This paper introduces the OECD Weekly Tracker of economic activity for 46 OECD and G20 countries using Google Trends search data. The Tracker performs well in pseudo-real time simulations including around the COVID-19 crisis. The underlying model adds to the previous Google Trends literature in...

Official Development Assistance amounted USD 146.6 billions in 2017 but do we know how much of this aid contributed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? And to what SDG in particular? This paper present a new methodology using machine learning designed to link project-based flows to the...

Portugal has notably increased its international openness over recent decades, with exports’ share of GDP rising by 20 percentage points since 1993. This analysis couples microdata with panel regression techniques to investigate the drivers of Portuguese export growth over the 1995-2016...

This paper presents descriptive evidence of specialisation trends and investigates empirically their causes and consequences, analysing the role of policies in this process. Then, based on the insights from the backward looking analysis, it draws global trade and specialisation scenarios up to...

Services play a more important role in trade and employment in the United Kingdom than in most other OECD countries. The UK services sector is supported by an open and transparent trade regime, policies that support competition and innovation, and regulatory transparency that facilitates the...

Services are an important part of global economic activity and of international trade. Nevertheless, compared to its very large tourism sector, the sector of high-end business services in Thailand remains small. As IT and information, and professional services are traded indirectly through value...

This paper provides estimates of the potential trade effects on exports and production at the sectoral level as well as GDP in Denmark of the exit of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU). Owing to the high uncertainty regarding the final Brexit deal between the EU and the UK,...

While services account for almost 80% of GDP in the United States and a growing share of global trade, regulatory barriers to services trade around the world are still high. Using a hypothetical liberalisation scenario, this paper assesses the potential reduction of trade costs that could be...

Theoretical and empirical studies on multi-product firms have shown that firms adjust their product mix in response to trade liberalisation. This paper uses the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and National Treasury (NT) firm-level panel to assess the response of South African firms to trade...

In 2016, the People’s Republic of China removed its support prices for maize and started destocking its large public reserves of maize. This paper investigates what would happen if China were to also eliminate its support prices for rice and wheat and reduce its public stocks of these two...