We consider an economy characterised by involuntary unemployment among low skilled workers, and investigate the implications for employment and income of welfare schemes often advocated as less distortionary. We show that reducing unemployment benefits in favour of income subsidies (social...

The expansion of welfare-state arrangements is seen as the result of dynamic interaction between market behaviour and political behaviour, often with considerable time lags, sometimes generating either virtuous or vicious circles. Such interaction may also involve induced (endogenous) changes in...

"While there is no denying that the world has made huge progress against absolute poverty over the last 200 years, until recent times the bulk of that progress had been made in wealthy countries only. The good news is that we have seen greater progress against poverty in the developing world in...