The forces of the market and systems competition bring about economic and social convergence in Europe, and there is no need for social policies at the EU level. Social harmonization would distort migration flows and slow down the speed of economic convergence. National welfare states will be...

This paper considers the problem of the optimal time path of contraction of an industry which has been hit by foreign competition, and shows that in general, along the optimal path, a production subsidy is warranted. The optimal subsidy trades off the benefit of unemployment in speeding up the...

Previous analyses of demand systems and the welfare effects of taxing male and female labour supplies suppress the analysis of household resource allocation by assuming a household utility function. To analyse the implications of assuming this is not the case, we construct a simple but fairly...