A new paper (together with Margareta Dackehag and Martin Rode) is now forthcoming in the EJPE: "Are OECD policy recommendations for public sector reform biased against welfare states? Evidence from a new database". The paper introduces a database that summarizes the policy advice in the OECD publication Economic Surveys. We show that the policy advice given in these surveys can be summarized as a kind of 'Washington Consensus' for welfare states, and that the interest in different types of reforms have varied over time:
![](https://cdn-images.postach.io/a2fdde83-e6cb-46f8-b598-1df971fb628f/1e06f1d5-ef51-4441-86e4-e0a76980e140/3d030848-add1-4378-8816-dcd6fc16dd68.png)
We quantifiy the perceived reform need and examine its correlates, which led to an interesting discovery: The reform need according to the OECD is highly correlated with the Fraser Institute's Economic freedom index.
![](https://cdn-images.postach.io/a2fdde83-e6cb-46f8-b598-1df971fb628f/1e06f1d5-ef51-4441-86e4-e0a76980e140/3c09cc59-23eb-48de-a9fb-2590e1b1730b.png)
We also examine if perceived reform need predicts subsequent policychanges. Using the Comparative Welfare State Entitlement dataset, we find some evidence that a high reform need is followed by lower welfare state entitlements in countries with a right-wing government, and higher entitlements in countries with a left-wing governments - but these results are not causal, ie these changes may well have ocurred regardless of what OECD recommends.
The database is available here.