Improving health care systems, while containing cost pressures, is a key policy challenge in most OECD countries. The recent economic and financial crisis has weighed heavily on fiscal positions – with gross government debt projected to exceed 100% of GDP in the OECD area by 2011 – and reinforced the need to improve public spending efficiency. Public spending on health care is one of the larges...

Using subjective well-being data for more than 91,000 individuals in 30 OECD countries, 1990-2008, we study how people’s implicit aversion towards inflation varies with income and other socio-economic characteristics. While inflation aversion decreases with income, it increases with the education level. Contrary to previous findings using statedpreference methods, these relationships apply not ...

Empirical results through a fixed effects regression model show that government size has a negative effect on growth mainly through hampering capital accumulation. When a sample is divided into OECD and non-OECD countries, the negative effect of government size on capital accumulation persists for non-OECD countries but not for OECD countries.

This paper uses data from the World Value Surveys (1990, 1995,1999) to investigate the impact of gender role attitudes and work values on women’s labour-market outcomes across 25 OECD countries. Anti-egalitarian views are found to display the strongest negative association with female employment rates and the gender pay gap. These views are, however, softening among recent cohorts. On the other...

In today's world, Public expenditures on health are one of the most important issues for governments. These increased expenditures are putting pressure on public budgets. Therefore, health policy makers have focused on the performance of their health systems and many countries have introduced reforms to improve the performance of their health systems. This study investigates the most important ...

I use bilateral import data to test for the role of trade costs and asset market frictions in impeding international consumption risk sharing. Trade costs play a significant role. I do not reject the null of optimal risk sharing within OECD countries, though I do reject for the world as a whole. I calculate the impact on ex-post welfare of moving from historical asset market frictions to optima...

The conditions under which safety data may be accepted by regulatory authorities (RAs) in OECD Countries do not only include the obligation to apply the principles of good laboratory practice (GLP) while producing these data, but also must countries, partaking in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) system for mutual acceptance of data (MAD), establish a monitoring p...