This paper deals with economic incentives and welfare-state arrangements in OECD countries; it also offers some lessons for would- be welfare states. These arrangements differ, of course, among countries. In particular, there is a wide variation in the extent to which countries rely on four...

This paper provides an analytical characterization of Markov perfect equilibria in a politico-economic model with repeated voting, where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution. The key feature of the theory is that the future constituency of redistributive policies depends...

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...

The achievements of social-welfare arrangements in Western Europe are well known: considerable income security, relatively little poverty and, in some countries, ample supply of social services. But there are also well-known weaknesses and hence considerable scope for improvement. Three types of...

The modern welfare state and full-employment policies have common intellectual roots. From the very beginning, welfare-state arrangements and full-employment policies were regarded as strongly complementary.

Developing countries, in particular the least developed ones, probably have more to learn from social policies in Europe during the early 20th century than from the elaborate welfare-state arrangements after World War II. In addition to macroeconomic growth and stability, the main ambitions must...

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 modern welfare state and full-employment policies have common intellectual roots. In the 1930s and 1940s, Keynesian visions of full employment and Beveridge-inspired ideas of a universal welfare state grew up in about the same intellectual environment. Both ideas emphasized a government’s...

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...