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The COVID-19 crisis created a sudden need for businesses and their employees to take up or increase working from home. By facilitating teleworking, digital technologies have been crucial in allowing economic activities to endure and in enabling a significant portion of individuals to continue earning income. This paper brings together information on how teleworking has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, it looks at which businesses and individuals have been able to leverage it to keep working. It also presents the definitions and survey vehicles underlying the statistics presented.

International audience; Using a new and original database, our paper contributes to the growth accounting literature by singling out the contribution of robots through two channels: capital deepening and TFP. The contribution of robots to productivity growth through capital deepening and TFP appears to have been significant in Germany and Japan in the sub-period 1975–1995 and in several Eastern European countries in 2005–2019. However, robotization does not appear to be the source of a significant revival in productivity.

This report uses a state-of-the-art gravity model to analyse the effects of selected international data agreements on bilateral trade flows in goods and services for the years 1995-2012. International data agreements can foster cross-border transactions by enhancing consumer trust and the interoperability of national regulatory frameworks, providing legal clarity for firms operating in distinct jurisdictions. Yet they can also involve compliance costs and restrictions on the free flow of data, potentially creating trade barriers. The report sheds light on these issues by examining how entering an international data agreement (e.g. the EU Data Protection Directive, the EU-US and Switzerland-US Safe Harbor agreements or the Council of Europe Convention 108) affects trade among participating countries relative to trade with or among non-participating countries. The results suggest that entering such agreements has a statistically significant and robust effect on trade, though this effect can vary according to the nature of the agreement.

Using a new and original database, our paper contributes to the growth accounting literature with three original aspects: first, it covers a long period from the early 60's to 2019, just before the COVID-19 crisis; second, it analyses at the country level a large set of economies (30); finally, it singles out the growth contribution of ICTs but also of robots. The original database used in our analysis covers 30 developed countries and the Euro Area over a long period allowing to develop a growth accounting approach from 1960 to 2019. This database is built at the country level. Our growth accounting approach shows that the main drivers of labor productivity growth over the whole 1960-2019 period appear to be TFP, non-ICT and non-robot capital deepening, and education. The overall contribution of ICT capital is found to be small, although we do not estimate its effect on TFP. The contribution of robots to productivity growth through the two channels (capital deepening and TFP) appears to be significant in Germany and Japan in the sub-period 1975-1995, in France and Italy in 1995-2005, and in several Eastern European countries in 2005-2019. Our findings confirm also the slowdown in TFP in most countries from at least 1995 onwards. This slowdown is mainly explained by a decrease of the contributions of the components 'others' in the capital deepening and the TFP productivity channels.

International audience; ICT components, such as microprocessors, may be embodied in other capital goods not recorded as ICT in National Accounts. We name ‘indirect ICT investment’ the value of embodied ICT components in non-ICT investment. The paper provides estimates of ‘indirect ICT investment’ based on detailed and unpublished Supply-Use tables (SUT) in 12 OECD countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.Our main finding is that ICT investment appears significantly higher when considering its indirect component, the average increase being about 35%. The inclusion of indirect ICT investment, excluding software (for which firms’ expenditures are difficult to measure), changes significantly the relative position of countries with respect to the ICT intensity of their investments. The inclusion of software further increases indirect ICT investment but the increase is smaller (in percentage) than without this inclusion. A final result, but concerning only three countries, it that the diagnosis of a stabilisation, or even a decrease, of ICT investment in percentage of GDP or of total investment, observed from the beginning of the century, is not modified if we take into account the indirect ICT investment.

La competencia es un factor esencial para el buen funcionamiento de los mercados. Fomenta la innovacion, la productividad y el crecimiento, lo cual, a su vez, genera riqueza y ayuda a reducir la pobreza. En los ultimos anos, Mexico ha puesto en marcha ambiciosas reformas para liberalizar y fortalecer su economia. La competencia se incremento en muchos sectores, sobre todo en el energetico —electricidad, petroleo y gas— y en los servicios de telecomunicaciones. La funcion de los reguladores se fortalecio y se faculto a las autoridades en materia de competencia para desalentar la colusion y otras practicas anticompetitivas.

Competition is essential to the functioning of markets. It fosters innovation, productivity and growth, which, in turn, create wealth and help to reduce poverty. Over the past years, Mexico has implemented ambitious reforms to free up its economy. Competition was enhanced in many sectors, most notably in the energy sector – electricity, oil and gas – and in telecommunication services. The role of regulators has been strengthened and the competition authorities have been empowered to deter collusion and other anticompetitive practices. Building on these achievements, Mexico now needs to ensure that entrepreneurship thrives and opportunities are spread evenly across the country. Removing existing barriers in services trade would benefit manufacturing and further facilitate the country’s integration into global value chains.

This chapter provides new estimates of the effects of ICT investments on total labour demand in 19 OECD countries over the early 1990–2012. The findings suggest that ICT investments have no effects on labour demand in the long run. In the short run, however, due to sluggish adjustments in production inputs, a one-off permanent decrease in ICT user cost results in a temporary increase in labour demand followed by a temporary decrease. Our estimates suggest that ICT investments raised labour demand in all countries in the early 1990–2007 but reduced it afterwards. The decrease in labour demand after 2007, however, was smaller than the increase before 2007, thus leading to a positive effect of ICT investment on labour demand over the whole period.

The aim of this study is to assess the effects of information and communications technologies (ICTs) on firms’ capabilities to innovate in a selection of OECD countries. Our findings support the hypothesis that ICTs act as an enabler of innovation, particularly for product and marketing innovation, in both manufacturing and services. However, we did not find any evidence that ICT use increases the capability of a firm to co-operate, to develop innovation in-house or to introduce products new to the market. These results suggest that ICTs enable firms to adopt innovation but they do not increase their "inventive" capabilities.

The aim of this paper is to assess whether the use of ICT has an impact on student performances as measured in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006. After controlling for observable students’ characteristics and self-selection, we did find a positive and significant effect of the frequency of computer use on science scores. In most countries, however, this effect seems larger when computer is used at home rather than at school. This finding questions the effectiveness of educational policies aimed at promoting computer use at school as a tool for learning.

Recent nonparametric studies find that the regional distribution of unemployment rates is more dependent on geographic location (neighborhood effects) than on national factors (state effects). These results, however, do not control for stochastic dependency between neighborhood and state effects (joint effects) and do not provide any measure of their relative size. In this paper, we construct a simple measure that is invariant in space and across time and compare state, neighborhood, and joint effects in Europe and North America. We find that neighborhood effects are stronger than state effects in Europe, whereas in North America the size of the joint effect is such that one cannot say which effects prevail.

El autor aborda la dificil tarea de predecir los efectos que tendra el envejecimiento de la poblacion en el mundo del trabajo. Cuando se evoca el aumento de la proporcion de personas de edad - que va unido a veces a un decrecimiento de la poblacion - lo que se piensa es que ello disminuye la oferta de fuerza de trabajo. Ahora bien, las consecuencias en el empleo no son obvias, pues la oferta de trabajo depende tambien de la tasa de actividad. Por otra parte, la demanda de trabajadores acusa los efectos salariales de las variaciones de la oferta y de los cambios simultaneos de la productividad y la acumulacion de capital, sin olvidar que al aumentar la poblacion dependiente suben los gastos en pensiones y en atencion sanitaria. V. Spiezia explora las consecuencias de estos factores y las medidas tomadas por los paises de la OCDE para atender los problemas que plantea el envejecimiento de la poblacion.

Il est fort complexe de prevoir les effets du vieillissement sur le marche du travail. Le vieillissement - dans certains cas la diminution - de la population fait d'abord penser a une contraction de l'offre de travail. Les consequences sur l'emploi ne sont toutefois pas evidentes. L'offre de travail depend aussi des taux d'activite. En outre, la demande de travail sera influencee par les effets sur les salaires de l'evolution de l'offre, sans oublier les changements en matiere de productivite, d'accumulation du capital, de couts des pensions et des soins de sante associes a l'elevation des taux de dependance. L'auteur etudie tous ces phenomenes et leurs interactions, ainsi que les mesures prises par les pays de l'OCDE face au vieillissement.

well-established tenet of the theory of unemployment is that unemploymentbenefits tend to increase the unemployment rate. This prediction is basedon two central pieces of labour economics, namely the job-search theory andthe efficiency-wage theory. In the job-search theory, unemployment benefitscause an increase in the duration of unemployment by reducing the incentive ofunemployed workers to search for and accept a job; in the efficiency-wagetheory, they reduce the cost of being unemployed and induce workers to ask forhigher wages, so the demand for labour decreases. Since the unemploymentrate is a function of the duration of unemployment and its incidence, unem-ployment therefore increases with both the level and the duration of benefits.Despite the strength of this theoretical prediction, the empirical evidencethat supports it is not very strong. Those studies which have detected an effectof benefits on unemployment duration have found it to be rather small. Othershave failed to detect any such effect at all. On average, estimates have impliedthat a 10 percentage point increase in the replacement rate (i.e. the ratio ofunemployment benefits to earnings from employment) would be associatedwith an increase of about 1-1½ weeks only in unemployment duration (Lancasterand Nickell, 1980; Meyer, 1990). This suggests that the impact of benefits onunemployment probably depends on a set of factors wider than the one usuallyconsidered in labour economics. The aim of this article is to investigate theconditions under which the provision of unemployment benefits would leavethe rate of unemployment unchanged.The main argument brought forward in the following analysis hinges onthe distinction between

Partant d'une distinction schematisee entre l'assistance chomage et l'assurance chomage, l'A. remet en question avec pertinence la theorie selon laquelle l'indemnisation du chomage a invariablement des effets negatifs sur les marches du travail. Que ces effets se manifestent ou non, plaide-t-il, ne depend pas tant du niveau de l'indemnisation que de ses modalites administratives. Son analyse theorique montre que les effets sur la duree du chomage et les salaires sont negligeables si l'indemnisation est essentiellement financee par les cotisations des travailleurs et des employeurs et qu'elle est soumise a des criteres d'ouverture des droits. Le juste equilibre entre l'efficacite et l'equite implique donc une separation claire entre l'indemnisation du chomage et l'aide sociale

The relationship between technology and employment is a very old and controversial topic. In the second section of this chapter a classical taxonomy, the roots of which can be found in the works of the nineteenth-century economists, will be discussed in detail. The effectiveness of that taxonomythe so-called ‘compensation theory’—is still a point of controversy between ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ scholars and commentators.