Public Administration

This paper studies the potential drivers of governments’ approval rates in 18 Latin American countries using Internet search query data from Google Trends and traditional data sources. It employs monthly panel data between January 2006 and December...

Since 2009, the OECD Development Centre has been publishing the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), a cross-country measure of gender-based discrimination in social institutions (formal and informal laws, social norms and practices). This...

This paper examines the link between economic globalisation, social protection expenditure, and within-country income inequality. We examine the relationship using income inequality data from both the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and the...

The empirical literature on development has labelled as “middle-income trap” (MIT) the fact that many developing economies struggle to adjust to new sources of growth after reaching middle-income levels. For Latin America and the Caribbean, this is...

The grant element is the “gift portion” of a financial transaction. The mathematical technique for arriving at a precise grant element percentage was first proposed by John Pincus of the RAND Corporation in 1963, and developed mathematically by Göran...

This study documents the process through which standard tax reliefs and tax allowances reduce the taxable base of the Personal Income Tax (PIT) in Latin American countries by using the models developed in Taxing Wages in Latin America and the...

The OECD has long argued that the ultimate goal of public policies is to improve the quality of our lives. But what makes us happy? Does living in a country guaranteeing equal rights and opportunities to women and men increase people’s...

A stronger macroeconomic position when the financial crisis erupted allowed Latin American economies to mitigate its impact through fiscal expansions, reversing the characteristic procyclical behaviour of fiscal policy. At the same time, in the last...

This paper reviews existing theoretical and empirical evidence on the economic effects of immigration in developing countries. Specifically, it discusses how immigration may affect labour market, entrepreneurship, human capital, productivity,...

This report makes a call for why the digital economy matters for developing countries and what they need to consider when developing a national digital strategy. The world is undergoing a digital revolution with significant implications for...

This paper is a first attempt at calculating the cost of air pollution in Africa. More precisely, it is a calculation of the major part of this cost: namely, the cost of premature deaths attributable to air pollution. It draws on the epidemiological...

Subjective well-being has in recent years been recognised as a goal of development that captures non-monetary or subjective dimensions of well-being. The body of evidence on the individual and societal determinants of subjective well-being is...

This paper studies the linkages between schools’ inputs and students’ performance in Latin America. We exploit the richness of PISA 2012 questionnaires at the student and school level to study the association between a different set of inputs and...

This paper estimates the potential income gains associated with greater gender parity in social institutions and the cost of the current level of discrimination. Using cross-country analysis, it investigates how gender-based discrimination in social...

Most emerging economies are characterised by lagging levels of productivity. While economic growth has been robust in much of the emerging world during the last two decades, it has generally been grounded on factor accumulation, with marginal...

This paper analyses income mobility in Viet Nam from 2004 to 2008. The concept of income mobility is important for developed and developing economies, especially for those, such as Viet Nam, witnessing a stable persistent economic growth and profound...

Most low-income countries export mainly unprocessed commodities. Yet, in their pursuit of structural transformation, they also seek a more diversified economic structure, including developing a strong manufacturing sector to create jobs and spur...

Using the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) from the OECD Development Centre, this paper provides evidence of the two-way relationship between gender inequality in social institutions and South-South migration. Discriminatory social...

A wide range of voices around the world have stressed the need to understand development as a multidimensional phenomenon that involves and affects many aspects of people’s lives. Increasingly, it is recognised that current well-being and its...

We analyse the effectiveness of exchange rate interventions for a panel of 18 emerging market economies during the period 2003-11. Using an error-correction model approach, we find that on average intervention is effective in moving the real exchange...

To what extent do budgetary processes and institutions hamper infrastructural development in Africa? To answer that question, this report analyses the answers of budget officials to questionnaires administered in 22 African countries: Benin,...

Tax incentives can be a useful tool to stimulate investment in developing countries. However, in these countries interest groups often are able to exert considerable influence in its management, if not its design. From a power-based approach to the...