This paper explores the consequences of pension reforms in Western Europe in a world economy setting. Whereas various economic and social consequences of population ageing have been investigated in OECD countries, very few analyses have explicitly taken the worldwide aspect of the problem into...

Why have some countries done so much better than others over the recent past? In order to shed new light on this issue, this paper provides a decomposition of the change in the distribution of output-per-worker across countries over the period 1960-98. The main finding of the paper is that most...