Reports

The increased adoption of digital technologies has been transforming the Spanish economy. The COVID-19 crisis is expected to speed up this process. The new digital strategy, ‘Digital Spain 2025’, features a number of ambitious objectives in a timely manner. There is a need to promote digital diffusion across the country by developing communication infrastructure further, while addressing the digital divide across regions and ensuring digital security. Addressing key bottlenecks, such as people’s skills, through education policies at every level, would enable the use of digital technologies and boost productivity growth. This would help in particular laggard firms and low-skilled people, making the benefits of digitalisation shared by all. In parallel, R&D should be enhanced to lift the capacity of firms to adopt and use digital technologies effectively, resulting in improving their business models and products. Finally, business dynamism should be revitalised to encourage risk taking among firms, thus facilitating digital diffusion, while ensuring an efficient allocation of capital.

Andalusia is the largest mining producer in Spain, the second-largest copper producer in the EU and a leader in marble and gypsum production. The region benefits from two distinct mining subsectors, each with a rich network of suppliers that are relevant for local development: the metallic mining sector (e.g. copper and zinc), which accounts for most of the regional mining production, and the non-metallic sector (ornamental rocks, aggregates and industrial minerals), which is highly dispersed across the territory. The regional mining value chain has the potential to leverage the increasing global and EU demand for sustainable raw materials and thus become a frontrunner in leading technologies and circular processes for environmentally sustainable mining. This study identifies how Andalusia can build on its strengths and address current and future challenges to improve regional productivity and well-being while accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy and assisting EU climate goals.

While the COVID-19 crisis has put many economic activities on hold, notably tourism, a pillar of Granada’s economy, it has also created a momentum towards more sustainable production and consumption patterns, in line with carbon neutrality goals. The pandemic also magnified the need for new urban paradigms while increasing awareness on the potential of the circular economy to transition to low carbon cities and regions, whilst also stimulating economic growth, creating jobs, and improving people’s lives and social well-being. This report summarises the findings of a two-year policy dialogue with the city of Granada in Spain, and provides recommendations and a vision to transition to a circular economy. It draws on Granada’s own experience with the transformation of a wastewater treatment plant into a bio factory in 2015, which contributed to increased water reuse and the production of new material from waste. The report argues that the city of Granada can play a role as a promoter, facilitator and enabler of the circular economy. This will require a collective and coordinated approach across all stakeholders and levels of government.

Cette source fiable et à jour de statistiques trimestrielles de l'OCDE sur la balance des paiements et le commerce international de marchandises dresse un tableau précis des tendances les plus récentes des structures d’échange des pays membres avec le reste du monde. Les données de balance des paiements sont présentées corrigées des variations saisonnières. Les statistiques de commerce international de marchandises sont ventilées par pays. Les séries présentées couvrent les dix derniers trimestres et les deux dernières années. Cette publication trimestrielle est divisé en trois parties : I. Balance des paiements et commerce international II. Commerce international de marchandises par pay.

This report explores the spatial dimension of productivity in the co-operatives of Italy, a country where they make up a relatively large share of total national employment. Co-operatives play a countercyclical role in job creation during crises. In a post-pandemic world, they could make a major contribution to steering the economy towards inclusiveness and sustainability. Productivity growth ensures that co-operatives can achieve both economic and social goals in the future. This report applies a place-based approach to investigate the issue of productivity in co-operatives, given their many interdependencies with local communities. Novel evidence points to the local factors that are linked with the concentration and productivity of co-operatives across regions, sectors and firm size classes in Italy. A comparison with other Italian firms as well as with Spanish co-operatives and other Spanish firms serves to illustrate how productivity performance varies across space and firm types. This report constitutes an empirical test for the analytical approach developed by the OECD Spatial Productivity Lab.

This report provides an ex ante assessment of the distributional effects of introducing portable severance pay accounts in Spain based on micro-simulations. In the current system, permanent workers who are dismissed from their job are entitled to 20 days of severance pay per year of service, which is relatively high by OECD standards. The report considers a reform that replaces the current severance payment system with individual saving accounts financed through periodic contributions by employers. The report focuses on two versions of the reform that keep constant respectively the total compensation in case of dismissal ('constant benefit') or the expected costs for firms of employing a permanent worker ('constant-cost'). Importantly, the analysis in the report does do not take account of the behavioural responses of firms and workers to the reform.

Social protection systems use a range of entitlement criteria. First-tier support typically requires contributions or past employment in many countries, while safety net benefits are granted on the basis of need. In a context of volatile and uncertain labour markets, careful and continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of income support is a key input into an evidence-based policy process. This paper proposes a novel empirical method for monitoring the accessibility and levels of safety net benefits. It focusses on minimum-income benefits (MIB) and other non-contributory transfers and relies on data on the amounts of cash support that individuals in need receive in practice. Results show that accessibility and benefit levels differ enormously across countries – for instance, in 2015/16, more than four out of five low-income workless one-person households received MIB in Australia, France and the United Kingdom, compared to only one in five in Greece, Italy and Korea, three countries that have since sought to strengthen aspects of safety-net provisions.