Turkey’s current account deficit widened to almost 10% of GDP in 2011 and has been narrowing only gradually since. An important question is to what extent Turkey’s current account deficit is excessive. To explore this issue, one needs to establish benchmarks. In this paper current account...

A shift towards healthier diets is expected to address the challenge of providing food security and nutrition for a growing global population. This report explores whether such a shift would also have positive effects on the other two challenges food systems face: supporting livelihoods for...

This paper illustrates possible trade-offs between two different fiscal consolidation strategies in Portugal: sticking to the nominal fiscal targets in the EU-IMF programme or allowing automatic stabilisers to work, while sticking to the structural primary deficit targets implied by the...

The forecasting uncertainty around point macroeconomic forecasts is usually measured by the historical performance of the forecasting model, using measures such as root mean squared forecasting errors (RMSE). This measure, however, has the major drawback that it is constant over time and hence...

Uncertainty is inherent to forecasting and assessing the uncertainty surrounding a point forecast is as important as the forecast itself. Following Cornec (2010), a method to assess the uncertainty around the indicator models used at OECD to forecast GDP growth of the six largest member...

This paper extends the OECD Economics Department’s suite of short-term indicator models for quarterly GDP growth, which currently cover only the G7 countries, to the BRIICS countries. Reflecting the relative scarcity of high-quality macroeconomic time series, the paper adopts a small-scale...

Global trade growth over the past few years has appeared extraordinarily weak, even in relation to weak global GDP growth. This paper shows that the apparent breakdown in the relationship between global trade and global GDP growth is largely explained by two factors: an inappropriate measurement...

The paper describes revisions to the trend employment component of the production function underpinning long-term economic scenarios. Starting with historical age and sex-specific employment rates, a novel approach is developed to correct for cyclical effects using the country-level employment...

The paper describes revisions to the trend labour efficiency component of the production function underpinning long-term economic scenarios. The main goal of the revision is to add more policy and institutional determinants in the equation to enrich the scenarios that can be constructed. In the...

Austria has a model of “separate gender roles” in work, family and life arrangements which persists despite efforts to better balance these roles. Irrespective of their education level - which is higher for new generations than men’s - the majority of women with children withdraw fully or...