A major step forward towards putting the measurement of well-being at the heart of policy-making was taken at a four-day international conference which ended in New Delhi today.

Secretary-General Angel Gurría opens the first meeting of the New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC) Group, an organisation-wide reflection process on the roots and lessons from the crisis with the aim of catalysing a process of continuous improvement of our analytical frameworks and policy advice. This meeting serves as a first step to get expert feedback and inputs to identify priorities for the way forward.

The President of the French Republic, Mr. François Hollande, met the Heads of international economic organisations at the OECD on Monday 29th October.

Restoring competitiveness is one of the key challenges to bring European economies back on a path of strong, sustainable and balanced growth. Europe could improve its growth prospects by implementing a strategic reform agenda with a broad range of policy reforms to increase productivity, dynamism and employment.

The correlation between a firm’s size and its productivity level varies considerably across OECD countries, suggesting that some countries are more successful at channelling resources to high productivity firms than others.

The Secretary-General presents the OECD’s views on “new approaches to economic development” at the 4th Annual Global Perspectives Conference, one of the most important gatherings of Civil Society Organisations.

The balance of economic power is expected to shift dramatically over the next half century, with fast-growing emerging-market economies accounting for an ever-increasing share of global output, according to a new OECD report.

This workshop will convene leading experts from health and finance backgrounds in government, academia, and international organisations to take stock of progress in health expenditure forecasting and to discuss future directions, in light of policy needs and recent advancements in techniques, detailed data and computing power.

Palabras de Angel Gurría,Secretario General OCDE, Lanzamiento del Informe Perspectivas Económicas de América Latina 2013: Transformación de la Estructura Productiva y Papel de las PYMES en el Desarrollo Regional

This paper uses household level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) over the period 1991 to 2008 to analyse the driving factors of movements in the German household savings rate.

The global economy is expected to make a hesitant and uneven recovery over the coming two years. Decisive policy action is needed to ensure that stalemate over fiscal policy in the United States and continuing euro area instability do not plunge the world back into recession, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Outlook.

Spain is immersed in a prolonged recession that has been compounded by the continuing crisis in the euro area. The path to recovery has been launched, but will require full implementation of reforms and some additional measures to restore confidence in the financial sector, redress public finances and bring down high unemployment, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Survey of Spain.

The Australian economy is robust and faces a solid short-term outlook, but it must continue adapting to ensure that its privileged place in the Asia-Pacific region contributes to long-term sustainable growth, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Survey of Australia.

The global crisis led to a smaller increase in the unemployment rate than in most other OECD countries as employment has been sustained through intensive use of reduced working time schemes.

The Netherlands, as other OECD countries, faces the challenge of providing high quality health and long term care services to an ageing population in a cost-efficient manner.

The Netherlands has strongly benefited from globalisation, which boosted international trade, cross-border investment and economic growth over the latest decades.

The well performing labour market has delivered low unemployment and relatively stable wage developments.

In several OECD countries, ongoing fiscal consolidation might have a negative impact on the static income distribution. However, this conclusion should be treated only as an approximate first step in the analysis.

This study looks into the use of fixed term contracts and agency work in Russia during and shortly after the crisis 2009 10 with the help of an enterprise survey.

Despite the economic importance of the road transport sector, there is no systematic cross-country evidence on the sector’s efficiency.

Although job creation has improved, since the end of the 2007-08 recession, the effects of the recession on the labour market remain severe.

In Slovakia, educational outcomes are below the OECD average and are too dependent on the socioeconomic background of students.

The Slovak economy experienced a strong but short recession in 2009. The recovery afterwards was driven by exports and investment. While GDP growth was one of the strongest in OECD, employment did not reach the pre-crisis level and unemployment remains stubbornly high.

In this paper we examine whether past labour market reforms aiming at reducing the rate of unemployment have raised its long-run volatility.

Structural reforms offer governments a powerful tool to boost economic growth, create jobs and bring about a strong and balanced economic recovery, according to the OECD’s latest Going for Growth report.

Sweden is a very egalitarian country but inequalities have risen and some groups are poorly integrated into the labour market.

In this paper we document the impact of education levels on labour market outcomes from 1994 to 2010 using national household survey data.

In this paper we include measures of school quality in regressions determining the labour market premiums to education level.

Extensive structural reforms since the early 1990s have strengthened the resilience of the Swedish economy to shocks.

This paper analyses the age structure of employment rates across OECD countries with a focus on France. The statistical contribution of each age group to total unemployment-rate differentials is also computed.

This short paper analyses the decline of France’s trade balance over the past 15 years. While the loss in export market shares is comparable to that of the major OECD countries except Germany, it is one of the largest among the countries of the euro area.

This paper discusses the pros and cons of a single labour contract. After reviewing the current state of dualism in labour markets and the recent labour reforms in Europe, we discuss the various proposals to eliminate dualism.

This book deals with two issues. The first concerns the various measurement of fiscal decentralization in general and their usefulness for policy analysis. The second and more specific issue concerns the taxonomy of intergovernmental grants and the limits of the current classifications.

OECD’s PISA publications highlight the impact of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS) on students’ results within countries. The focus here is to investigate whether ESCS measures could contribute to differences in aggregate educational outcomes between countries.

In his speech to OECD Ambassadors, the President of Iceland discussed how Iceland could offer lessons on the nature of a clean energy economy; and presented some insights from Iceland's recent challenges in dealing with the financial crisis.

The main features of China’s current sub-national finance arrangements date back to the 1994 tax reform. China has a multi-level government structure that shares national tax revenues through a system of tax sharing and transfers, and divides spending assignments and responsibilities.

Following a sharp drop amidst the global economic crisis and a subsequent recovery, the spot price of crude oil has been broadly stable for the past couple of years. This paper discusses the factors that drive oil demand and supply and, hence, the price of the resource.

Under the Universal Credit reform, the main means-tested benefits except the Council Tax Benefit will be pooled into one single benefit with one single taper rate. The reform will give people better incentives to work, reduce complexity and contribute to reducing poverty.

Employment has risen by more and unemployment has risen less than expected, given the path of output. Nevertheless, long-term and youth unemployment and involuntary part-time work are high. A polarised labour market risks worsening income inequality, which is high by OECD standards, despite a recent and likely temporary decline.

Luxembourg is a rich and fast-growing country. However, inequality of disposable incomes has trended up modestly over the past decades and relative poverty has risen reflecting mainly the rapid growth of high incomes.

France has avoided the most severe impacts of the global economic crisis and turmoil in the euro area, but must now take action to boost competitiveness and create jobs, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Survey of France.

China has made tremendous progress toward achieving inclusive growth, but major reforms are needed to ensure a fourth decade of rapidly converging living standards and a greener economy, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Survey of China.

China’s new leadership has signalled that it is time to step up the pace of reform, building on the remarkable economic and social achievements to date while recognising the pressing need for deep structural changes. Indeed, far-reaching reforms are necessary for continuing to raise living standards and well-being, even as China is poised to become the world’s largest economy by around 2016.

Income inequality in Colombia has declined since the early 2000s but remains very high by international standards. Income dispersion largely originates from the labour market, which is characterised by a still high unemployment rate, a pervasive informal sector and a wide wage dispersion reflecting a large education premium for those with higher education.

Income inequality in Colombia has declined since the early 2000s but remains very high by international standards. While most of the inequality originates from the labour market, wealth – and thus capital income – is also highly concentrated and the tax and transfer system has little redistributive impact.

This paper provides both descriptive and empirical evidence about the main youth labour market problems in Spain. Using the experiences of other EU economies as a benchmark, we document the performance of Spain as regards a wide set of youth labour market dimensions.

The unemployment rate among young people has reached painfully high levels, in particular among those young people with low levels of education.

The GGKP’s second annual conference will be held at the OECD Headquarters in Paris on 4-5 April 2013. The discussion will be framed around two headline themes: Greening global value chains and Measurement and reporting for green growth.

The economic situation of young people is unsatisfactory. Educational inequalities have been widening for over a decade, due to a sharp decline in the results of the most highly disadvantaged students. The unemployment rate for the 20-24 age bracket has not dropped below 16% for nearly 30 years.

Legal systems provide the basic institutions for firms and markets to operate. Their quality can have important consequences on the size distribution of firms, who rely on them for contract enforcement. This paper uses the variation in legal system quality across states in Mexico to examine the relationship between judicial quality and firm size.