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News & Events
News
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12-Dec-2011
Early signs of weakness in the Israeli housing market may presage an imminent sharper than desired decline in prices, tax settings excessively favour home ownership, and housing support schemes extend well beyond assistance to low income households.
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12-Dec-2011
In the energy sector, there is sluggish reform in electricity and concerns about competition in natural gas. Competition issues in the financial sector remain a subject of debate.
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12-Dec-2011
The economy, including the housing market, is slowing; sound financial-market supervision is important. Alleviating poverty and raising GDP per-capita, requires structural reform to education, social, housing and industry policies, including the energy sector.
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12-Dec-2011
In recent years Russian leaders have increasingly emphasised the importance of modernising the economy, stressing the need to reduce the dependence on oil revenues and diversify the economy. The process of accession to the OECD, which began in 2007, dovetails closely with this agenda. The accession process provides a useful opportunity to take stock of the extent to which policies and outcomes in Russia are converging on those of the OECD, identifying both progress and areas where the gaps are still large and thus where peer review and drawing on OECD experience may be particularly useful.
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12-Dec-2011
While Russia remains a relatively high-inflation economy, monetary policy has delivered a gradual decline in inflation over the past 12 years, and the policy framework is being adjusted to the new lower-inflation environment to which the country is moving.
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12-Dec-2011
Fiscal policy has been mostly prudent and Russia’s budgeting procedures are relatively advanced, but a reduction in the non-oil deficit is needed, along with a framework that better protects against the danger of policy becoming pro-cyclical.
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12-Dec-2011
A key aspect of the business climate, insofar as it bears on the performance of the economy as a whole, is the degree to which it facilitates competition. The OECD’s product market regulation (PMR) indicators, which measure the extent to which policy settings promote competition in markets for goods and services where competition is viable, suggest that such policy settings remain relatively anti-competitive in Russia.
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12-Dec-2011
Following the pattern of output, aggregate labour productivity in Russia fell disastrously from 1990 to 1998 and then increased rapidly until 2008. It dipped in the crisis year of 2009 and then began to recover. In 2010 labour productivity was a little over 30% of the upper half of the OECD countries.
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12-Dec-2011
Russia has one of the most energy-intensive economies in the world. The high degree of energy intensity, combined with relatively carbon-intensive energy use, results in Russia accounting for a disproportionately large share of global carbon emissions. Moreover, low energy efficiency contributes to poor air quality, and Russia has one of the highest rates of premature mortality attributable to air pollution in the world.
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12-Dec-2011
One factor impeding competitive pressures on incumbent firms is Russia’s relatively restrictive trade and foreign investment regimes. The government should take a range of additional steps to liberalise international trade and investment.
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