This paper focuses on minimum wages (MW), mandated benefits (MB), employment protection legislation (EPL), and unemployment insurance benefit systems (UIB). Even though different institutions might try to accomplish the same goal(s), the mechanisms through which each regulation interacts with...

Pension indexation should anchor the parameters of the pension system to one or more economic and demographic variables to ensure that the system is implemented in a sustainable way, while minimizing distortions affecting important economic choices. Arguing that financial sustainability,...

This note summarizes activation policy strategies in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Policy makers can choose from a broad menu of options. Each of them comes with potential strengths and weaknesses, but there can also be important links between them. To...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the determinants of industry-level multifactor productivity growth. It focus on traditional factors, including the process of technological catch up, human capital and R&D as well as institutional factors affecting labor adjustment costs. The link...

This paper argues that it is important to take into account unfunded public pension liabilities as part of an assessment of the overall fiscal situation, including the fiscal positions of pension schemes pre and post reforms. It examines the concept of the implicit pension debt (IPD) and...

Unemployment insurance has been the subject of numerous theoretical and empirical studies. These studies elucidate the benefits and the cost of unemployment insurance, namely, the improved allocation of risk bearing and the reduced incentives for work. In the past two decades a branch of the...

In 1995, Latvia became the first country in Central and Eastern Europe to implement parametric reform of the Soviet-style PAYGO pension system, and the first in the world to implement the"notional defined contribution (NDC) system"originally designed for Sweden. The Government's intention was to...

This paper considers the implementation of, and rationale for, pension reforms based on notional accounts (sometimes known as notional defined contribution plans or NDCs). The distinguishing feature of such reforms is that a structure of individual accounts is established, in which contributions...

A number of researchers have recently proposed a variety of different `vulnerability'measures designed to capture the welfare consequences of risk for poor households, and also proposed a variety of different approaches to estimating these various measures of household vulnerability. However,...

Economic transition in Bulgaria has been associated with the emergence of unemployment, the fall in real wages and a substantial increase in wage inequality. The ranks of low-paid workers have grown and their relative wage status has substantially deteriorated. Unemployment is of long duration....