Reforming the public sector, long a priority for Thailand, involves several challenges. Among these, insufficient public participation in policy-making is undermining the efficient allocation of resources toward public needs and development goals.

The combination of different working-age benefits, childcare costs and income taxation creates complexity, reduces work incentives and holds back employment.

“Urgent and concerted effort” is needed from governments to drive more inclusive, sustainable economic growth that benefits everyone in society, according to a new OECD report.

Finland raises a large amount of taxes to finance high-quality public services and redistribute income.

OECD appoints Laurence Boone as new Chief Economist

1st Joint IMF-OECD-World Bank Conference on Structural Reforms

Slow productivity growth in advanced economies holds back income gains and therefore improvements in well-being.

The German economy is undergoing a robust expansion, with record-low unemployment and real wage gains underpinning domestic demand while strong exports are driving business investment. The strong fiscal position will offer opportunities for funding structural reforms and public investment to meet future challenges, according to a new report from the OECD.

The European economy is growing robustly, helped by accommodative monetary policy, mildly expansionary fiscal policy and the global acceleration. The current economic expansion should be used to speed up implementation of reforms to the euro area architecture and EU policies that would support greater European integration and ensure stronger, more inclusive long-term growth, according to two new reports from the OECD.

Short-term prospects for the Korean economy are good, with an uptick in world trade and fiscal policy driving growth, but productivity remains relatively low and the country faces the most rapid population ageing in the OECD area, according to a new report from the OECD.

Economic performance in The Netherlands is vibrant and growth is expected to remain robust, underpinned by sound public finances, healthy job creation and high levels of confidence. The current economic expansion should be used to speed up implementation of reforms to ensure future stability and support more inclusive labour markets, according to a new report from the OECD.

This paper summarises earlier OECD work aimed at quantifying the impact of structural reforms on economic outcomes.

Lithuania’s economy has grown faster than most other OECD economies over the past 10 years, unemployment continues to fall and public finances have stabilised after a long period of deficits and rising debt.

Policy choices made today can have important positive effects on future living standards, according to new long-term economic scenarios released by the OECD.

This paper presents country-specific effects of structural reforms. It discusses how sizeable and interesting country-specific effects can be identified in a panel setting by conditioning the impact of individual policies on their own level or on the stance of other policies and institutions.

The Irish economy has experienced a decline in productivity growth over the past decade. This has mostly reflected the poor performance of local firms, with the large productivity gap between foreign-owned and local enterprises having widened.

This paper provides robust empirical evidence that government effectiveness is a key determinant of sovereign defaults.

The paper examines the possible design and macroeconomic stabilisation properties of a euro area unemployment benefits re-insurance scheme using annual historical data from 2000 to 2016.

This paper exploits a new database that is unique in its scale and scope containing detailed information on over two million projects carried out by one million firms that benefited from the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund and the Cohesion Fund in 25 EU member countries during the multi-annual financial framework 2007-2013.

Health care expenditure per person, after accounting for changes in overall price levels, began to slow in many OECD countries in the early-to-mid 2000s, well before the economic and fiscal crisis.

A steady economic expansion in Indonesia is boosting living standards, curbing poverty and offering millions of people greater access to public services.

Large business groups, which played a key role in Korea's economic development, are still dominant today, especially in exporting.

The Brazilian economy has made a rapid recovery from the global economic crisis, but further reforms are necessary to boost long-term growth, spur investment and further reduce poverty, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Survey of Brazil.

This note is taken from Chapter 2 of Economic Policy Reforms: Going for Growth 2012.

Brazil’s strong economic growth has helped cut the youth unemployment rate over the past decade to levels below those of most OECD countries. Increased investment in education and vocational training is also helping young people get a foot in the jobs market, according to a new OECD report.

“What is the city but the people?” asked Shakespeare in Coriolanus. All city planning focuses on people and the quality of life. The big cities in Brazil took shape from the 1950s, when the country’s population amounted to approximately 52 million inhabitants, only 36.2% of whom lived in cities.

Brazil has made significant progress in building a reputation for sound fiscal policy since it passed the Fiscal Responsibility Law in 2000. In recent years, however, the fiscal situation has become more difficult as public spending and gross debt have risen.

Brazil remains a fairly closed economy, with small trade flows relative to its share of world income. This paper explores the effects of three possible policy reforms to strengthen Brazil’s integration into global trade: a reduction in import tariffs, less local content requirements and a full zero-rating of exports in indirect taxes.

Current carbon prices are falling short of the levels needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, but even moderate price increases could have a significant impact, according to new OECD research.

Brazil’s old-age pensions have reduced old-age poverty below OECD levels, but pension expenditures of 8.2% of GDP are expected to rise rapidly as the population ages. A pension reform is necessary to ensure the financial sustainability of the system.

Brazil is steadily investing in the creation of rules and regulations to converge to governance standards already consolidated in developed countries. Complying with these international standards is indispensable if Brazilian companies intend to operate on a global scale.

Brazil is emerging from its long recession and is headed for solid growth in 2018 and 2019 as recent structural reforms start to bear fruit. Sustaining this recovery, unleashing Brazil’s full economic potential and spreading the benefits fairly will require additional efforts to rein in public spending, increase trade and investment, and further focus social spending on those most in need, according to a new OECD report.

This country note for Brazil provides detail on the proportion of CO2 emissions from energy use subject to different effective carbon rates (ECR), as well as on the level and components of average ECRs in each of the six economic sectors (road transport, off-road transport, industry, agriculture and fishing, residential & commercial, and electricity).

This report compares urbanisation trends on the basis of a common methodology which helps cross-country comparison of the socio-economic and environmental performance of metropolitan areas in 28 OECD countries.

Greater use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) can help Spain unlock governmental efficiencies and help prepare the country for future economic growth, according to a new study from the OECD.

In this paper we develop a simple analytical framework to analyze “good” and “bad equilibria” in public-debt and growth dynamics.

The economics profession seems to increasingly endorse the existence of a strongly negative nonlinear effect of public debt on economic growth. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) were the first to point out that a public debt to GDP ratio higher than 90% of GDP is associated with considerably lower economic performance in advanced and emerging economies alike.

OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría opens the Global Forum on Better Governance for Inclusive Growth held in Paris. The Forum will focus on public sector reforms worldwide and identify lessons learned, good practices and innovative solutions for advancing the governance reforms necessary to foster inclusive growth.

This report summarises experience of OECD and non-OECD countries with reforming inspections, attempts to present some of the most interesting and successful experiences suggesting that some good practices may be valid beyond the countries where they were initially pioneered.

This report summarises the results of the survey on regulatory enforcement and inspections conducted among OECD countries in 2012. The report draws some general conclusions from this survey and provides theoretical background on the topic. It also suggests some recommendations for organising and reforming inspections.

Taxes and cash transfers reduce income inequality more in France than elsewhere in the OECD, because of the large size of the flows involved. But the system is complex overall. Its effectiveness could be enhanced in many ways, for example so as to achieve the same amount of redistribution at lower cost.

The Spanish government has launched a series of ambitious public administration reforms as part of wider efforts to promote economic competitiveness and strengthen trust in government and public institutions.

On 19 September 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to grant the right to vote to all adult women. New Zealand's Permanent Representative to the OECD Rosemary Banks says the 120th anniversary of this decision is an time to reflect on that achievement.

This workshop served to discuss how benchmarking and measuring regulatory performance can help advance a regulatory policy at the sub-national level.

Public trust is the cornerstone of effective governance, the main ingredient to promote economic growth and social progress. Like never before, our citizens have doubts about their government’s capacities to make the right decisions. Therefore, we need to take the necessary measures to recover that confidence, said OECD Secretary-General.

This report assesses progress in the implementation of regulatory policy within the MENA region and highlights good practices from Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority and Tunisia.

The report "Regulatory Reform in the Middle East and North Africa" assesses progress in the implementation of regulatory policy within the MENA region and highlights good practices from Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority and Tunisia.

Using panel data for OECD countries, this study investigates the extent to which changes in government spending on education, health and other areas influence long-term growth.

In the wake of the financial crisis there has been renewed focus on the importance of a country’s net external debt position in determining domestic interest rates and, relatedly, its vulnerability to a crisis. This paper extends the panel estimation of OECD countries described in Turner and Spinelli (2012) to investigate the effect of external debt and its interaction with government debt on the interest-rate-growth differential.

Recommendation of the OECD Council on Effective Public Investment Across Levels of Government