The paper provides a selective survey of methods and findings concerning the impact of tax and welfare policies on employment unemployment and economic growth in OECD countries. The paper examines a number of facets of tax and welfare policy and concludes that cross-country macroeconomic studies...

I argue that the offsetting effect of social security contributions on household retirement saving depends on how closely the social security programme imitates a private retirement saving plan (i.e. the quot;actuarialquot; component of the social security programme) - the closer the design of...

This paper surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and older people in industrialized countries using data up to the mid-1990s. It addresses a series of questions. At what level are the incomes of the elderly relative to the population as a whole? How...

The paper examines projections of the fiscal liabilities of public pension programmes in a number of OECD countries. It investigates the reasons why many countries have built up such liabilities in the past and critically appraises the future projections of pension costs. It examines the...

Books reviewed: H. Bateman, G. Kingston and J. Piggott, eds., Forced Saving: Mandating Private Retirement Incomes, Richard Disney, author Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger, eds., Regional and National Capital Flows: Macroeconomic Causes and Consequences, Magdalena Polan, author Angus Maddison,...

We study entry, exit and survival of UK manufacturing establishments from 1986 to 1991 using the newly released ARD database. We document patterns of entry and exit across industries and over time. We estimate an augmented Cox proportional hazard to examine the survival of new plants in the UK...

Books reviewed: Finis Welch (ed.), The Causes and Consequences of Increasing Inequality S. Togan and V. N. Balasubramanyam (eds.), Turkey and Central and Eastern European Countries in Transition Towards Membership of the EMU Yair Mundlak, Agriculture and Economic Growth: Theory and Measurement...

Much of the existing literature on the use of informal credit arrangements such as ROSCAs (Rotating and Credit Saving Associations) theorises the use of such institutions as arising from market failures in the development of formal saving and credit mechanisms. As economic development proceeds,...

We utilise questions concerning individual ‘debt literacy' incorporated into market research data on households' unsecured debt positions to examine the association between consumer credit and individual financial literacy. We examine the relationship between individual responses to debt...