Over the past 60 years, urbanisation and cities have fundamentally transformed the social, economic and political geography of West Africa. The number of people living in cities increased from 5 million in 1950 to 133 million in 2010. During the same period, the number of towns and cities with...

This report presents new evidence on industry concentration trends in Europe and in North America. It uses two novel data sources: representative firm-level concentration measures from the OECD MultiProd project, and business-group-level concentration measures using matched...

This working paper offers a synthesis of the current knowledge on the determinants of productivity. It carefully reviews both “spatial” (e.g. agglomerations, infrastructure, geography) and “aspatial” (e.g. human capital, labour regulations, industry-level innovation and dynamism)...

This paper investigates how digital technologies have shaped the concentration of inventive activity in cities across 30 OECD countries. It finds that patenting is highly concentrated: from 2010 to 2014, 10% of cities accounted for 64% of patent applications to the European Patent Office, with...

Using household survey data, we document evidence of a loosening of credit standards in Euro area countries that experienced a property price boom-and-bust cycle. Borrowers in these countries exhibited significantly higher loan-to-value (LTV) and loan-to-income (LTI) ratios in the run up to the...

Research and development (R&D) indicators are increasingly used not only to facilitate international comparisons, but also as targets for policies stimulating research. An example of such an indicator is R&D intensity. The decomposition method of R&D intensity was conceived with the aim of...