{"title":"Productivity measurement, R&D assets and mark-ups in OECD countries","authors":"P. Schreyer, B. Zinni","doi":"10.1787/FB3C2E6F-EN","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1787/FB3C2E6F-EN","url":null,"abstract":"A key feature of the 2008 revision of the System of National Accounts was the treatment of R&D expenditure as investment. The question arises whether the standard approach towards accounting for growth contribution of assets is justified given the special nature of R&D that provides capital services by affecting the working of other inputs as a whole – akin to technical change and often requires up-front investment with sunk costs. We model R&D inputs with a restricted cost function and compare econometric estimates with those derived under a standard index number approach but find no significant differences. However, we cannot reject the hypothesis of increasing returns to scale. The standard MFP measure is then broken down into a scale effect and a residual productivity effect, each of which explains about half of overall MFP change. The scale effect points to the importance of the demand side and market size for productivity growth. We also compute mark-up rates of prices over marginal cost and find widespread evidence of rising mark-ups for the period 1985-2016.","PeriodicalId":196193,"journal":{"name":"OECD Statistics Working Papers","volume":"10 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113989826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Child well-being and the Sustainable Development Goals","authors":"David Marguerit, Guillaume Cohen, Carrie Exton","doi":"10.1787/5E53B12F-EN","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1787/5E53B12F-EN","url":null,"abstract":"This paper summarises available evidence on the distance that OECD countries need to travel in order to reach the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets for children and young people. More than 50 indicators are included in this analysis, covering 43 of the 169 targets, and 11 of the 17 Goals. The analysis finds that, on average, OECD countries are still far from reaching the targets pertaining to Goals 4 “Quality education”, and 8 “Decent work and economic growth”. Goals 1 “No poverty”, 2 “Zero hunger” and 16 “Peace, justice and strong institutions” are also highlighted as priority areas. However, the results vary widely across OECD countries, and among specific targets within each of the goals. Yet, all of these findings need to be considered in light of what it is not currently possible to measure. In particular, there are large data gaps for Goals 1 (“No poverty”), 5 (“Gender equality”), 11 (“Sustainable cities and communities”), and 16 (“Peace, justice and strong institutions”).","PeriodicalId":196193,"journal":{"name":"OECD Statistics Working Papers","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130538702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Including unpaid household activities","authors":"P. Ven, Jorrit Zwijnenburg, Matthew De Queljoe","doi":"10.1787/BC9D30DC-EN","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1787/BC9D30DC-EN","url":null,"abstract":"The System of National Accounts, which provides information on important macroeconomic indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), household disposable income and final consumption, typically excludes the value of unpaid household activities. Exceptions are made for the production of goods for own final consumption (e.g. subsistence farming), the services from owner-occupied dwellings, and the production from employment of paid domestic staff, but the output from unpaid domestic and personal services, such as the preparation of meals, taking care of children, cleaning, repairs, volunteering, etc., is all excluded. This report deals with the impact of including unpaid household activities on macro-economic aggregates for G7-countries. It builds upon earlier work by Ahmad and Koh (2011) and van de Ven and Zwijnenburg (2016). The report starts off with discussing the pros and cons of including unpaid household activities, or more specifically, the reasons why these activities are currently excluded from the macro-economic aggregates that can be derived from the framework of national accounts. It then discusses how estimates can be compiled using statistics from time use surveys and other available information. Here, also some of the complexities related to the approximate valuation of unpaid household activities are being addressed. Subsequently, results are presented for the level estimates of GDP as well as for economic growth when including the value of unpaid household activities for the G7 economies. The report concludes with a number of recommendations on the way forward, also touching upon some of the (potential) policy implications of the work on valuing unpaid household activities.","PeriodicalId":196193,"journal":{"name":"OECD Statistics Working Papers","volume":"518 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123117903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Costantino Balestra, Romina Boarini, Elena Tosetto
{"title":"What matters the most to people?","authors":"Costantino Balestra, Romina Boarini, Elena Tosetto","doi":"10.1787/EDF9A89A-EN","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1787/EDF9A89A-EN","url":null,"abstract":"The OECD Better Life Index is an interactive composite index that aggregates average measures of country’s well-being outcomes through weights defined by users. This paper studies these weights by analysing the responses given by close to 130 000 users since 2011 to date. The paper has three goals. First, to investigate the factors shaping users’ preferences over a set of 11 well-being dimensions. Second, to provide insights into users’ preferences for a large group of countries which differ in terms of culture and living conditions. Third, to test for the effects of users’ satisfaction with respect to a given well-being dimension on the weight they attach to it, across different population groups. Various empirical models are used to identify responses’ patterns and see whether they can be accounted for by respondents’ characteristics and their perceived well-being. The paper finds that health status, education and life satisfaction are the aspects that matter the most for BLI users in OECD countries. Men assign more importance to income than women, while women value community and work-life balance more than men. Health, safety, housing and civic engagement become more important with age, while life satisfaction, work-life balance, jobs, income and community are particularly important for youth. There are also clear regional patterns in the choices by BLI users; for instance education, jobs and civic engagement are particularly important in South America while personal safety and work-life balance matter a lot in Asia-Pacific. Analysis carried out on a subset of observations (i.e. BLI-users who completed an extended questionnaire) finds that, for several well-being dimensions (i.e. jobs, housing, community, health, education, civic engagement, personal safety, life satisfaction and work-life balance), there is a positive and linear relationship between individual preferences and self-reported satisfaction in the same dimension, with evidence of distinctly different patterns of association within the population in the case of income and education.","PeriodicalId":196193,"journal":{"name":"OECD Statistics Working Papers","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115479786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
F. Murtin, L. Fleischer, Vincent Siegerink, A. Aassve, Y. Algan, Romina Boarini, S. González, Zsuzsanna Lonti, G. Grimalda, Rafael Hortala Vallve, Soonhee Kim, David Lee, L. Putterman, Conal Smith
{"title":"Trust and its determinants","authors":"F. Murtin, L. Fleischer, Vincent Siegerink, A. Aassve, Y. Algan, Romina Boarini, S. González, Zsuzsanna Lonti, G. Grimalda, Rafael Hortala Vallve, Soonhee Kim, David Lee, L. Putterman, Conal Smith","doi":"10.1787/869EF2EC-EN","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1787/869EF2EC-EN","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes the results of an international initiative on trust (Trustlab) run in six OECD countries between November 2016 and November 2017 (France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Slovenia and the United States). Trustlab combines cutting-edge techniques drawn from behavioural science and experimental economics with an extensive survey on the policy and contextual determinants of trust in others and trust in institutions, administered to representative samples of participants. The main results are as follows: 1) Self-reported measures of trust in institutions are validated experimentally, 2) Self-reported measures of trust in others capture a belief about trustworthiness (as well as altruistic preferences), whereas experimental measures rather capture willingness to cooperate and one’s own trustworthiness. Therefore, both measures are loosely related, and should be considered complementary rather than substitutes; 3) Perceptions of institutional performance strongly correlate with both trust in government and trust in others; 4) Perceived government integrity is the strongest determinant of trust in government; 5) In addition to indicators associated with social capital, such as neighbourhood connectedness and attitudes towards immigration, perceived satisfaction with public services, social preferences and expectations matter for trust in others; 6) There is a large scope for policy action, as an increase in all significant determinants of trust in government by one standard deviation may be conducive to an increase in trust by 30 to 60%.","PeriodicalId":196193,"journal":{"name":"OECD Statistics Working Papers","volume":"13 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114136172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inequalities in household wealth across OECD countries","authors":"Carlotta Balestra, R. Tonkin","doi":"10.1787/7E1BF673-EN","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1787/7E1BF673-EN","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes how household wealth is distributed in 28 OECD countries, based on evidence from the second wave of the OECD Wealth Distribution Database. A number of general patterns emerge from these data. First, wealth concentration is twice the level of income inequality: across the 28 OECD countries covered, the wealthiest 10% of households hold, on average, 52% of total household wealth, while the 60% least wealthy households own little over 12%. Second, up to a quarter of all households report negative net worth (i.e. liabilities exceeding the value of their assets) in a number of countries. In addition, some countries feature large shares of households with high levels of debt relative to both their incomes and the assets that they hold; this potentially exposes such households to significant risks in the event of changes in asset prices or falls of their income. Third, more than one in three people are economically vulnerable, as they lack liquid financial assets to maintain a poverty-level living standard for at least three months. Fourth, one in three households has received some gift or bequest in their life, with this share being considerably larger among high income and high wealth households. The paper also describes changes in wealth distribution since the Great Recession among the sub-set of countries for which repeated observations are available in the OECD Wealth Distribution Database. Finally, the paper discusses a number of methodological challenges, notably on how to better account for the top end of the wealth distribution.","PeriodicalId":196193,"journal":{"name":"OECD Statistics Working Papers","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132766538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jorrit Zwijnenburg, Sophie Bournot, David Grahn, Emmanuelle Guidetti
{"title":"Distribution of household income, consumption and saving in line with national accounts","authors":"Jorrit Zwijnenburg, Sophie Bournot, David Grahn, Emmanuelle Guidetti","doi":"10.1787/615c9eec-en","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1787/615c9eec-en","url":null,"abstract":"Economic inequality has been a matter of concern for policy makers and citizens. Evidence-based policies around important topics such as inequality need to rely on systematic, robust data and indicators. For that reason, the OECD and Eurostat have developed methodology and engaged in several rounds of data collection to measure disparities in line with national accounts (DNA). These estimates complement existing indicators on economic inequality by providing more comprehensive measures of inequality, by extending the analysis from income to consumption and saving, and by providing results that are fully consistent with macroeconomic aggregates, also ensuring a high degree of international comparability. This paper presents the latest developments of the DNA work.","PeriodicalId":196193,"journal":{"name":"OECD Statistics Working Papers","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130509396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Developing thematic satellite accounts","authors":"P. Ven","doi":"10.1787/b833cbfa-en","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1787/b833cbfa-en","url":null,"abstract":"The 2008 System of National Accounts (SNA) provides the international standards for compiling macro-economic statistics. In addition to the core set of accounts, the 2008 SNA also introduces satellite accounts, which are linked to, but distinct from, the central framework of national accounts. One type of satellite accounts involves some rearrangement of central classifications and the possible introduction of complementary elements, to give a more detailed description and monitoring of a certain theme, such as tourism, education, health, the digital economy and transport. They may involve some differences from the standards applied in the central framework, but they generally do not change the underlying concepts of the SNA in a fundamental way. The second type of satellite analysis is mainly based on concepts that are alternatives to those of the SNA. They may include a different production boundary, an enlarged concept of consumption or capital formation, an extension of the scope of assets, and so on. There is a growing demand for satellite accounts, especially for the first type of thematic satellite accounts. This paper aims to clarify the key steps for the compilation of such thematic satellite accounts, using the example of a satellite account for transport.","PeriodicalId":196193,"journal":{"name":"OECD Statistics Working Papers","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122742894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The economy of well-being","authors":"Ana Llena-Nozal, Neil Martin, F. Murtin","doi":"10.1787/498e9bc7-en","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1787/498e9bc7-en","url":null,"abstract":"As well-being has matured as a statistical and measurement agenda, it has become increasingly relevant as a “compass” for policy, with a growing number of countries using well-being metrics to guide decision-making and inform budgetary processes. One remaining challenge has consisted in providing policy-makers with a better understanding of the linkages between the drivers of well-being and economic growth. This paper develops the concept of an “Economy of Well-being” as a basis for highlighting these linkages and showing how policy can most effectively leverage them. The paper defines an economy of well-being around the idea of a “virtuous circle” in which individual well-being and long-term economic growth are mutually reinforcing. It also explores the characteristics of an economy of well-being and the conditions under which it can be sustained. Secondly, based on a survey of existing empirical evidence, the paper contributes to outline how economies of well-being can be built. It provides analysis of several important channels through which economic growth and well-being support and reinforce one another, focusing on the multidimensional impact of policies in four areas that research has shown to be important for well-being: Education and Skills; Health; Social Protection and Redistribution; and Gender Equality.","PeriodicalId":196193,"journal":{"name":"OECD Statistics Working Papers","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131702031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}