This paper is an overview of the social welfare systems of five EastAsian countries, namely Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong andSingapore. It analyses the overall costs of welfare as well as incomedistribution aspects, based on both aggregate data and a programme-byprogrammereview of their...

Based on outcomes for residents and qualitative studies, it is widelythought that public services meet the needs of residents less well indeprived areas, and that this is due to both the demands placed onservices being greater and the services themselves being of a lowerquality. This paper looks...

This article outlines the recommendations of the UK Pensions Commission, andthe data and analysis on which they were based, including projections ofdemographic change, trends in private pension saving, and evolution of the statepension system. The Commission concluded that without reform,...

[...]What might account for this link between parentalincome and children’s income? Many economists believethat this relationship is due in large part to differentialhuman-capital investment between high-income andlow-income families. High-income parents can invest inmore (and better)...

This paper describes a new and intuitive methodfor answering these technical questions by tabulating theexact loss distribution arising from correlated credit eventsfor any arbitrary portfolio of counterparty exposures, downto the individual contract level, with the losses measuredon a...

[...]This study is the first formal investigation ofconsumer attitudes that compares the forecasting power ofthe University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentimentand the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index.We begin with a background analysis of structural differencesbetween the...

[...]In this article, we shed light on the globalizationof international production and trade by demonstratingthe increasingly important role vertical specializationplays in international trade. We use case studies andinput-output tables to calculate the level and growth...

The British industrial revolution created an industrial economy. While casual discourse conflates industrialization and economic growth, Britain was remarkable primarily for the pronounced structural change that occurred rather than for rapid economic growth. Uniquely the British labour force...

Historical narratives which place the Glorious Revolution at the beginning and Parliament near the centre of explanations for the rise and success of Britain’s fiscal military state begin to seem truncated in chronology, narrow in conception and insular in focus. Nevertheless, their stories...