Several recent studies have examined the steady-state welfare implications of mortality differentials within unfunded Social Security systems, concluding that these differentials undermine the progressivity of the system and make society worse-off relative to alternative public pension schemes....

We examine the impact of a stylized pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) Social Security program in an economy of overlapping generations with equilibrium growth. We adopt realistic mortality and other demographic assumptions and allow for the presence or absence of full life annuities. In all cases we find...

We consider a small open economy in which the level of public education funding is determined by popular vote. We show that growth can be enhanced by the introduction of pay-as-you-go pensions even if the growth rate of aggregate wages falls short of the interest rate. The reason is that the...

This paper analyses the role of social safety nets in the form of redistributional transfers and wage subsidies. It is argued that public welfare programs can be viewed as a crime-preventing or disruption-preventing devices because they tend to increase the opportunity cost of engaging in crime...

Demographic trends in most developed economies are characterized by rising longevity and decreasing birthrates. These trends endanger the sustainability of the current public pension systems. Therefore social security reform proposals are on the agenda in many countries. This paper demonstrates...

Estonia is widely regarded as a paramount example for a successful transformation of a socialist economic system to a functioning market economy. Against the backdrop of this positive image which contrasts strongly with the crisis scenarios in Southern Europe the remaining problems of Estonia...

This paper attempts to analyze the growth effects of social security expenditures in Germany from a time series perspective. Therefore, a regression model based on standard determinants of growth is specified and estimated as a vector error correction model. Results show that there is a...

This paper analyzes a social security policy with public debt in an overlapping generations growth model. In particular, the paper considers a situation in which population aging causes a heavy burden of social security payments where public debt is issued by the government to finance the...

The Partnerships pillar of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development cuts across all the goals focusing on the mobilisation of resources needed to implement the agenda. Thailand’s “sufficiency economy philosophy” encourages the prioritisation of long-term sustainability over short-term...

In this paper, we analyse the empirical relationship between social security expenditure and economic growth, using cross-country data for a sample of 61 countries and panel data for a sample of 20 industrialized countries. We find that, whenever a statistically significant association between...