This paper first reviews trends since 1985 in public spending on labour market programmes, both active and passive. It then reviews the main findings from recent evaluations of labour market programmes. At first sight evaluation findings are not very encouraging, but there are some success...

We give an expression to order O(<italic>T</italic>^-1), where <italic>T</italic> is the sample size, for bias to the estimated coefficient on a lagged dependent variable when all other regressors are exogenous. The general expression is a nonlinear function of the coefficient on the lagged dependent variable, the autoregressive...

Although rather discouraging in general, the evaluation literature indicates some measures that have been successful. Job-search assistance, wage subsidies in the private sector, and labour market training do work for some groups, even if the impacts are not large. Also, the evaluation...

The Netherlands is the only country other than Australia where publicly-financed employment services for disadvantaged jobseekers are now primarily executed by contracted providers operating in a quasi-competitive market. Focusing on Dutch employment services for unemployment insurance (UI)...

Taxes and other fiscal measures on health-related commodities are in widespread use. Alcoholic beverages and tobacco products have been subjected to taxation for a long time in most countries. Several OECD governments have passed legislation to increase existing taxes or to introduce new taxes...

This paper examines wage setting mechanisms for health workers in hospitals across eight different OECD countries. It describes similarities and differences and how fixed or fluid these approaches have been in recent years through health system reforms, labour market dynamics and economic...