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Over the past generations, Japan has shown that it is possible to achieve strong educational progress: In the 1960s, Japan still ranked 14 th among OECD countries in the proportion of people with university-level or vocational tertiary qualifications, today it ranks 2 nd just after Canada. However, in Japan, the number of science graduates remains below the OECD average. There are 1596 people w...

This paper focuses on the evolution of productivity in the telecommunications industries for 13 OECD countries over the period 1979-1998. It uses Data Envelopment Analysis, a non-parametric approach that allows decompositions of changes in productivity into variations in efficiency and technical change. Moreover, it tests the existence of convergence in labor and total factor productivity level...

In this article, the authors present the most recently available data on the health care financing and delivery systems of the 24 industrialized member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). U.S. health expenditure performance is compared with the performance of other OECD countries. Thirty-six tables of data from 1960-90 are presented on health expenditu...

Advertising bans can increase or decrease alcohol consumption due to effects on beverage choice, price competition, and substitution by producers toward non-banned media. We study bans on broadcast advertising in seventeen OECD countries for the years 1977-95, in relation to per capita alcohol consumption, liver cirrhosis mortality, and motor vehicle fatalities. The results indicate that advert...

Many of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries use global budgeting to control all or certain portions of their health care expenditures. Although the use of global budgets as a cost-containment tool has not been implemented in the United States in any comprehensive way, recent health care reform initiatives have increased the need for research into such tools. In g...

Econometric investigations of individual countries’ experiences with inflation and unemployment in the 1970’s have shown that it is no longer sufficient to simply assume that wages are sticky in order to explain observed macroeconomic phenomena and make policy recommendations. A number of theoretical papers appearing in the last few years, motivated in part by the international econometric comp...

This paper argues that income inequality has increased in several, but not all, developed countries over the last twenty years. The increase in some countries supports the conclusion that the deregulation of markets, resulting in the concentration of economic power, is the fundamental cause as well as the gross manifestation of inequality of both income and wealth. JEL classifi cation: D30 (Gen...

A large amount of recent evidence finds a negative relationship between local unemployment and wages in OECD countries, a relationship christened a ‘wage curve’. This contradicts the conventional model of the labour market in which high unemployment regions have higher wages to compensate for search and other costs. This paper discovers a wage curve in South Africa, a country with several times...

The paper illustrates an unconventional approach to providing adequate nourishment worldwide. Regions with an insufficient calorie supply receive transfer payments in order to increase their food budgets. The transfer payments are financed by a flat income tax in OECD countries. A general equilibrium model, which contains this transfer payment mechanism as well as information about nutrition, i...