This extended book review of Creating a Learning Society by Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald (2014) looks at the 700-page long scholarly work from a transition economy perspective. Using as a starting point Arrow's renowned concept of "learning by doing", the authors throw away the doctrines...

With its impulses and coordination initiatives the EU makes efforts to influence the employment and labour policies in its Member States. Here the principal instruments are the European Employment Strategy and its main constituent, the Employment Guidelines. The latter, while based on modern...

With its impulses and coordination initiatives the EU makes efforts to influence the employment and labour policies in its Member States. Here the principal instruments are the European Employment Strategy and its main constituent, the Employment Guidelines. The latter, while based on modern...

This paper surveys the most significant problems of the pension systems of EU11 countries. These nations had to transform their old-age social security systems after replacing a state-socialist economic order with a capitalist one. Stressing common as well as specific features, our paper...

Though the Hungarian pension system has been suffering from many erroneous rules, in the present paper we confine our attention to the rules of retirement in Hungary since 1990. In every pension system, there exist two rules which determine how the lifetime contribution (which is approximately...

Though never stated explicitly, there is a hidden hypothesis that in a normal pension system, the retirement age and the contribution length are strongly and positively correlated. We compare the time paths of male and female correlation coefficients in Austria, Hungary, Germany and Sweden for...

We consider three transfer models with a representative individual who discounts the utility of the merit good with respect to the standard one's. In each model, a paternalistic government taxes the consumer and transfers him additional merit goods in return. The private purchase of the merit...

In his seminal model (Feldstein, 1985), the government operates a social security system to counter the representative worker's myopia. (i) For a complete myope, he determined a sizable optimal tax rate (and the corresponding benefit level). (ii) For a partially shortsighted worker, he...

In this paper, we analyze Hungarian pension policies between 1998 and 2017, comparing the pre- and post-2010 periods. Before 2010, Hungary was a liberal democracy dominated by populist economic policies. We call this the period of democratic populism. After 2010, with center-right but illiberal...

At the design of public pension systems, the designers frequently neglect that higher earners statistically live longer, and possibly also retire later. Since the first difference has recently been rising steeply, this negligence is less and less tolerable, especially with nonfinancial defined...