The unemployment rate in Estonia rose sharply in 2010 to one of the highest levels in the EU, after thecountry entered a severe recession in 2008. While the rate declined relatively rapidly in 2011, it remained high especially for the less educated. In 2009, the Employment Contract Law relaxed...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the links between public debt and economic growth in advanced economies. We find that theoretical models yield ambiguous results. Whether high levels of public debt have a negative effect on long-run growth is thus an empirical question. While many...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of fiscal episodes in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) donor countries on the distribution of their aid expenditures towards developing countries. We use descriptive statistics provided by Alesina and Ardagna (2010) on fiscal...

Innovation has long been recognized as one of the key elements of economic progress, though some say that its direct relation to the concept of economic growth remains rather controversial. Productivity growth is the key economic indicator of innovation, non-the-less. Growth theory assumes that...

Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called...

The basic aim of the research is to investigate the impacts of research and development (R&D) on manufacturing trade. Six hypotheses are tested. The focus is on possible non-linear effect of R&D on trade flows and whether R&D helps overcome the distance and the role of level of economic...

This paper presents evidence regarding the existence of common business cycles in OECD countries. More specifically, the paper examines the extent to which these cycles relate to each other over time. Business cycle components of output are extracted by adopting the Hodrick–Prescott,...

This paper uses an instrumental variable approach to study whether public debt has a causal effect on economic growth in a sample of OECD countries. The results are consistent with the existing literature that has found a negative correlation between debt and growth. However, the link between...

Between 2006 and 2009, the OECD undertook a series of reviews of national rural development policy. The reviews largely followed a consistent approach and used the OECD's New Rural Paradigm (NRP) as a common metric for assessing various national approaches. Although the reviews cannot be...

This paper employs the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to evaluate the performance of public spending and to show how productivity has changed over time for 18 selected OECD countries during 1995 to 2002. Our analysis shows that 14 countries exhibit variable returns to scale, meaning that...