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...

Changes in the biophysical characteristics of natural habitats – that can be measured with data on land cover – are the best proxy to monitor pressures on ecosystems and biodiversity. This paper presents a suite of indicators that track land cover change over time in a globally consistent...

The main features of China’s current sub-national finance arrangements date back to the 1994 tax reform. China has a multi-level government structure that shares national tax revenues through a system of tax sharing and transfers, and divides spending assignments and responsibilities. Local...

This paper provides a method to classify TL3regions across OECD countries based on their level of access to metropolitan areas. TL3 regions are classified as ‘metropolitan’ if more than half of their population lives in one or more functional urban area (FUA) of at least 250 thousand...

House prices have increased significantly in Canada over the past decade, driving household debt and residential construction activity to historical highs. Although macro-prudential tightening has slowed the pace of household borrowing in the last few years, house prices have continued to trend...

Despite being one of the smallest countries in the OECD, Israel is marked by significant socio-economic disparities, which have a clear spatial dimension. Ethnic and religious groups with weak socio-economic outcomes are not benefitting from the thriving high-tech sector in the centre of the...

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...

This paper examines the role of rural regions in the economic transformation of Korea. The analysis at regional level reveals that, while having experiencing continued urbanisation and rapid demographic shift of aging and depopulation, the Korean rural areas performs well in terms of...

This report offers a guide on potential reform pathways towards sustainable agriculture water use, based on a thorough review of selected past water and agriculture reforms and extensive consultation with policy experts. A theory of change is developed that emphasises the importance of...

This report analyses trends in agriculture for the US Southwest region, one of the most water stressed and productive agricultural regions in the world expected to face further water shortages in the future due to climate change and continued growth. It examines projected water risks by...