The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid post-war industrialisation was not sustained beyond the mid-1960s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during the next three decades, during which trend...

This paper presents the latest edition of the OECD indicators of product market regulation (PMR), which measure regulatory stance in 35 OECD and 11 non-OECD countries. This update is based on a new methodology, which has been implemented to ensure that the PMR indicators maintain their relevance...

This paper examines the evolution of firm mark-ups across 26 countries for the period 2001-14. It also discusses and investigates empirically how this can be related to the degree of digital transformation in sectors. Four main facts emerge: i) mark-ups are increasing over the period, on average...

Large business groups, which played a key role in Korea's economic development, are still dominant today, especially in exporting. The concentration of economic power creates a number of problems and risks. Ensuring a level-playing field between the business groups, also called chaebols, and...

Concerns about market power and competition in the agri-food sector are widespread, with commentators regularly suggesting that farmers are in a structurally weaker position than other actors, who therefore benefit at their expense. The evidence reviewed in this paper indicates that downstream...

Regulations of product markets serve legitimate objectives but, when ill-designed, can impose unnecessary restrictions on competition, and therefore on business dynamism, productivity and ultimately well-being. A recent update of the OECD’s Product Market Regulation indicator for Costa Rica...

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities on firm performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontier technique is used on a unique unbalanced longitudinal dataset on top European R&D investors over the period...

Do firms in the same sector converge towards the same R&D intensities? Previous research has often assumed this to be true. A closer examination, using microdata from the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard for the years 2000-2015, shows a large amount of heterogeneity in R&D intensities...

This paper examines how import penetration affects firms' productivity growth taking into account the heterogeneity in firms' distance to the efficiency frontier and country differences in product market regulation. Using firm-level data for a large number of OECD countries, the analysis reveals...

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...