by Sharan Burrow (General Secretary, ITUC) & Pierre Habbard (General Secretary, TUAC) With multilateralism in crisis the G20 Leaders’ Summit demonstrated welcome unity in the face of a global pandemic. At face value, their commitments are strong: - Protect lives, - Safeguard people’s jobs and incomes, - Restore confidence, preserve…

By Séverine Picard @Sevrine_Picard “Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit”. Last year, a discussion panel at the Davos World Economic Forum went viral after one of the panelists bemoaned the failure of the rich to pay their fair share of tax. …

Organisational change through Choice, Co-creation and Consultation by Anna Byhovskaya ( @AnnaByhovskaya ) What would happen to the way we live and work if Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered systems were run on minimum standards with inadequate supervision and consultation mechanisms? Such “AI let loose” scenario would most likely entail serious…

Anna Byhovskaya & Kavya Tibrewal Digital divides — ie the unequal access to ICT- has several dimensions, including regional, gender, income distribution. Resolving digital divides also matters in the context of the SDGs. The following briefing offers an overview the issues at stake and, from there, three key policy areas…

Back to Supply-Side Economics? The key message from the OECD Economic Outlook published today, is for governments to engage “renewed” and “deeper” structural reforms — trade liberalisation and de-regulation, to raise business profitability over so-called “hurdle rates”, which is estimated at no less 14%, and thereby help redress the investment…

by Janssen Ronald The belief that reforms to make labour markets much more flexible are indispensable and highly necessary is deeply ingrained in the thinking of international economic institutions such as the European Commission, the OECD and the IMF. To advance their policy agenda of labour market deregulation, these institutions…

by Janssen Ronald Under the title of ‘Decoupling of wages from productivity: Macro –Level facts”, OECD Economics Department recently published a paper describing how medium wages have been lagging behind productivity developments since 1995 in most OECD countries. OECD methodology The paper splits up the total divergence between the evolution of medium…

A closer look at OECD numbers — The latest OECD Economic Survey of Portugal published today calls for labour market reforms but also admits to the fact that the country is suffering from “ the most unequal distributions of income in Europe. Recent efforts to step up the guaranteed minimum income scheme are welcome.” One of the…

The OECD in its latest Economic Outlook, published on the 28th of November, continues to point to the “low growth trap”, the global economy has found itself in over the past five years, but now predicts that growth could “gather some steam” (http://www.oecd.org/economy/outlook/economicoutlook.htm). Average growth in the OECD is projected…