For years William Gould has argued for labor law reform that would facilitate trade union organization and collective bargaining. In the face of increased erosion in worker protection and weakening of the collective bargaining process, Gould proposes an agenda of reforms to balance the interests...

While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google's ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and...

Poland’s productivity has grown strongly over the past decade, and efforts to reduce the regulatory burden have been significant. Despite impressive progress, product market regulation remains more burdensome than in most OECD countries, partly due to the importance of red tape and the level...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

Indonesia has come a long way in improving its tax system over the last decade, both in terms of revenues raised and administrative efficiency. Nonetheless, the tax take is still low, given the need for more spending on infrastructure and social protection. With the exception of the natural...

Traditional growth theory emphasizes the incentives for capital accumulation rather than technological progress. Innovation is treated as an exogenous process or a by-product of investment in machinery and equipment. Grossman and Helpman develop a unique approach in which innovation is viewed as...

The economic importance of innovative activity brings with it an active debate on the effect of public policy on the innovation process. This annual series, sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, brings the work of leading academic researchers to the broader policy community,...

Traditional Japanese labour market practices, which benefited both workers and firms during the highgrowth era, are no longer appropriate in the context of slow economic growth and rapid population ageing. Reforms are needed in light of the upward trend in non-regular employment to break down...

Using plant-level data from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) for the fiscal years from 1998-99 through 2007-08, this study provides plant-level cross-state/time-series evidence of the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on total factor productivity (TFP) and labour...