Inequality is usually thought of in terms of income or wealth, but it might make even more sense to think of it in terms of how satisfied people are with their lives. A recent study, How’s Life?, attempts to shed light on people’s experience and the variation in life satisfaction within countries.
As governments around the world attempt to bring deficits under control and debt to manageable levels, just where to find the savings is a tricky question. Governments face a delicate balancing act as they try to achieve real fiscal discipline without mortally wounding public services, often in precarious political circumstances.
Emerging economies have made good progress on health coverage recently, but the share of out-of-pocket payments in total health expenditure remains significantly higher than in most advanced countries.
The Fukushima tragedy in Japan in March 2011 has unsettled the nuclear energy outlook. Nuclear power started out almost 60 years ago with the Obninsk plant near Moscow in 1954, but after strong growth in the 1960s and 1970s, the industry declined sharply in the 1980s due to costs, delays and safety concerns after the Three Mile Island accident in the US in 1979, and the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986.
Despite two decades of outsourcing and globalisation, the US remains the world’s largest manufacturer in 2009. However, its share of world value-added in manufacturing declined from around 22.7% of the total in 1990 to less than 20% in 2009. China’s share rose from a minute 2.7% to 17.5% over the same period, taking over Japan, hitherto the world’s second largest manufacture, whose share dropped from 17.7% to 11.4% over the two decades.
GDP, output, inflation, current account, unemployment, interest rates for 40 countries plus euro area, as published in OECD Observer. Just print it out and pin it up.
Food prices have increased over the year to January 2011 in many of the world’s economies. Moreover, those increases, which accelerated from mid-2010, reversed the downward trend in food prices of 2009 and the first half of 2010, OECD-FAO Agriculture Outlook 2011-2020 says. Threequarters of the OECD countries recorded retail food price increases of 5% or less, while price increases exceeded that in half a dozen or so countries. Two OECD countries, Korea and Estonia, experienced increases of over 10%. Brazil, China, Indonesia and Russia all had double-digit rates of food infl ation during the year to January 2011, well up on the previous year. In South Africa, food prices increased by a moderate 3.3%, though this represented a doubling from the rate of the previous year. Food price inflation also accelerated in the second half of 2010 in several countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America. In high-income OECD countries the contribution of food price movements to inflation has been positive though small, generally around 0.5 percentage points. However, food price increases contributed over 1.5 percentage points to inflation in countries such as Estonia, Turkey, Hungary and Korea. This contrasts with the year to January 2010 when food prices decreased, attenuating inflation. The contribution of food price movements to OECD inflation remains small, the report notes, not least because of the small share of food expenditures in the overall consumer basket.
Migration into OECD countries fell by about 7% in 2009 to 4.3 million people, down from just over 4.5 million in 2008. Recent national data suggest migration numbers fell further in 2010, the 2011 International Migration Outlook says.
Development aid from OECD donor countries totalled $129 billion in 2010, the highest level ever, and an increase of 6.5% over 2009. But despite this record, the 2010 figures confirm that some donors are not meeting internationally agreed commitments.
Could action on gender help jumpstart efforts to make the Millennium Development Goals deadline by 2015? The third goal already explicitly aims to “promote gender equality and empower women” (MDG3), but gender has a direct and profound impact on several other targets, too.
House prices in many OECD countries rose for more than a decade from the mid- 1990s–an unusually long and steep climb. Previously, booms typically lasted for about six years and house prices rose by about 45%; by contrast, the recent boom went on for twice as long and prices increased by an average of 120%.
With the crisis still unfolding, can governments meet their agreed development aid targets? Total net official development assistance (ODA) from donor countries in the OECD Development Assistance Committee came to $119.6 billion in 2009, which is a real increase of 0.7% from 2008. If debt forgiveness is excluded, the real increase jumps to 6.8%. In fact, development aid rose by some 30% in real terms between 2004 and 2009, and continued to grow during the crisis, unlike other financial flows to developing countries, which have fallen sharply. Nonetheless, more aid effort is needed.
Anyone who doubts that policy can spur innovation should look at the Kyoto Protocol. After it was adopted in 1997, the number of patents for certain technologies used to mitigate climate change climbed worldwide. In fact, just six years later, the number of patents on wind technologies had grown more than five-fold, and those on solar photovoltaic and hydro/marine technologies had more than doubled. The number of new patents for other climate change mitigation technologies, such as carbon capture, biofuels and geothermal energy also rose, though at a rate that was not much faster than the increase for patents in general over the same period.
Unemployment has risen sharply during the recession, and young people have been particularly hard hit. Even in good times, unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds can be two to three times that of adults, but youth unemployment has increased much more rapidly during the crisis. In Germany, which has a successful apprenticeship programme, young people are now one and half times more likely to be unemployed than prime age workers, while in Sweden their risk is four times greater.
More women go to work today than 40 years ago, but their pay has not kept pace with men’s. Some 58% of women on average in the OECD area worked in 2008, up from 45% in 1970, ranging from 70% of women in the Nordic countries to less than 50% in Greece, Italy, Mexico and Turkey. Indeed, with fewer women staying at home, dual-earner families are now commonplace in most OECD countries; only in Japan, Mexico and Turkey are single-income families more common. However, men are often still the main earners in dual-earner families because so many women work part-time and for lower wages than their husbands. In the Netherlands, a relatively egalitarian country, 60% of women work part time, compared with 16% of men.
Unemployment in the OECD area is predicted to reach some 10% in 2010, up from about 5.6% in 2007. Men have been hit harder than women: across the OECD area, male employment has fallen by 3% since the recession started, while the decline for women stood at a tenth of that, at 0.3%. Hence the “mancession” tag bloggers and commentators have used to characterise the jobs crisis.
Income levels of sons are often influenced by the income levels of their fathers, OECD research shows. The height of each bar on the graph measures the extent to which sons’ earnings levels reflect those of their fathers. The correlation is strongest in the UK, Italy and the US, and much less so in Denmark, Australia and Norway.
Development aid for water supply and sanitation projects has risen in recent years after a decline in the late 1990s. Considering the importance of safe water, perhaps it hasn’t risen far enough. In 2007-08, OECD Development Assistance Committee countries committed on average $5.1 billion in bilateral annual aid to the water supply and sanitation sector, 50% up on 2003-04 in real terms. When combined with aid from multilateral agencies, the total was $6.6 billion. Over the 2003-08 period, bilateral aid to water increased by an annual average of 15%, while multilateral aid rose 3% annually. Still, for DAC countries, aid to the water supply and sanitation sector rose to just 7% of all aid commitments in 2007-08, only slightly up from 6% in 2003-04.
Global electricity demand declined in 2009 for the first time since the end of World War II according to OECD estimates. Electricity demand experienced a constant climb over the second half of the 20th century through the oil crises of the 1970s, the Black Monday crash of 1987, and on through the dot-com bubble bursting at the turn of the millennium as development countered all downward forces. The credit crunch of 2008 though, has resulted in a drop of as much as 1.6% based on OECD figures derived from the IMF’s latest GDP growth forecast for 2009.
Has the crisis affected remittances from migrants abroad? One survey has found that migrants from Latin America based in the US are still sending money home even if that means cutting expenses, taking second jobs, working more hours or, if they have lost their jobs, dipping into their savings.
Just like R&D, researchers are vulnerable to economic downturns. R&D in industry is closely linked to creating new products and production techniques and to a country’s innovation effort. In 2006, before the current recession hit the global economy, around 2.6 million researchers, or about 65% of all researchers, including those in the government and education sectors, were employed by businesses in the OECD area.
International mergers and acquisitions have registered a decline of 56% in 2009 over 2008, latest estimates show. This is the largest year-on-year decline in recent history. Much of this decline was due to the 60% plunge in M&A activity by firms based in the OECD area, from over $1 trillion to $454 billion. But major emerging economies, which enjoyed strong international investment performance in 2008, also suffered their first sharp declines in 2009 with respect to both outward and inward M&As.
One in nine women are diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in their life and one in thirty die from the disease. Though survival rates are improving, due to a combination of increased awareness, earlier diagnosis and better treatments with innovative drugs, there are considerable differences in measured outcomes of cancer control across OECD countries. For example, while close to 90% of women aged 50-69 are screened annually in the Netherlands and Finland, only around 20% of women in that age group are screened in the Slovak Republic and Japan. Some countries that had low screening rates in 2000, such as the Czech and Slovak Republics, showed sharp increases by 2006, whereas some countries with already high rates, such as the US, Finland and Norway, reported declines.
Despite the global economic slowdown, consumption of meat is projected to grow over the next decade, keeping pace with increases in population and purchasing power in most parts of the world. By 2018, human beings will be eating more than 320 million tonnes of meat a year, up some 20% compared with 2006-08. In developing countries, per capita meat consumption will jump more than 16%, outpacing population growth and rising from 24 kg per person per year today to a projected 27 kg in 2018.
By sector-
International trade has declined steeply during the crisis, though how has the fall been reflected in different sectors and countries? Take the US, Germany and Japan, the three largest OECD traders-OECD countries account for roughly 60% of world trade. As shown in the top graph for total trade (which is the sum of imports and exports, rather than the difference, which is the trade balance as shown on page 5), machinery and transport equipment have broadly speaking been the main culprits, falling by over 11% in the US, 14% in Germany and 15% in Japan, comparing the second quarter 2009 with a year earlier. Lower energy prices have also contributed to fewer imports. Trade in fuel and lubricants fell by nearly 10% in the US and Japan, though exports by just over 3% in Germany. A closer look shows that fuel and lubricant imports in the US and Japan plummeted, by 13.6% and 18.1% respectively. Trade in manufactures and chemicals were not affected quite as badly, though it fell particularly steeply in Germany, by 6% and 3.6% respectively, year-on-year.
As actress Bette Davis once said, "getting old is not for sissies". Just when you expect to be reaping the rewards of a life of hard work, there is a surprisingly good chance that you will, instead, be struggling just to get by. In the mid-2000s, an average of 13.3% of people over 65 were living in poverty in OECD countries. An astonishing 45% of Koreans of that age were income poor, as were more than one out of every five older persons in Australia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico and the US. In only eight countries was the income poverty rate 5% or less among their oldest citizens.
Jobs crisis or no, it's best to invest in education. As this year's edition of Education at a Glance shows, men and women who have university-level degrees earn far more over the course of a lifetime than those who don't. In fact, men with higher education in Italy and the US can earn over US$300,000 more than their counterparts who do not have a university degree. Rewards tend to be lower for women, with Korea and Spain the exceptions.
Should water-scarce countries import water-intensive products and cultivate less water-intensive ones? After all, since all goods contain a certain amount of water in their production, exporting farm produce is rather like exporting water, albeit in virtual form. A thousand litres of water may be needed to produce a kilo of wheat, but five to ten times more is needed for a kilo of meat.
