The document contains ongoing work on an OECD project that examines the role of agricultural policies in raising incomes and reducing poverty in developing countries. A key focus is on ways in which the policy recommendations that the OECD has developed for its member countries might need to be qualified in the case of lower income developing countries. The paper is divided into two parts: Part...

There are only two parts of the developing world where a massive problem of food insecurity exists, namely South Asia and Subsaharan Africa. This is where a major portion of the poor in the world reside. Increased attention to the developments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have however diverted attention from the problems of this poor humanity. The likely short term adverse effects of ...

A paper prepared for an OECD review of policies for information, guidance and counselling services

All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including O notice, is given to the source. There are two principal theories of why countries trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in acc...

We cannot take access to equitable out-of-school science learning for granted. Data compiled in 2012 show that between a fifth (22% in Brazil) and half (52% in China and the United States) of people in China, Japan, South Korea, India,Malaysia, theUnited States, the EuropeanUnion, andBrazil visited zoos, aquaria, and sciencemuseums (National Science Foundation, 2012). But research suggests part...

OBJECTIVE To use available suicide-rate data from 20 countries to see patterns and relations more clearly. METHOD We obtained raw suicide rates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) database from 1960 through 1997 and calculated averages and standard deviations. RESULTS There is a positive linear relation between the variation in suicide rate and geographic l...

This paper focuses on the evolution of productivity in the telecommunications industries for 13 OECD countries over the period 1979-1998. It uses Data Envelopment Analysis, a non-parametric approach that allows decompositions of changes in productivity into variations in efficiency and technical change. Moreover, it tests the existence of convergence in labor and total factor productivity level...

This paper uses yearly panel data on OECD countries to analyze the relationship between growth and the cyclicality of government debt. We develop new time-varying estimates of the cyclicality of public debt. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: (i) less procyclical public debt growth can have significantly positive effects on productivity growth, in particular when financial developm...

The purpose of this paper is to document the fundamental shift that is taking place in OECD countries. This shift is from the managed economy to the entrepreneurial economy. While politicians and policy makers have made a plea for guidance in the era of entrepreneurship, scholars have been slow to respond. This paper attempts to make a first step identifying and articulating these differences. ...

We study the production side of the Heckscher–Ohlin model empirically. The evidence we present suggests that the endowments of countries around the world are too dissimilar for all countries to be able to produce the same set of goods. In contrast, the endowments of the rich OECD countries are sufficiently similar, so that these countries do not have to specialize in different subsets of goods....