Over the last decades Argentina’s living standards have lost ground relative to other developed and emerging economies. Putting Argentina on a path to stronger, inclusive and job-rich growth requires boosting productivity and strengthening investment through wide-ranging structural reforms....

Using a pan-European data set of 8.5 million firms, this paper finds that firms with high debt overhang invest relatively more than otherwise similar firms if they are operating in sectors facing good global growth opportunities. At the same time, the positive impact of a marginal increase in...

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...

Uncertainty faced by households and firms affects economic activity. The rise in uncertainty since the beginning of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece could be one factor that has contributed to the steep and long-lasting recession. This paper presents a brief empirical analysis quantifying...

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...

This article gives methodological guidance on how best to compare the share of profits in value-added across countries using national accounts. Such comparisons are often based on accounts for institutional sectors such as non-financial corporations. It turns out that these are less...

Over the past two decades, aggregate labour productivity growth in most OECD countries has decoupled from real median compensation growth, implying that raising productivity is no longer sufficient to raise real wages for the typical worker. This paper provides a quantitative description of...

Productivity growth is slowing down among OECD countries, coupled with increased misallocation of resources. A recent strand of literature focuses on the role of non-viable firms (“zombie firms”) to explain these developments. Using a rich firm-level dataset for one of the OECD countries...

This paper explores the existence and importance of financing constraints for R&D investments in large EU and US manufacturing companies over the 2000-2007 period. The main results obtained by estimating error-correction equations suggest that the sensitivity of R&D investments to cash flow...

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...