery from the current deep recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will require raising productivity through structural reforms. This implies a number of challenges for economic policies. With large parts of the economy shielded from competition, firms face weak incentives to become...

Brazil spends around 15% of GDP on different social benefits, but within these expenditures, different benefits have different social impacts. While the small conditional cash transfer programme Bolsa Família is well-targeted to the poor and has a strong diminishing effect on inequality,...

Une concurrence vigoureuse sur le marché des produits constitue un élément essentiel pour assurer une croissance économique dynamique. Cette étude examine les conditions de la concurrence en liaison avec les performances économiques de la Suisse, dont la croissance a été plus faible que...