Social security revenues are influenced by business cycle movements. In order to support the working of automatic stabilizers it would be necessary to calculate social insurance contribution rates independently from the state of the business cycle. This paper investigates whether European...

Competition among health insurers is widely considered to be a means of enhancing efficiency and containing costs in the health care system. In this paper, it is argued that this could be unsuccessful since health care providers hold a strong position on the market for health care services....

Many health economists demand more competition in the health care system. They focus on the competition between sickness funds for insured and the competition between health care providers for contracts with sickness funds. But they neglect the competition between health care providers for...