Publications & Documents

Despite the significant negative impacts of COVID-19 on tourism, the crisis is providing an opportunity to rethink tourism for the future. Achieving this greener and more sustainable tourism recovery, calls for a greater policy focus on the environmental and socio-cultural pillars of sustainability. The paper focuses on five main pillars of policy solutions, and best practices, to help destinations rebuild and flourish in this dramatically changed policy context for tourism development. Recommended policy solutions aim to: i) rethink tourism success, ii) adopt an integrated policy-industry-community approach, iii) mainstream sustainable policies and practices, iv) develop more sustainable tourism business models, and v) implement better measure to better manage. The report presents a selection of 9 case studies on destination strategies to support a sustainable and inclusive recovery.

Thailand has had a remarkable economic development trajectory over the past 60 years and foreign direct investment (FDI) has been pivotal in this success. Thailand was one of the first movers in opening up to manufacturing FDI and in establishing proactive investment promotion and facilitation policies. While challenges remain in some areas of responsible business conduct, there is strong political will to address them. Thailand aspires to become a high income economy by 2037 by upgrading to a value based green economy. Inward FDI will play a prominent role in achieving this goal but this requires a concerted effort to reform the investment climate to remain an attractive host to foreign investment and to benefit to the full extent from that investment. While the COVID-19 crisis might temporarily delay progress, the policy recommendations in this review draw attention to potential reform priorities to help Thailand fulfil its development ambitions aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals and to contribute to a more inclusive and sustainable recovery from the pandemic.

This publication presents the findings of the OECD review of SME and Entrepreneurship Policy in Viet Nam. It offers an in-depth examination of the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurship in Viet Nam, the quality of the business environment, and national policies in support of new and small businesses. The report shows that Viet Nam is one of the most globally integrated economies in the world, building its solid growth performance on the attraction of foreign direct investments and export promotion. Viet Nam’s business environment has considerably improved in recent years, although important reforms are still needed in certain policy areas. Viet Nam's SMEs contribute to national employment and national GDP proportionally less than in the OECD area, although official statistics do not take into consideration the large informal sector that mostly consists of self-employed people and micro-enterprises. Viet Nam’s SME and entrepreneurship policies are relatively new, dating back to the early 2000s. In this respect, the 2018 SME Support Law is an important milestone which may help address some of the challenges that are holding back the development of a more vigorous domestic enterprise sector. Key policy priorities in this regard, building better business linkages between multinationals and local enterprises and stronger business development services, are the subjects of two thematic chapters of the report.

The paper investigates the financial vulnerability of non-financial firms during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic crisis. In particular, it evaluates the extent to which firms may run into a liquidity crisis following the COVID-19 outbreak and the impact of stylised policy measures to reduce the risks and depth of such crisis. The analysis relies on three ingredients: a simple accounting model, a large dataset reporting firms’ balance sheets for 14 countries and granular data on the magnitude of the shock measuring the impact of confinement measures on economic activity (notably depending on the capacity of each sector to operate by teleworking). Results suggest that, without any policy intervention, up to 38% of firms would face liquidity shortfalls after 10 months since the implementation of confinement measures. Comparing the impact of different policies (tax deferral, debt moratorium and support to wage payments), the analysis shows that government support to relieve wage bills is the most effective tool to reduce liquidity shortages, followed by debt moratorium policies. Finally, the paper zooms into labour market policies and compares the costefficiency of short-term work and wage subsidies schemes, highlighting how their relative efficiency depends on their design.

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of benefits and side-effects of foreign-currency differentiated reserve requirements for a sample of 58 countries from 1999 to 2015. Departing from the existing literature on effectiveness which used binary variables to measure policy changes, the intensity of reserve requirement adjustments is captured by using the gap between foreign and local currency rates to isolate the impact of differentiation net of volume effects. The findings show that increasing the gap between FX and local currency-denominated reserve requirements is generally effective in reducing currency mismatch and dollarisation in banks’ balance sheets, notably through a reduction in the share of banks’ FX liabilities to total liabilities and in banks’ net FX positions. The findings also show that a higher gap is associated with a broader reduction in capital inflows, in particular portfolio debt inflows and flows to non-banks. Little evidence of domestic or international circumvention, with risks shifting to other sectors or countries is visible.