This paper seeks to assess the impact of liberalisation and privatisation on performance in the generation segment of the electricity supply industry. Regulatory indicators for a panel of 19 OECD countries over a 10 year time period were constructed to examine the influence of regulatory reform...

Russia in 2003 embarked on the restructuring of its electricity sector. The reform is intended to introduce competition into electricity production and supply, leaving dispatch, transmission and distribution as regulated natural monopolies with non-discriminatory third-party access to the...

This paper assesses Brazil’s regulatory framework and agencies for several network industries (electricity, oil and gas, and water and sanitation). Private investment can be encouraged by tackling regulatory uncertainty in many areas. To this end, recent initiatives include a new regulatory...

The landscapes of housing loan markets vary considerably across OECD countries, reflecting differences in preferences and policy settings. This paper first draws a topography of disparities in mortgage structure, documenting considerable variation across OECD countries in key features such as in...

Inter-regional migration – the movements of the population from one region to another within the same country – can be an important mechanism of spatial economic adjustment, affecting regional demographic and growth patterns. This paper examines the economic and housing-related factors that...

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of patterns and trends of worker transitions across European countries and the United States, with an emphasis on differences across socio-economic groups. Understanding labour market transitions is important to gauge the scope of labour market...

New variants of the virus are spreading which, together with seasonal effects, are estimated to be able to raise effective reproduction numbers by up to 90%. Meanwhile, many countries are rolling out vaccination programmes, but at varying speeds. Hence the race is on to beat the variants with...

The longer run consequences of the pandemic will partly hinge on its impact on high productivity firms, and the ongoing process of labour reallocation from low to high productivity firms. While Schumpeter (1939) proposed that recessions can accelerate this process, the nature of the COVID-19...

This paper provides a new measure of human capital using PISA and PIAAC surveys, and mean years of schooling. The new measure is a cohort-weighted average of past PISA scores (representing the quality of education) of the working age population and the corresponding mean years of schooling...

Resolving stark differences between rich and poor countries in vaccine coverage against COVID is a global policy priority for 2022. However, even among OECD countries, there currently remain surprisingly large differences in vaccine coverage and this paper attempts to explain these differences,...