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Improving building efficiency is essential for reducing energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and operational costs. In OECD Countries the average share of the Residential and Commercial Sector for space conditioning accounts for 30–37% of the cumulative final energy use. The current situation is somewhat typical of post-industrialized Countries: while the technology for reducing the external thermal losses and for installing more energy-conscious devices and procedures (including real-time monitoring and better design of the enclosures) is readily available, the cost of such measures is often perceived as excessive for the private user. For this reason, some governments have resolved to launch incentivization campaigns to encourage both private and public actors to invest in building efficiency. This strategy has been successful and its large-scale application -even if enacted on a preliminary basis- led to substantial reductions of the energy load per square meter −50 to 100 kWh/(m2 yr)- so that subsidies and incentives are likely to assume a major role in shaping the energy conversion market. Technologies that are deemed “more environmental benign” or “of strategic interest” will receive institutional funding to promote their implementation, the funds being allocated both to design techniques, new materials and less energivorous devices. Since the funding is usually provided in the form of tax rebates, this approach is not devoid of problems: in fact, previous campaigns at regional and national level in the primary Energy Conversion and in the Transportation Sector have resulted in monumental failures. While it is clearly in the interest of a community to enact a reduction of their final energy uses, it is also true that such incentivization plans, if not properly and carefully implemented, may constitute an economic and ecological “doping” of the market (detail price increases, material and components shortages, etc.). This paper is a follow-up of a previous study conducted in 2021–22 that proposed a rational and thermodynamic-based approach to the issue: in that paper we presented an innovative cost/benefit procedure that considers the primary exergy savings of an “energy saving” intervention and the installation/ operation costs and combines them with the statistically foreseeable savings in the improvement of the building seismic class. The method is intended to serve as a possible model for future policy decisions, and it makes use of the fundamental principles of Exergy Analysis augmented by a conventional cost/ benefit analysis and by basic resilience considerations. The case study analyzed in the previous paper is re-examined here in the light of some recent normative developments the Eco-Sisma-Bonus (“Superbonus”), the incentivization plan launched between 2014 and 2020 by the Italian Government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most OECD countries inflation sharply increased since the end of 2021, mostly driven by energy and food prices. Certain categories of households are particularly vulnerable, as they spend large portions of their consumption on energy and food. Drawing on national micro-based household budget survey data, this paper quantifies the impact of rising prices on households' welfare. Declines in household purchasing power between August 2021 and August 2022 are estimated to range from 3% in Japan to 18% in Czechia. This decline is driven by energy prices in most countries, especially Denmark, Italy, and the United Kingdom. In general, inflation weighs relatively more on lower income households. The effects are stronger for rural households, due to energy price inflation. These findings call for a careful targeting of income and price support measures, notwithstanding their administrative and logistical complexity, taking into account their effects on economic activity, inflation, and environmental goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the relationship between public policy reforms and productivity, investment, employment and per capita income for OECD and non-OECD countries. More competition-friendly product market regulations are associated with improved economic outcomes: lower barriers to foreign trade and investment go in tandem with greater multi-factor productivity (MFP), and lower barriers to entry and less pervasive state control over the business sector with larger capital stock and increased employment rate. More flexible labour market regulations are found to go hand in hand with higher employment rates whereas no robust link between labour market regulations and MFP and capital deepening can be established. The findings also suggest that the quality of institutions is fundamental for economic outcomes. Finally, the paper shows that countries at different levels of economic development face different policy effects and that some policy reforms interact with each other by attenuating and amplifying each others' economic impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether U.S. monetary policy has different effects on young and old countries. I first empirically show that a contractionary U.S. monetary policy shock brings about a smaller fall in output and a greater rise in net exports in old countries using vector autoregressions (VARs), and that the shock leads to a larger fall in consumption and a smaller decrease in investment in old countries using the local projection method. I then construct a three‐country life‐cycle model including the U.S., a young country, and an old country. Consistent with the empirical analyses, the simulation results of the model show that a contractionary U.S. monetary policy shock has weaker effects on output in the old country than in the young country. In response to the shock, despite a larger fall in consumption in the old country, investment there decreases by less and net exports rise by more, which enables output in the old country to decline by less. The stronger incentives to save in the old country, resulting from the longer life expectancy and hence the longer retirement period, play a key role in generating these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in economic history has found that mortgage debt in relation to GDP has taken off in the historical long run ("great mortgaging"), as growing banking assets have been redirected into mortgage credit. This paper maps the parallel long-run investment history of private (life) insurance as the much overlooked second pillar of the financial system. Drawing on in-depth studies of the US and Germany, it finds that a "great de-mortgaging" took place in insurers' portfolios, with mortgages falling from up to 90 percent in the 19th century to below 5 percent today in favor of fixed-income securities. A parallel shift to secondary mortgage bonds has hardly offset this decline, while direct real estate remained largely a residual investment class. Banks' great mortgaging is thus partly an institutional substitution effect. The paper sees insurers' asset shift itself as mainly driven by long-run changes in capital demand and competition with banks and pension funds. It extends these findings to other long-term institutional investors and other OECD countries in the historical long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost a decade after the stipulated deadline in the 7th amendment to the EU Cosmetics Directive, which bans the marketing of animal-tested cosmetics in the EU from 2013, animal experimentation for cosmetic-related purposes remains a topic of animated debate. Cosmetic industry continues to be scrutinised for the practice, despite its leading role in funding and adopting innovation in this field. This paper aims to provide a state-of-the-art review of the field on alternative testing methods, also known as New Approach Methodologies (NAMs), with the focus on assessing the safety of cosmetic ingredients and products. It starts with innovation drivers and global regulatory responses, followed by an extensive, endpoint-specific overview of accepted/prospective NAMs. The overview covers main developments in acute toxicity, skin corrosion/irritation, serious eye damage/irritation, skin sensitisation, repeated dose toxicity, reproductive toxicity/endocrine disruption, mutagenicity/genotoxicity, carcinogenicity, photo-induced toxicity, and toxicokinetics. Specific attention was paid to the emerging in silico methodology. This paper also provides a brief overview of the studies on public perception of animal testing in cosmetics. It concludes with a view that educating consumers and inviting them to take part in advocacy could be an effective tool to achieve policy changes, regulatory acceptance, and investment in innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observers have noted that New Zealanders are less inequality averse and less in favour of redistribution than one would expect given actual levels of income and wealth inequality in the country. Attempted explanations have been unsatisfying, partly because of a lack of an explicit comparative focus. This paper uses four waves of the World Value Survey (2000–2020) and compares New Zealand views with those of respondents in 18 other high-income OECD states. New Zealanders across the board are indeed outliers, but this is explained by the extensive experience of intergenerational educational mobility of successive NZ cohorts. New Zealanders also believe that their society is characterised by a large degree of equality of opportunity and this overrides any concern that they might have about inequality of outcomes. While there may also be other ideational and institutional factors to consider, a series of hierarchical binomial logit regressions confirm that experiences and perceptions of upward mobility must be part of any explanation of New Zealand idiosyncrasies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Crónica Tributaria is the property of Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, Ministerio de Hacienda y Funcion Publica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The availability of public funding for private schools, in both primary and secondary education, has become a common feature in a number of OECD countries. The expansion of public subsidies for privately owned schools has consequences that go far beyond the involvement of private actors in the provision of education. These include deepening forms of regulatory governance in educational systems and the blurring of frontiers between public and private education. Public subsidies for privately owned schools have been adopted following diverse rationalities and in pursuit of different goals. In light of the diversity, this research examines the regulatory configurations of private subsidized education provision across OECD countries, from a policy instruments' perspective. Based on a systematic review of the literature, the article identifies four models of regulation of private subsidized education, and analyses why and how these models have been problematized and have evolved accordingly. The paper pays particular attention to recent educational reforms adopted, in most cases, to tackle the equity challenges posed by publicly subsidized private provision. Finally, the paper elaborates on the implications that this form of provision has for public education and the achievement of equity goals, and reflects on the potential and limits of regulatory reforms when confronting these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Journal of Educational Research / Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Bildungswissenschaften is the property of University Library of Bern and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: New pharmaceuticals are increasingly being developed for use across multiple indications. Countries across Europe and North America have adopted a range of different approaches to capture differences in the value of individual indications. Objective: The three aims of this study were (i) to review the price-setting practice over the past 5 years for multi-indication products across England, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Canada and the USA; (ii) to assess the impact of current practices on launch strategy; and (iii) to identify issues in the implementation of indication-based pricing. Methods: Ten current and former members of health insurance organisations, healthcare payer organisations or health technology assessment agencies with expertise on pharmaceutical purchasing were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. Interview transcripts were imported into NVivo 12 for thematic analysis. Results: The majority of countries studied require full assessments upon launch of a new indication. Five different approaches to pricing were identified: weighted pricing, differential discounting, mandatory discount, price anchoring and free pricing. Manufacturers show a tendency to launch first in niche indications with high unmet need to achieve a high price. Stakeholders from England, France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland consider their current system fit for purpose, while other countries expressed concern over the administrative burden of monitoring products at indication level. Conclusions: Given the high administrative burden, it is questionable whether indication-based pricing would provide additional public benefit above and beyond current weighted dynamic single pricing and differential discounting practices for multi-indication products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the data provided in the 2022 Sustainable Development Report the so-called Prosperity pillar, i.e., the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 7-11 is studied to elucidate the state of compliance as well as the trends in development for the 193 countries included in the report. To the extent that data for all five SDGs were available partial ordering methodology was applied to rank the countries according to their compliance as well as their trend toward compliance. The analyses took simultaneously data for all five SDGs into account to get an overall picture of the prosperity midway through the 15 years period for the 17 UN SDGs. It was disclosed that the ten top countries, i.e., presently best comply with the prosperity goals were Denmark > Austria = Finland = Sweden = Norway > Slovenia > Germany > Portugal > Japan > Iceland, respectively. In the case of the trends, the top ten countries were found to be Germany > Netherlands > Ecuador > Bhutan = Finland = Ireland = Slovak Republic > Czech Republic = Maldives = Malta, respectively. It was further disclosed that SDG 10 (Reduced inequalities) appeared as the most important indicator for the ranking, whereas SDG 9 (Industry, innovation, and infrastructure) appeared as the least important. A similar set of analyses was carried out for country regions. The top regions both in the case of states and trends were the OECD and the high-income countries whereas the bottom of the list was the low-income countries and Africa. The study unambiguously points to SDG 10 (reduced inequalities) as the main focus for the remaining period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the current research is to determine the factors and processes which influence economic growth and human development in relatively free societies and thereby provide a framework for policy formulation. Countries within the OECD grouping are committed to democratically elected government and market economies and fall into this category. The OECD group comprises 37 countries, including Colombia, and in 2019 accounted for 63% of real global GDP. This research focuses on the data of the thirty-seven countries over the twenty-year period of 2000-2019. Economic data is drawn from the World Bank and the IMF websites; whilst data on development indicators and income inequality is drawn from the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and WID (World Inequality database) websites. Analysis of the data in these countries provides insights into the factors and processes which influence economic growth and human development in economies with a democratic political regime. The estimated equation shows that economic growth in OECD countries was significantly higher when incoming investment as a proportion of the size of the economy and openness of the economy were higher, inflation, exchange rate changes and oil prices were lower. Smaller economies in the OECD also had higher economic growth. As the aim of a government is to increase not only the income but also the standard of living of its citizens, it is necessary also to assess the relationship between economic growth and the quality of life and wellbeing of its citizens. Five-year average cross-sectional regressions also show that economic growth in OECD countries is higher in the countries with lower HDI. This report further finds that economic growth has a bi-directional causality with changes in the human development index, and changes in life expectancy and a unidirectional causality with changes in the expected years of schooling (implying higher delivery of education) and changes in the standard of living. Another finding is that income inequality increases with economic growth; both in terms of the share of income of the top 10% and share of the lower 50%. Clearly investment in public goods, and social policies for education, skills training, healthcare and redistribution of wealth need more attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Verimlilik Dergisi is the property of Verimlilik Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Verimlilik Dergisi is the property of Verimlilik Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)