Socioeconomic conditions and values have changed considerably since the emergence of elaborate welfare-state arrangements during the first decades after World War II. For instance, recent socioeconomic changes have created new needs (justifications) for intertemporal reallocations of income as...

It is useful to distinguish between exogenous and endogenous factors behind contemporary and expected future problems for the welfare state. This paper tries to identify major problems of both types and to indicate alternative reform possibilities to deal with them. At the same time as several...

The expansion of welfare-state arrangements is seen as the result of dynamic interaction between market behaviour and political behaviour, often with considerable time lags, sometimes generating either virtuous or vicious circles. Such interaction may also involve induced (endogenous) changes in...

In developed countries, pension systems emerged as a political response to socio-econo-mic changes brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, new socio-economic changes create both rationales and poli-ti-cal forces for revisions of...