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...

Mitigating climate change requires aligning real economy investments with climate objectives. This pilot study measures the climate consistency of investments in transport infrastructure and vehicles in Latvia between 2008 and 2018, estimated at EUR 1.5 billion per year on average. To do so,...

Achieving a low-greenhouse gas (GHG) development requires making finance flows consistent with this objective. In order to measure progress to date as well as inform future public action in this area, this paper calls for further efforts to track gross primary investments flows in new...

This paper presents results from a first pilot study to measure the consistency of real economy investments with climate change mitigation objectives. The analysis focuses on investments in infrastructure and equipment in the manufacturing industries in Norway between 2010 and 2017, estimated at...

The effect on the household consumption price index from possible sources of error in capturing digital products depends on the weight of the affected products. To calculate upper bounds for this effect, we apply weights based on the average structure of household consumption in OECD countries...

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...

This paper explores the extent to which “zombie” firms – defined as old firms that have persistent problems meeting their interest payments – are stifling labour productivity performance. The results show that the prevalence of and resources sunk in zombie firms have risen since the...

Spain has chronically low productivity growth, which undermines its ability to generate higher living standards. Important contributors to low productivity growth are the misallocation of capital to low productivity firms and under-investment in knowledge-based capital. To foster a better...

Poland’s productivity has grown strongly over the past two decades. However, the public and private capital stock is weak, and investment remains focused on the adoption of existing technologies, which weighs on future productivity gains and innovation. Many micro enterprises have low...

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...