The paper provides empirical analysis of the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and the quality of public services in the Russian regions. The analysis suggests that fiscal decentralisation has no significant effect on the key inputs into secondary education, such as schools,...

Commodity resources offer vast opportunities for development. In the long run, however, the performance of commodity-rich countries tends to fall short of expectations, as commodity rents induce macroeconomic volatility and undermine incentives to improve institutions. The paper looks at the...

The paper provides a theoretical and cross-country empirical analysis of the determinants of financial deepening, and finds that higher credit-to-GDP ratios are associated with stronger creditor rights and lower inflation, and that the marginal effect of improvements in creditor rights...

The paper analyzes the determinants of success of recent fiscal consolidations in the OECD countries as well as the short-run and long-run effects of fiscal adjustments on economic activity by looking at fourteen case studies, panel data for OECD countries, and the results of simulations using a...

This paper investigates the impact of education reforms in Estonia on adult skills, using the PIAAC surveys conducted by the OECD. Estonia implemented comprehensive education reforms in the early 1990s throughout Estonian-speaking schools while in Russian-speaking schools less comprehensive...

This paper evaluates the growth performance of more than 200 economies. It identifies instances of relatively strong economic performance after the 2008-09 global financial crisis, and asks if determinants of sustained strong (and weak) performance have changed in recent years. It finds that...

This paper looks at the determinants of the quality of economic institutions such as rule of law and control of corruption in a large sample of countries. The analysis pays particular attention to the quality of democratic institutions as a potential determinant. Both types of institutions –...

The paper provides a cross-country empirical analysis of the impact of corruption on foreign direct investment flows. The gravity model estimates suggest that if control of corruption in the destination country improves, investment flows from cleaner countries rise more than they do from...

Non-performing loans (NPLs) are a burden for both lender and borrower; they contract credit supply, distort allocation of credit, worsen market confidence and slow economic growth. So what is the best way to deal with them? This paper compares three different scenarios: actively reducing NPLs,...