I use bilateral import data to test for the role of trade costs and asset market frictions in impeding international consumption risk sharing. Trade costs play a significant role. I do not reject the null of optimal risk sharing within OECD countries, though I do reject for the world as a whole. I calculate the impact on ex-post welfare of moving from historical asset market frictions to optima...

This article presents data on health care spending for 30 OECD countries from OECD Health Data 2003, the latest edition of OECD's annual data collection on health systems across industrialized countries. OECD data show health care expenditures as a proportion of gross domestic product at an all-time high, due to both increased expenditures and overall economic slow-down. The article discusses s...

This paper extends the literature on productivity spillovers from inward FDI. We use comparable industry level data for 17 OECD countries and investigate the importance of horizontal and vertical spillovers, and differences between CEEC and other OECD countries. Results show that there is evidence for spillovers through vertical backward linkages between multinationals and domestic firms for al...

The OECD is a unique forum where the governments of 30 democracies work together to address the economic, social and environmental challenges of globalisation. The OECD is also at the forefront of efforts to understand and to help governments respond to new developments and concerns, such as corporate governance, the information economy and the challenges of an ageing population. The Organisati...

The article is based on a multidimensional conception of healthcare system performance. Our objectives are to assess the performance of the healthcare systems of 27 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and to discern the countries' profiles according to the homogeneity of their healthcare systems' levels of performance. The analyses were carried out on data co...

We investigate country heterogeneity in cross-country growth regressions. In contrast to the previous literature that focuses on low-income countries, this study also highlights growth determinants in high-income (OECD) countries. We introduce Iterative Bayesian Model Averaging (IBMA) to address not only potential parameter heterogeneity, but also the model uncertainty inherent in growth regres...