Documents Pisu, Mauro 12 results

"It is well known that the performance of foreign firms compared to domestic companies is superior with respect to employment, wages, and productivity. In this paper we detail the export behaviour of foreign affiliates in the United Kingdom relative to indigenous firms. Our findings show that foreign firms are more likely to export, and when they do so they are more export intensive and overall contribute disproportionately to total manufacturing exports from the UK. While firm-level advantages explain some of these differences in export behaviour, strategic considerations dominate, where these include the differential in costs, productivity, and market size between the UK and foreign countries. That is, both horizontal and vertical motives can be found for the use of the UK as an export platform by foreign firms."

"Social institutions face many challenges. The recent economic crisis has provided a stress test as it has left a legacy of high unemployment and high government debt in many countries. It also lowered potential output and thus the revenue base for social protection schemes. At the same time, ageing and other secular trends raise long-term sustainability issues. The design of social institutions determines their capacity to deal with shocks and trend changes and the way risks are shared between the institutions and their stakeholders. They also circumscribe the scope for automatic or discretionary adjustments, when trade-offs between sustainability, adequacy and efficiency arise. This report examines the sustainability of social institutions and their ability to absorb and cope with short-term shocks and longer-term trends by providing risk sharing and expenditure smoothing, focusing on pension, health care and unemployment insurance schemes."

"Countries differ widely with respect to the level of labour income inequality among individuals of working age. Labour income inequality is shaped by differences in wage rates, hours worked and inactivity rates. Individual labour income inequality is the main driver of household market income inequality, with family formation as well as self-employment and capital income dispersion playing a smaller role. Household disposable income dispersion is lower in all OECD countries than household market income inequality, due to the redistributive effect of tax and transfer systems, but redistribution differs widely across countries. This paper maps income inequality for all OECD countries across various inequality dimensions and summarises them in inequality outcome diamonds. It also provides a cluster analysis that identifies groups of countries that share similar inequality patterns."

"Taxes and transfers reduce inequality in disposable income relative to market income. The effect varies, however, across OECD countries. The redistributive impact of taxes and transfers depends on the size, mix and the progressivity of each component. Some countries with a relatively small tax and welfare system (e.g. Australia) achieve the same redistributive impact as countries characterised by much higher taxes and transfers (e.g. Germany) because they rely more on income taxes, which are more progressive than other taxes, and on means-tested cash transfers. This paper provides an assessment of the redistributive effect of the main taxes and cash transfers based on a set of policy indicators and a literature review. It also identifies empirically four groups of countries with tax and transfer systems that share broadly similar features. The paper then assesses potential trade-offs and complementarities between economic growth and income redistribution objectives associated with various tax and transfer reform options."

"Poverty is an important policy issue in OECD countries and the recent crisis has made it even more pressing. This paper highlights poverty rate differences across countries and reviews the various policies to tackle it. The OECD-wide poverty rate has drifted up, reaching around 11% in the late 2000s. In the majority of OECD countries, children suffer from a higher poverty rate than working-age people and poverty is more wide-spread among women than men. Albeit boosting employment is essential to reduce poverty rates durably, work alone does not suffice to eliminate it as in-work poverty is a problem in many countries The redistribution system is effective in reducing poverty. Countries achieving a greater reduction in market-income poverty tend to redistribute more towards people at the bottom of the income distribution. Policies aiming at facilitating paid work along with employment-conditional cash transfers to top-up the income of low-wage workers can offer effective ways to combat poverty. Child poverty is also a major concern because of its adverse long-term effects. Countries with low levels of child poverty combine low levels of joblessness among parents with effective redistribution policies towards children. This suggests these two policy approaches are complementary and relying exclusively on only one of them is likely to be insufficient to reduce poverty among children significantly."

"Employment is pivotal to strengthening Greece's economic recovery, increasing social welfare and redressing poverty. Jobs are returning, making inroads into high unemployment, but their wages and skill levels are lower than many that were lost during the crisis. Greece's hiring is benefiting from more flexible arrangements. Legislative amendments can maintain this flexibility, ensure wages align with productivity and better protect individuals from labour market risks. Ensuring that workers possess skills that match employers' needs will sustain employment and productivity growth. Improving the education system is a long-term mission and involves raising its pedagogical strength and orientation towards professional needs. A social welfare system dominated by pensions has not been able to prevent a steep hike in poverty among children and the young, risking long-term harm to well-being. Pursuing recent steps towards a better targeted social protection, accompanied by support programmes for jobseekers, will provide a reliable safety net and reduce poverty. This Working Paper relates to the 2018 OECD Economic Survey of Greece. (http://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-greece.htm)."

This paper assesses Italy's 2019 tax and benefit reforms, analyses hypothetical reforms and proposes a reform package that balances goals of reducing poverty, encouraging employment and fiscal sustainability. Using the OECD's Tax-Benefit and the EUROMOD microsimulation models, it shows that the new guaranteed minimum income scheme introduced in 2019 significantly strengthens Italy's low income protection system but can also financially discourage recipients from working. The debated flattening of personal income tax rates would do little to improve work incentives, but would drastically cut tax revenues and increase inequality, by reducing the progressivity of the personal tax system. A proposed reform package that maintains progressive personal income tax rates, gradually withdraws low-income support and provides additional benefits for low-wage earners would make inroads into poverty and inequality while encouraging formal work. This paper accompanies and extends the results of the in-depth chapter of the OECD 2019 Economic Survey of Italy (2019[1]) on social and regional disparities."

"The full potential of digital technologies remains unrealised and their benefits unequally shared because of insufficient investment in enabling intangible assets and communication networks within and across countries. The COVID-19 shock poses new challenges and opportunities. Drawing on past and ongoing OECD work, the paper proposes a multipronged policy approach to durably accelerate the diffusion and uptake of digital technologies across all layers of society, and share their benefits more widely. The building blocks of the proposed LIFT approach include: Lifelong learning for all to ensure everybody has the opportunity to acquire and upgrade the skills needed to thrive in a digital world; Intangibles finance for the knowledge economy to allow more firms, especially small ones, to increase intangible investment and seize the opportunities offered by the digital transformation; Framework market conditions for the digital age to upgrade policies to the digital age, especially in the areas of taxation, competition law and enforcement, digital security, firms' entry and exit, and e-government; Technology access via digital infrastructure to facilitate access to communication networks and accelerate the take up of digital technologies and their international diffusion."

"Global progress towards tackling climate change is lagging. This paper puts forward a framework to design comprehensive decarbonisation strategies while promoting growth and social inclusion. It first highlights the need of evaluating a country's national climate targets and current policy mix, in conjunction with facilitating monitoring tools to assess current and future progress, as a key step to design effective decarbonisation strategies. It then provides a detailed comparison of several policy instruments across different assessment criteria, which indicates that no single instrument is clearly superior to all others. This highlights the need for developing decarbonisation strategies based on a wide policy mix consisting of three main components: 1) emission pricing policy instruments; 2) standards and regulations; 3) complementary policies to facilitate the reallocation of capital, labour and innovation towards low-carbon activities and to offset the adverse distributional effects of reducing emissions. However, there is no one-size-fits-all policy mix, as feasible policy choices depend on countries' industrial structure, social preferences and political constraints. A robust and independent institutional framework, stakeholders engagement and credible communication campaigns are key to managing these constraints and ultimately enhancing public acceptance of climate mitigation policies."

"Governments rapidly provided large support to help households and firms face the 2021-22 energy price crisis. Drawing on the OECD Energy Support Measures Tracker and country case studies, this paper documents countries' policy responses and draws lessons for enhancing countries' preparedness to future energy price shocks. Support implemented or announced by countries so far has been largely untargeted and often fiscally costly. As such it might add to inflationary pressures and in many cases reduce incentives to save energy and transition away from fossil fuels. Reliance on imported energy, technical obstacles to implement a targeted approach and political economy constraints help explain the type of support countries provided. There is now a case for withdrawing broad-based energy support, given the recent moderation in energy prices and ongoing or planned minimum-wage and welfare-benefit increases to compensate for high inflation. Digitalisation would help improve the quality of support countries can provide to face a future energy or other crisis by speeding up payment delivery and facilitating a more targeted approach based on vulnerability factors beyond low income, such as the inability to renovate an energy-inefficient home. Ensuring that support measures maintain incentives for energy savings and encourage energy diversification, combined with investments to accelerate the green transition, is key to reducing vulnerability to energy price shocks."