To support governments in addressing immediate challenges and advancing long-term reform, the OECD delivers high-quality, actionable economic policy advice. In formulating economic policy advice, the OECD combines cross-country research with detailed national knowledge from its country desks. The OECD’s broad scope, combined with close engagement with policymakers, ensures that recommendations are practical, credible, and designed to achieve lasting impact.
Test page Economic Policy
Economic policy encompasses a broad range of strategies employed by governments to optimise economic performance, including areas such as fiscal policy, which deals with government spending and revenues; monetary policy, focused on controlling the money supply and interest rates; structural reform, aimed at enhancing long-term economic efficiency and competitiveness; and regulatory reform, which focuses on updating and streamlining economic regulations.
Supporting governments in developing economic policy
The Long-Term Scenarios
The Long Term Scenarios for the World Economy extend the usual short-run horizon of economic forecasters to better illustrate the potential benefits of reforms to education, governance, labour market policies and product market regulations, whose effects play out over decades. OECD’s long-term scenarios are done every 2-3 years to quantify some of the most important long-term macroeconomic trends and policy challenges facing the global economy.
Economic policy by country: Economic surveys
OECD Economic Surveys are periodic reviews of member and non-member economies. Reviews are on a two-year cycle; other selected non-member economies are also reviewed from time to time. Each Economic Survey provides a comprehensive analysis of economic developments, with chapters covering key economic challenges and policy recommendations addressing these challenges.
Productivity and AI
Raising productivity growth is a priority for most OECD countries, which have experienced long-standing weak productivity performance, weighing on incomes and well-being. Artificial Intelligence (AI) with its rapidly expanding capabilities is emerging as a new General Purpose Technology (GPT), comparable to earlier digital technologies such as the internet and personal computers, or previous breakthrough innovations like the steam engine and electricity. Generally, past inventions eventually led to periods of accelerated economic growth. Can AI play a similar role now and revive productivity growth?
The Global Forum on Productivity (GFP)
The Global Forum on Productivity (GFP) fosters international collaboration among public institutions to advocate and implement policies that boost productivity. It enables institutions to share views, data, and undertake collective policy analysis, enhancing international cooperation.
Product market regulation indicators
Pro-competition regulation can help boost living standards, raise output per capita by increasing investment and employment, and encourage firms to innovative, thereby lifting productivity. The OECD has been tracking these product market regulations since 1998. The latest update of the PMR indicators currently includes 47 OECD and non-OECD economies.
The OECD Environmental Policy Stringency (EPS) Index for policy analysis
As countries adopt stricter environmental policies, the need for tools to compare the stringency of these policies across nations has become increasingly urgent. Since its creation in 2014, the OECD Environmental Policy Stringency (EPS) index has become a widely used tool for policy analysis. Updated in 2022, the index now spans over three decades (1990–2020), covering 40 countries and 13 policy instruments, with a focus on climate change and air pollution mitigation and a sub-index that measures the strength of technology support policies, complementing the existing market-based and non-market-based sub-indices.
The OECD Insolvency indicator
Sound insolvency frameworks are essential for business dynamism, economic renewal and productivity. Systems that neither inhibit corporate restructuring of viable firms encountering temporary financial distress nor excessively penalise business failure, can facilitate the reallocation of resources towards more productive uses and entrepreneurial risk-taking. Insolvency frameworks vary widely across OECD and European Union countries.
The OECD introduced an insolvency indicator in 2016 to summarise the most relevant features of insolvency frameworks for resource reallocation and productivity growth. The indicator was updated in 2022 and now includes 45 countries, including all OECD and European Union members.
The OECD public finance data portal
This portal provides comparable data and documents from the OECD and external sources to facilitate public finance research.
Economic policy papers
The OECD Economic Policy Papers series is designed to make available selected studies on structural and macro-economic policy issues of current interest. The Papers are produced in the context of the work carried out on the two regular OECD titles, OECD Economic Outlook and Going for Growth.
OECD Economics Department working papers
This working paper series covers a wide range of topics including the economic situation, policy analysis and projections; fiscal policy, public expenditure and taxation; and structural issues including ageing, growth and productivity, migration, environment, human capital, housing, trade and investment, labour markets, regulatory reform, competition, health, and other issues.
The views expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.
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Context
Economic policy by country: Country snapshots
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Related data
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