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...

New Zealand ranks highly on most indicators of well-being, but incomes are below the OECD average due to low labour productivity. Low labour productivity is only partly explained by the industry composition of the NZ economy and is primarily a consequence of sustained low multi-factor...

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased...

The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid post-war industrialisation was not sustained beyond the mid-1960s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during the next three decades, during which trend...

Drawing on new empirical analysis of 30 years of structural reforms across the OECD, this paper sheds light on the impact of reforms over time, identifies the horizon over which their full effects materialise, and investigates whether such effects vary with prevailing economic conditions and...

The downturn in fixed investment among advanced economies from the onset of the global crisis was unusually severe, widespread and long-lasting relative to comparable episodes in the past. As a result, investment gaps are large in many countries, not only in relation to past norms but also...

Investments in both human and physical capital are key drivers of economic growth and productivity gains. The United Kingdom has had a turbulent recent history, being strongly affected by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and more recently voting to leave the European Union, its largest...

With a newly constructed firm-level dataset combining various survey- and registry data from Statistics Estonia, this paper sheds new light on the labour productivity premium from adopting digital technologies and boosting digital skill use. The productivity premium is decomposed into a direct...

Technologies such as cloud computing, software to automate supplier- and customer relations, online platforms and artificial intelligence seem to offer a vast potential to boost productivity and living standards. However, aggregate productivity growth has declined sharply across the OECD over...

This paper reviews the main issues related to the short-term impact of structural reforms in different macroeconomic contexts and takes stock of existing theoretical and empirical studies. Taking reforms introduced in “normal” times as a benchmark, it reviews the available evidence on the...