A well-established result in the literature is that Social Security tends to reduce steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle model...

Social safety nets protect citizens against hardship. By offering compensation, social safety nets may help overcome the political resistance to trade liberalisation and structural reform, but they can also weaken the incentives to work and save. Depending on their design, safety nets may also...

Social safety nets protect citizens against hardship. By offering compensation, social safety nets may help overcome the political resistance to trade liberalisation and structural reform, but they can also weaken the incentives to work and save. Depending on their design, safety nets may also...

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...

The policy brief presents a review of potential effects of parametric pension reform in Belarus starting in 2017 for the population aged 50 and more in terms of unemployment, alcohol consumption, and poverty. It concludes that, despite the fact that raising the retirement age is overdue in...

The conventional wisdom is that increasing globalisation requires a reduction in the provision of the welfare state among industrialised countries as the distortions resulting from this type of expenditure undermine international competitiveness and the ability of countries to attract and/or...

This paper analyses the shifting balance between public sector and private sector welfare provision in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. Five sectors - education, health, personal social services, housing, and income maintenance and social security - are examined over three time...

In this article, we use data on five social inclusion indicators (poverty, inequality, unemployment, education and health) to assess and compare the performance of 15 European welfare states (EU15) over a 12-year period from 1995 to 2006. Aggregate measures of performance are obtained using...

This paper will analyze the Menem administration's social policy reforms during the 1990s. Neo-liberal reforms in Argentina are well-known both in the economy and in the social arena, but in the latter we can discern the presence of tripartite negotiations. The form of such negotiations, the...