Appropriately designed Product Market Regulation (PMR) is essential to enhance productivity, boost economic growth and increase welfare. Regulation is needed to address market failures and guarantee the health and safety of consumers. However, by limiting the entry and expansion of firms, a too...

Income inequality in Colombia has declined since the early 2000s but remains very high by international standards. Income dispersion largely originates from the labour market, which is characterised by a still high unemployment rate, a pervasive informal sector and a wide wage dispersion...

This paper explores the productivity impact of trade, product market and financial market policies over the last decade in China – a fast growing country where, despite significant reform action, regulatory stance remains still far from OECD standards. The paper makes a critical distinction...

Turkey’s business sector dynamism has underpinned broad-based and inclusive growth in the 2000s. However, the business sector is highly segmented, with a relatively small core of modern high-productivity corporations, and myriad small, less formal and low-productivity entities. This hampers...

This paper uses panel regression techniques to assess the policy determinants of private sector innovative activity – proxied by R&D expenditure and the number of new patents – across 19 OECD countries. The relationship between innovation indicators and multifactor productivity (MFP) growth...

This paper explores the role of managerial capital and business research and development (R&D) in fostering multifactor productivity (MFP) convergence in a panel of 42 countries. The OECD long-term growth model is augmented to show that, in addition to trade openness, an economy’s speed of...

Investment in knowledge-based capital (KBC) – assets that lack physical embodiment, such as computerised information, innovative property and economic competencies – has been rising significantly. This has implications for innovation and productivity growth and requires new thinking on...

This paper explores the growing importance of intangible assets as a potential source of innovation and productivity gains, and the contribution of efficient resource allocation to this process. Realising the growth opportunities implied by intangible assets depends on the ability to reallocate...

This paper investigates patterns in product market regulation across 34 OECD and 21 non-OECD countries, using an updated and revised version of the OECD’s indicators of product market regulation (PMR). The analysis shows that liberalisation of product markets has further slowed over the past...

This paper examines how import penetration affects firms' productivity growth taking into account the heterogeneity in firms' distance to the efficiency frontier and country differences in product market regulation. Using firm-level data for a large number of OECD countries, the analysis reveals...