By Bill Below. Are policy makers stuck in time? That may explain why incremental issues that cumulate and creep slowly across the temporal dimension pose such huge challenges. Politicians are clearly more comfortable in the here and now. Harder to deal with are slow-moving emergencies such as climate change, growing inequality and state pension reform, to name but a few. More...

By Robert Skidelsky. “Why did no one see it coming?” asked Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, shortly after the world economy collapsed in 2008. In addressing the question to a group of economists, the Queen was spot on. As OECD Chief of Staff Gabriela Ramos said, “The crisis struck at the core of tightly held economic ideas, modules and policy”. I would go further. Crisis struck because of tightly held economic ideas, models and policies. More...

By Mathilde Mesnard. New economic and policy thinking is required today more than ever. On September 18th, the OECD Secretary-General launched a discussion on the New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC) Synthesis report with OECD Chief Economist Catherine Mann, Lord Robert Skidelsky and Jean Pisani-Ferry. The launch event was in the best tradition of NAEC seminars with hard questions being asked about the report and the OECD’s policy approaches. More...

By Gillian Tett. The Silo Effect first sprung to life during the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. But it is not a book about finance. Far from it. Instead, it asks a basic question: Why do humans working in modern institutions collectively act in ways that sometimes seem stupid? Why do normally clever people fail to see risks and opportunities that are subsequently blindingly obvious? Why, as Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist, put it, are we sometimes so “blind to our own blindness”. More...

By Dirk Pilat. Today, innovation is central to advanced and emerging economies alike; in many OECD countries, firms invest as much in the knowledge-based assets that drive innovation, such as software, databases, research and development, firm-specific skills and organisational capital, as they do in physical capital, such as machinery, equipment or buildings. More...

By Brian Keeley. In the United States it’s called “the 9-to-5”; in France it’s métro, boulot, dodo –“subway, work, sleep”; in Japan it’s personified as the “salaryman” and his female equivalent, the “office lady”. Whatever it’s called, the traditional job seems to be something we all identify with. More...

By Andrea Vacchino and Markus Schuller. How can you know whether a multi-asset portfolio is well managed? Many institutions have policy indices built according to the investment management’s preferences and expectations on risks and returns associated to each asset class. Other institutional investors run peer group comparison between multi-asset managers or measure their portfolio against total return indices. More...

The OECD presented today the final package of measures for a comprehensive, coherent and co-ordinated reform of the international tax rules to be discussed by G20 Finance Ministers at their meeting on 8 October, in Lima, Peru.  The OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project provides governments with solutions for closing the gaps in existing international rules that allow corporate profits to « disappear » or be artificially shifted to low/no tax environments, where little or no economic activity takes place. More...

By Brian Keeley. Time was when the only people who had gigs were long-haired types who stayed in bed till noon and played in bars till dawn. These days, it seems, everyone’s hopping from one gig to another – drivers, software designers, cleaners. Bye-bye full-time work, hello freedom and flexibility. More...