Full employment was the centrepiece of the economic policy of social democracy in the post-war period. Whilst the role of Keynesianism in policy making may be exaggerated, it offered the prospect of maintaining full employment without any section of society having to pay. Problems with the...

Flexible markets require flexible societies; humans, however, need a stable social order. According to received wisdom, when capitalist development razes traditional social structures, society fights back, and welfare state policies organize new stability to replace the old. More market produces...

In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Joseph A. Schumpeter concluded that socialism would eventually displace capitalism in Western democracies. This would come about as a result of the superior performance of capitalism. We extract six 'stylized' propositions that are essential elements of...

Sweden experienced exeptionally fast economic growth during the century-long period 1870-1970. This illustrates that a decentralized market economy, highly open to international transactions, may be quite conductive to sustained productivity growth if the government fulfills its 'classical'...

Substantial cross-national differences in poverty alleviation are well documented, but theextent to which different parts of the social transfer system account for this variation is still relatively unexamined. This study analyses the redistributive effects of specific social policy institutions...

Welfare state supporters typically contend that social-welfare programs boost the incomes of low-earning households. Critics argue that, over time, such programs reduce the growth of economic output and/or employment. As a result, redistribution may produce stagnant or even declining real...

Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of 'temporal autonomy': the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life....

This report gives the results derived from a cross-sectional analysis of the distributional effects of noncash benefits in four countries. The results of the Norwegian data suggest that the distribution of benefits influences the relative income position of household groups. The main...