The Reference Series is a subset of the OECD Social Expenditure Database (SOCX) database, has been developed in order to serve a growing need for indicators of social policy.It provides a unique tool for monitoring trends in aggregate social expenditure and analysing changes in its composition...

The literature on public social expenditure envisages a role for the composition of public social expenditure in the design of policies to reduce inequality and promote economic growth. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on which to ground social policy decisions. This study...

In many OECD countries, the majority of social spending is financed from earmarked revenues, and a large share of revenues earmarked for any type of government spending is used for social purposes. Tying revenue sources to specific expenditure categories has a number of potential advantages and...

This paper provides new insights in the link between distance and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in OECD countries. We find that the impact of distance on flows and stocks of FDI, controlling for exports, is negative and strongly significant, in line with gravity models, whereas in a standard...

equating female earnings to male earnings, also has a negative effect on the development of liberal Catholicism. That is feminism greatly polarizes Catholic structures, especially in the more developed world. Our results on the determinants of the rate of long-term economic growth are well...

Our data are from two sets of reliable and regularly repeated global opinion surveys: The World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Social Survey (ESS). Our statistical calculations were performed by the routine and standard SPSS statistical program (SPSS XXIII), and relied on the so-called...