Employment guarantee programs have often been used by developing countries to ensure livelihood of the poorer sections of the society without recourse to physical or human capital. India started the world’s largest such program in 2005 in the form of the National Rural Employment Guarantee...

This paper examines social security increases in Ireland as a case study of the existence of political budget cycles in European countries. Ireland is an appropriate country to examine, first because it has a system of proportional representation and some studies suggest that proportional...

This paper investigates how government transfers affect economic growth. Using meta-analysis techniques, we systematically review 24 primary studies with 164 estimates that examine the effect of government transfers on economic growth. After addressing heterogeneity and issues of publication...

The transition to the market economy that started in Romania after 1989, and especially the beginning, during the period 1991-2009, of the re-structuring and turning to private ownership of most of the fields of the economy, determined the appearance of certain special social and economic...

Social Security programmes around the world link public pensions to retirement: people do not lose their pensions if they make a million dollars a year in the stock market, but they do confront marginal tax rates of up to 100% if they choose to work. After arguing that most existing theories...

Albania provides a small amount of social assistance to nearly 20 % of its population through a system that allows a degree of community discretion in determining distribution. This study investigates the poverty targeting of this program. It indicates that relative to other safety net programs...

Cross-national studies on happiness have focused on differences in level of happiness. The focus of this paper is on spread in happiness in the nation, also called ‘inequality in happiness’. Inequality in happiness in nations can be measured by the size of the standard deviation of responses...

The econometric consensus on the effects of social spending confirms a puzzle we confront in the raw data: There is no clear net GDP cost of high tax-based social spending on GDP, despite a tradition of assuming that such costs are large. This paper offers five keys to this free lunch puzzle....