Is the economic and financial crisis also a crisis of Economics? From different perspectives, today there is rather harsh criticism of Economics as a Social Science. In this paper, first, some of the recent failures of Economics are discussed. Then some of the criticisms are taken up that are...

Taking into account the Swiss experience, this paper considers some aspects of the current reform discussion concerning the German health insurance system. The income dependence of effective premia, their size and their distributional consequences are discussed. The potential role of competition...

Up to now there was a general conviction that increasing unemployment and inflation have a negative impact on the government's popularity. This was true for Germany as well, but it does not seem to hold any longer. This paper first reviews the results of earlier periods before presenting new...