We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...

A PAYGO system may serve as insurance against not having children and as an enforcement device for ungrateful children who are unwilling to pay their parents a pension. In fact, the latter was Bismarck’s historic motive for introducing this system. It is true that the PAYGO system reduces the...

Due to exceptionally low birth rates, the dynamism of Europe will be lagging behind that of other regions of the world for the time being. The paper assembles a rich body of comparative empirical data to clarify the extent of the demographic problems for the EU countries. It advances the view...

Razin and Sadka (1999) show that unskilled immigration is beneficial to all income and all age groups in society, even if immigrants are net beneficiaries of the welfare system. Among other things, this result rests on the assumptions that immigrants have the same reproduction rate as the native...

Education is vital for economic success, both at the national and the individual level. But education also has significant social effects. This report is OECD’s first attempt to gather and synthesise developments in measuring these social effects. The report focuses on two broad areas: health,...