This policy brief provides new insights on recent migration trends for doctors and nurses up to 2008, and discusses the main causes and consequences for destination and origin countries, and presents possible policy responses. In 2006, the World Health Organization estimated that there was a shortage of more than 4.3 million health personnel across the...

Housing markets have played a prominent role in macroeconomic developments over recent years. For a great part of the 2000s, buoyant housing markets have contributed to sustained economic activity in most OECD countries. But many markets overheated and the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market has been at the epicentre of a deep financial...

Policy makers need both a handy reference guide to the regional policies of their own and other countries and a broader analysis of trends in regional policies, based on sound, comparable information. Regional Policies in OECD Countries responds to this need. It is the first systematic, comparative analysis of OECD countries' regional policies.

High-speed broadband networks are a platform supporting innovation throughout the economy today in much the same way electricity and transportation networks spurred innovation in the past. New innovations such as smart electrical grids, tele-medicine, intelligent transportation networks, interactive learning and cloud computing will require fast communication networks to operate efficiently.

Over the past two decades OECD countries have made a series of policy choices, particularly with respect to decentralisation, allowing for greater territorial differentiation in policy design and implementation. This report examines these arrangements across the OECD. These policy choices are influenced by a need for governments to solve increasingly complex problems, ones for which...