Industrial specialization has important implications for economic performance; therefore, understanding its determinants is of key policy relevance. This paper quantifies the relationship between factor endowments, policies and institutions and patterns of industrial specialisation in production...

This paper quantifies the importance of different determinants of trade at the industry level using a sample of 54 OECD and non-OECD economies. The empirical methodology extends the approach of previous empirical studies to explicitly quantify the impact that trading partners’ factor...

The United Kingdom has been among the most affected OECD economies by the COVID-19 crisis, reflecting the high share of services in output and its integration in the world economy. Productivity growth in the United Kingdom has consistently underperformed relative to expectations and was more...

This paper examines the link between barriers to trade and investment and productivity performance, in the United Kingdom and selected European countries using both firm-level and sectoral data. Barriers to trade and investment appear to be a robust determinant of productivity in the long term....

This paper sets out a framework to estimate quality-adjusted price levels and price changes for fixed broadband services in OECD countries. We extend and adapt existing hedonic frameworks for international and interarea comparisons and consider the extended country product dummy approach....

Global trade imbalances narrowed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. They have remained at a lower level but are still of concern to policy makers because of the risks they pose to individual economies, as well as globally. However, the ultimate causes of these imbalances are not...

Health care expenditure per person, after accounting for changes in overall price levels, began to slow in many OECD countries in the early-to-mid 2000s, well before the economic and fiscal crisis. Using available estimates from the OECD’s System of Health Accounts (SHA) database, we explore...

This paper presents the econometric analysis of lower secondary school performance carried out for the chapter on education of the 2019 OECD Economic Survey of Sweden. The dataset covers most Swedish schools providing education for 9th graders. Student socio-economic background has a...

The present paper develops Adaptive Trees, a new machine learning approach specifically designed for economic forecasting. Economic forecasting is made difficult by economic complexity, which implies non-linearities (multiple interactions and discontinuities) and unknown structural changes (the...

During the commodity price spikes in 2007-08 and 2010-11, several countries implemented temporary export restrictions on staple foods in an attempt to protect domestic consumers from rising and volatile prices. The impacts of these policies, however, are not limited to the countries that are...