This report summarizes key recent key finds by the OECD relative to the French economy.

People today are living longer than ever before, while birth rates are dropping in the majority of OECD countries. In such demographics, public social expenditures require to be adequate and sustainable in the long term. Older workers play a crucial ...

Drawing on the OECD’s expertise in comparing country experiences and identifying best practices, this book tailors the OECD’s policy advice to the specific and timely priorities of Portugal, focusing on how its government can make reform happen.

This report provides an overview of “multi-level governance” reforms in OECD countries. It includes case studies on Finland, France, Italy, Japan and New Zealand.

Throughout the last decades, advanced industrial democracies have been confronted by the long term pressures of globalisation, rising and persistent unemployment, ageing populations, rising health care costs, and the severe, but shorter-term shocks of recession, currency runs, and other troubles. The international political economy literature is rife with observations that states are under increasing pressure to reduce taxes and to trim their budgets, and recent austerity efforts in Europe and the United States support the view that governments are responding to these intensifying economic and political incentives by constraining their spending. Simultaneously, governments encounter political pressures to maintain or expand their social welfare safety nets in order to meet the needs of their most vulnerable populations - the unemployed and underemployed, the sick and disabled, pensioners, and the poor. Despite these common pressures, there has been a great degree of divergence over the last decades. Variation endures in terms of the aggregate levels of taxation and expenditures and the distribution of costs and benefits among the citizenry. Reforms have differed in regard to whether they are approached in a confrontational manner by the government alone or in consensual, negotiated process that includes the parliamentary opposition, trade unions, and employers' associations. Some painful reforms have been met with massive strikes and protests, while other painful reforms have been accepted with relative equanimity. Finally, there has been a great deal of variance in the ability of various governments to adopt and implement their reform packages and to survive the potential backlash in response to these reforms. Considering the cases of France, Italy, and Germany during the 1990s, this dissertation sheds new light on the factors determining the approach to reform, the distribution of costs and benefits, and the likelihood that governments will succeed in their attempts to adopt and implement reforms. Chapter 1 introduces the core questions, presents a brief overview of the theory, and explains the methodology and case selection. Chapter 2 develops a theoretical framework for understanding: (a) the factors that lead governments to adopt a particular approach to a reform, (b) the role that partisanship plays in determining the distributional implications of reform, (c) the effect that the approach and the distributional implications of the reform have upon how the parliamentary opposition, the social partners, and the public respond to the reform, and (d) the role that response plays in determining the ultimate fate of the reform - and, in some cases, the fate of that government. Chapter 3 considers the experiences of France, exploring the theory's ability to explain a case of a typical state facing conflicting economic and political pressures to reform its economic, fiscal, and social welfare policies. Chapter 4 tests the theory's applicability to Italy, a country undergoing a particularly high level of economic and political stress. Chapter 5 focuses upon the apparently deviant case of Germany, where both the reform approach and the distributional implications of the reform seem to run counter to the theory's predictions. Deep examination of the role of party factions and shifts in the balance of power within the governing coalition reveals the importance of considering the preferences of the reform leadership rather than the coalition as a whole in order to generate accurate predictions and interpretations. Chapter 6 concludes with an overview of generalisable conclusions and future research directions.

"America the Great" is the result of five years' research and writing that began in late 2009 in response to the contemporary American "tea party" movement and criticisms that the movement's participants did not know the history and theory of the original 1773 Boston Tea Party from which the modern movement takes its name. The extensive library of original books, newspapers, magazines, etc., now available (primarily via "google books") to anyone over the Internet, means that researchers have available to them the university libraries of the world. The availability of accurate original documents made it possible to expand the original scope of research into other historical events, and into other countries (primarily Great Britain), and enabled the work to develop into a more general examination of theories of human dignity, and of the differing conception of government that arises depending on the conception of human dignity that is characteristic of the people that is creating that government.

This report compares the performance of the French innnovation systems with that of other countries and presents the conclusions of interviews with 30 key actors in the French research and innovation system.

Cartels, trusts and agreements to reduce competition between firms have existed for centuries, but became particularly prevalent toward the end of the 19th century. In the mid-20th century governments began to use so called ‘cartel registers’ to monitor and regulate their behaviour. This book provides cases studies from more than a dozen countries to examine the emergence, application and eventual decline of this form of regulation. Beginning with a comparison of the attitudes to regulation that led to monitoring, rather than prohibiting cartels, this book examines the international studies on cartels undertaken by the League of Nations before World War II. This is followed by a series of studies on the context of the registers, including the international context of the European Union, and the importance of lobby groups in shaping regulatory outcomes, using Finland as an example. Section two provides a broad international comparison of several countries’ registers, with individual studies on Norway, Australia, Japan, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. After examining the impact of registration on business behaviour in the insurance industry, this book concludes with an overview of the lessons to be learnt from 20th century efforts to regulate competition. With a foreword by Harm Schroter, this book outlines the rise and fall of a system that allowed nations to tailor their approach to regulating competition to their individual circumstances whilst also responding to the pressures of globalisation that emerged after the Second World War. This book is suitable for those who are interested in and study economic history, international economics and business history.

Has the greenback really lost its preeminent place in the world? Not according to currency expert Marc Chandler, who explains why so many are—wrongly—pessimistic about both the dollar and the U.S. economy. Making Sense of the Dollar explores the many factors—trade deficits, the dollar’s role in the world, globalization, capitalism, and more—that affect the dollar and the U.S. economy and lead to the inescapable conclusion that both are much stronger than many people suppose. Marc Chandler has been covering the global capital markets for twenty years as a foreign exchange strategist for several Wall Street firms. He is one of the most widely respected and quoted currency experts today.

This set of 44 volumes, originally published between 1924 and 1995, amalgamates a wide breadth of research on the Labour Movement, including labour union history, the early stages and development of the Labour Party, and studies on the working classes. This collection of books from some of the leading scholars in the field provides a comprehensive overview of the subject how it has evolved over time, and will be of particular interest to students of political history.