All advanced industrial nations appear to be experiencing a jobs problem. There simply appear to be too few decent employment opportunities to go around. This difficulty manifests itself somewhat differently in different countries. But no Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nation appears to have been able to fully escape rising wage inequality (sometimes coupled with d...

The Fourth International Social Security Association (ISSA) Meeting of Directors of Social Security Organizations in Asia and Pacific was held in Seoul from 9 to 11 November 2005 and was organized in cooperation with the National Health Insurance Corporation of the Republic of Korea. The Meeting was attended by 131 participants from 29 countries. Also at the Meeting were representatives from th...

A clear break in the post-World War I1 pattern of rapid productivity growth was a virtually universal phenomenon across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, in most of them beginning in the early 1970s. This development had implications for both the evolution of aggregate supply, as well as the growth of real income and the types of macroeconomic and structura...

Using the most recent data on health spending published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we explore reasons why U.S. health spending towers over that of other countries with much older populations. Prominent among the reasons are higher U.S. per capita gross domestic product (GDP) as well as a highly complex and fragmented payment system that weakens the dema...

In spite of many challenges faced by the Baltic States during the recent economic and nancial crisis, their progress since independence in 1991 has been remarkable. In about two decades those countries have been transformed from being centrally planned economies and part of the former Soviet Union, into modern countries that are rmly integrated into the global economy. Since the independence ...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of attention recently, yet empirical analyses of public capital productivity have generally been limited to the official capital stock estimates available in a small sample of countries. Alternatively, many researchers have investigated the output effects of public investment—recognizing that investment may be a poo...

In 2003, the United States had fewer practicing physicians, practicing nurses, and acute care bed days per capita than the median country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Nevertheless, U.S. health spending per capita was almost two and a half times the per capita health spending of the median OECD country. One proposal for both lowering health spending and im...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of attention recently, yet empirical analyses of public capital productivity have generally been limited to the official capital stock estimates available in a small sample of countries. Alternatively, many researchers have investigated the output effects of public investment—recognizing that investment may be a poo...

Health care expenditure and utilization trends in the 24 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries are provided and analyzed in terms of trends in price, population, and volume-intensity. The United States spends more on health than other countries, both in absolute dollar terms and relative to gross domestic product. Moreover, the gap appears to have grown in recent years...