This survey highlights the key results of the empirical literature concerning the costs of flexibility enhancing reforms in product and labour markets. The documented costs include reduced employment, loss of government revenue, undesirable distributional consequences and political instability....

The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...

This paper investigates the relationship linking investment (capital stock) and structural policies. Using a panel of 32 OECD countries from 1985 to 2013, we show that more stringent product and labour market regulations are associated with less investment (lower capital stock). The paper also...

This paper analyses for 34 OECD countries the extent to which the calculation of aggregate multi-factor productivity (MFP) is sensitive to alternative parameterisations. The starting point is the definition of MFP used in previous work in the OECD’s Economics Department (e.g. Johansson et al....

The development community agrees on the need to address conflict and fragility for global security and sustainable development. In such complex situations, programming should strive to include multiple actors at various levels of society. Although the use of private investment in fragile...