Publications & Documents

This paper evaluates the link between educational policies and i) student performance and ii) macroeconomic measures of productivity. The analysis has two stages. First, using the 2015 and 2018 PISA databases, it quantifies the relationship between student test scores and the characteristics of students taking the tests, their school environment and national educational systems. Second, assuming that these relationships reflect the effect of different characteristics/policies on student test performance, the second stage converts the latter into an estimated effect on macroeconomic measures of productivity using a new measure of human capital as an intermediary variable. This new measure of human capital, devised in previous OECD work, combines student test scores and mean years of schooling with estimated elasticities that suggest the former is more important. The analysis shows a positive association between spending on education and student test scores, but only for levels of student expenditure below the OECD median, suggesting scope for currently low-spending countries to raise student performance with potential gains to long-run productivity. Boosting participation in early childhood education as well as improving teacher quality is found to generate large aggregate productivity gains. There are significant, but smaller, macroeconomic gains for many countries from limiting grade repetition and ability grouping across all subjects as well as increasing the accountability of schools. Finally, the results provide evidence for income inequality having a major influence on productivity through a human capital channel.

This paper analyses employment dynamics across firms during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of job retention schemes (JRS) in shaping these dynamics. It relies on a novel collection of high-frequency harmonised micro-aggregated statistics, computed using administrative data on employment and wages from electronic payroll records across 12 countries linked to monthly information on policy support during COVID-19, as well as on a new indicator of JRS de-jure generosity. The analysis highlights four key findings: i) the employment adjustment margins varied over time, adjusting mainly through the intensive margin in 2020, while both the intensive and the extensive margins contributed to employment changes in 2021; ii) the reallocation process remained productivity enhancing, although to a lower extent on average compared to 2019; iii) JRS were successful in their purpose of cushioning the effect of the crisis on employment growth and firm survival; iv) JRS support did not distort the productivity-enhancing nature of reallocation.

This paper identifies different types of climate change mitigation strategies countries adopted over the last two decades and assesses the policy synergies they might generate. The analysis exploits the rich policy repository of the OECD’s Climate Actions and Policies Measurement Framework (CAPMF). This is the most comprehensive and harmonised mitigation policy database to date, covering more than 120 policy instruments and 50 countries over 2000-20. Statistical cluster analysis yields four types of mitigation strategies, which differ in the variety and stringency of mitigation policies. Until the mid-2000s mitigation strategies were similar and based on few policies and low overall stringency. They started to differentiate in the mid-2000s and then in the mid-2010s as some countries enlarged the variety of policy instruments and raised stringency. Regression results indicate that emissions are negatively associated with the overall stringency of the country’s mitigation strategies. Moreover, this relationship is stronger for mitigation strategies comprising a larger set of instruments, pointing to larger policy synergies.

This study investigates the capacity of governments to reallocate spending across different functions of the government. It mobilises the COFOG dataset for the period 1996 - 2017, which allows comparing public spending mixes at detailed levels in ways that are consistent across countries and over time. Three main empirical findings are established. Firstly, countries differ in their propensity to reallocate public spending across functions and countries that reallocate more are also countries with sounder governance and tighter fiscal rules in place. Secondly, obstacles to reallocation are identified, with governments avoiding nominal cuts, especially in health and social expenditures. Thirdly, while the analysis underlines some degree of convergence among OECD countries in terms of public spending allocation, this convergence is not universal. A cluster of Nordic countries persists, and Greece is identified as diverging from the rest of countries included in the sample.

High employment growth has sustained Israel’s high GDP growth in recent decades, but demographic change and labour market duality put future growth at risk. Policy action is required to stimulate employment and raise labour productivity, especially among population groups with weaker labour market outcomes. A particular concern is closing employment gaps of Haredim and Arab Israelis and ensuring gender equality in the workplace, which would simultaneously improve opportunities for all Israelis and the aggregate labour productivity of the economy. This will require setting appropriate work incentives and providing better support for working parents; improving skills at all stages of the learning cycle; as well as increasing mobility and improving reallocation towards high-productivity jobs and firms, in particular in the high-tech sector.

As countries seek to draw lessons the COVID-19 crisis and increase their future resilience, evaluations are important tools to understand what worked or not, why and for whom. This report builds on the OECD work on 'government evaluations of COVID-19 responses'. It evaluates Belgium’s responses to the pandemic in terms of risk preparedness, crisis management, as well as public health, education, economic and fiscal, and social and labour market policies. Preserving the country’s resilience in the future will require promoting trust in public institutions and whole-of-government approaches to crisis management, reducing inequalities, and preserving the fiscal balance. The findings and recommendations of this report will provide guidance to public authorities in these efforts.

This paper describes the latest update of the OECD’s long-term scenarios, which are done every 2-3 years to quantify some of the most important long-term macroeconomic trends and policy challenges facing the global economy. For the first time, this update incorporates the effect of the low-carbon energy transition. The study first presents a baseline projection that acts as a business-as-usual scenario against which the economic effects of the transition can be gauged. Next, it outlines extensions to the OECD global long-term model (LTM) to consider energy use and associated CO2 emissions and describes an alternative stylised scenario in which OECD and non-OECD G20 countries successfully transition to low-carbon energy in a way broadly consistent with a net-zero target for greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. These extensions rely on a variety of sources, but most crucially on simulations of CO2 mitigation costs with the OECD’s ENV-Linkages model. Finally, the model’s extensions are used to explore some fiscal implications of the energy transition, in particular how the negative economic effects of carbon mitigation could be alleviated by fiscal or other structural reforms.

This paper investigates the link between gender diversity in senior management and firm-level productivity. For this purpose, it constructs a novel cross-country dataset with information on firms’ senior management group and other firm characteristics, covering both publicly listed and unlisted firms in manufacturing and non-financial market services across nine OECD countries. The main result from the analysis is that productivity gains from increasing gender diversity in senior management are highest among firms with low initial diversity. Increasing the female share to the sample average of 20% in firms with initially lower shares would increase aggregate productivity by around 0.6%. This suggests that improving women’s access to senior management positions matters not only for equity but could yield significant productivity gains.