Norway’s success in maintaining high living standards, low inequality and good progress in gender balance owes much to its business sector. High-productivity business-sector jobs support high wages and profits, providing capacity to fund comprehensive public services and inclusive employment...

This paper investigates policyholder protection schemes in OECD member countries and selected non-OECD countries. It is selective in its scope: it examines the rationale for a policyholder protection scheme; the relationship between certain design features and moral hazard; the role of a...

Combining existing information with a newly collected dataset, the paper develops indicators of the performance and the institutional characteristics of OECD judicial systems. It provides cross-country comparisons of measures of trial length, accessibility to justice services and predictability...

Since 2009, the OECD Development Centre has been publishing the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), a cross-country measure of gender-based discrimination in social institutions (formal and informal laws, social norms and practices). This working paper presents the conceptual and...

A well-functioning justice system is indispensable to business activity and to a society as a whole. Judicial efficiency measured by trial length, one of the essential factors in the effectiveness of the justice system, ensures contract enforcement, which is the basis of market transactions....

The mixed growth performance of emerging market economies has revived angst about a "middle-income trap". However, a forensic review of statistical evidence shows that middle-income countries “escape” to higher income levels more often than both poorer and richer countries. At the same time,...

Governments are created and run by humans, who can experience the same behavioural biases and barriers as individuals in society. Therefore, it makes sense to explore how behavioural insights (BI) can be applied to the governance of regulatory policy making, and not just to the design of...

In 2022, the OECD will add a human capital dimension to its fragility framework in acknowledgement of the ambition set forth in States of Fragility 2018 to “never lose sight of the end goal of delivering hope and better lives for all people in fragile contexts”. The COVID-19 pandemic and its...

This paper provides an analysis of India’s existing regulatory regime and its evolution over the last 25 years, and the efforts to improve the regulatory framework as India has transitioned towards a market economy. The paper argues that while India has implemented many sector specific...

Business registration is crucial for ensuring accountable, transparent and viable business environments. By bringing businesses into the formal economy, governments are able to provide more strategic and targeted policies for businesses and consumers. The objective of this working paper is to...