Owing to slow growth and a relatively weak fiscal position, Portugal’s public debt had been rising for almost a decade when the global crisis struck, sharply increasing the deficit. The loss of confidence in Portuguese and other euro area sovereign bonds required international financial...

The challenge for fiscal policy in Slovakia is to achieve fiscal consolidation in a way which supports the fragile recovery and protects spending on areas which are important for re-embarking on a trajectory of high trend growth and underpinning a catch-up in living standards. While the recently...

Poland has significantly upgraded its infrastructure network over the past decade. However, bottlenecks still weigh on productivity growth and environmental and health outcomes. The EU 2014-20 programming period is an opportunity to improve the management of infrastructure investment. In the...

Across the euro area, the ability of public finances to support equitable growth has tended to deteriorate. Concerns about high and rising public debt, together with market pressure in some cases, led to sharp fiscal consolidation in 2011-13, against the backdrop of a weak economic situation at...

The Partnerships pillar of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development cuts across all the goals focusing on the mobilisation of resources needed to implement the agenda. Thailand’s “sufficiency economy philosophy” encourages the prioritisation of long-term sustainability over short-term...

Developing activities in areas other than finance would help to sustain growth and deal with the declining potential output and trend productivity growth that Luxembourg’s economy is facing. Given the relatively high labour costs, Luxembourg’s future comparative advantages are likely to lie...

The United Kingdom (UK) has spent less on infrastructure compared to other OECD countries over the past three decades. The perceived quality of UK infrastructure assets is close to the OECD average but lower than in other G7 countries. Capacity constraints have emerged in some sectors, such as...

Indonesia has a very good record of poverty reduction, having halved its incidence over the past two decades. Nevertheless, almost 30 million people still live below the national poverty line, mostly in rural areas and in certain provinces. In order to make further progress in lifting these...

The NZ economy has performed well over the past few years, having achieved relatively strong GDP and employment growth. However, some constraints to sustaining this momentum beyond the short term are emerging in the fields of skills, housing and urban infrastructure. Skills shortages have risen...

Three main approaches can be used to assess infrastructure performance. The first employs macro-econometric techniques to estimate the impact of the existing infrastructure capital stock on growth and to infer its growth-maximising level. This approach neglects the impact of infrastructure on...