This paper examines the relationship between workforce demographics and aggregate productivity. Changes in the age structure of the workforce is found to be significantly correlated with changes in aggregate productivity. Different demographic structures may be related to almost one quarter of the persistent productivity gap between the OECD and low income nations as well as part of the product...

Over the past decades, a large body of research in fields such as knowledge utilization, evidencebased policy making, or epistemic communities, has been addressing the conditions under which expert advice can play a role in policy design. This research has been successful in exploring the complex role of expertise in the policy process and has produced a number of hypotheses relating to institu...

Pursuant to Article 1 of the Convention signed in Paris on 14th December 1960, and which came into force on 30th September 1961, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shall promote policies designed: − to achieve the highest sustainable economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in Member countries, while maintaining financial stability, and thus t...

Lately the previous confidence in e-learning has declined. An OECD report from 2005 states that elearning has been an administrative success, but not as far as learning itself is concerned. In 2003 Commissionaire Reding gave a speech, in which she strongly promoted blended learning as the way forward towards a learner-centric approach to learning with a more or less hidden criticism toward e-le...

Venture capital is an important vehicle for financing new and innovative high-risk ventures. While its size relative to the economy is typical for an OECD country, Australia’s total venture capital investment is relatively smaller than that of the United States. The US, however, has a number of regions or ‘clusters’ with very high levels of venture capital activity, such as Silicon Valley and B...

The main objective of this paper is to report on the findings of an empirical study on the determinants of innovativeness in manufacturing firms. The empirical study covers 184 manufacturing firms located in the Northern Marmara region of Turkey. The types of innovation are taken as product, process, marketing and organizational innovations as suggested in the Oslo Manual 2005 published by OECD...

The majority of OECD countries has experienced a reduction in the volatility of output during the past two and a half decades. This period has also been characterized by a process of capital accounts liberalization among these countries. We study an open economy business cycle model with financial market frictions and show that the international liberalization of capital markets can lead to low...

This paper formulates an empirical model to estimate the impact of endogenous new regional trade agreement (RTA) membership on trade structure. The likelihood of new RTA membership is influenced by economic fundamentals such as country size, factor endowments, and trade and investment costs. In a sample of country-pairs covering mainly the OECD economies we find a particularly strong effect of ...

This report on restructuring public utilities draws on both submissions prepared by the countries themselves and from a large body of work by the OECD on regulatory reform – including the sectoral reviews carried out by the Competition Committee, the publications of the OECD’s Regulatory Reform Project, the work of the OECD’s TISP Committee in telecommunications, work by the International Energ...