This publication is a non-technical report prepared for Polish Ministry of Economy and Labor. The main goal is to present a comprehensive statistical and econometric analysis of employment, unemployment and participation in Poland in the period 1998-2004 and confront Polish experiences with...

When it comes to retirement income policy, there is a general perception that workers have full 40-year working careers before retiring. Further, it is generally assumed that workers with low lifetime earnings have low earnings in each year during a normal working career. The basic research...

That the Government of Mauritius provides nearly every resident over the age of 60 with a non-contributory, basic pension is one of the best-kept secrets in the world. The scheme dates from 1950 and became universal in 1958, following abolition of a means test. Remarkably, introduction of a...

Most workers in developing countries have no access to pensions in old age. Well-intentioned reformers have concentrated on privatization, but this does nothing to expand coverage. Non-contributory, universal pensions automatically protect an entire population, in a way that contributory...

I analyze simultaneous voting on the wage tax rate and investment in public education using a model with three overlapping generations and ability differences inside each cohort. Wage tax revenue finances public education and social security benefits. I derive the results both for a...

The paper analyses a two-sector model of endogenous growth with two common features of economic development: stages of sustained growth and underdevelopment traps. The model also demonstrates the transitional issues of a temporary underdevelopment trap, seemingly sustainable growth, and a...

This paper develops a theory of endogenous growth cycles focusing on the interaction between consumers' desire to satisfy an indefinite range of wants and firms' incentive to utilize knowledge from past production experiences. We show that firms endogenously form a number of distinguishable...

The paper deals with the application of Minimum Weighted Residual Methods (MWR) in intertemporal optimizing models of endogenous economic growth. In the 1st part of the paper the basics of the MWR method are described. Attention is mainly concentrated on one special class of MWR methods: the...

Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a...

In this paper we investigate economic growth in economies where households face liquidity constraints, and young agents rely on the family to finance their investments in education. We analyze the type of family aid in which youths can borrow because their parents guarantee the loan repayment...