The “Golden Age” of post-war European economic growth has witnessedextraordinary changes not only in the economic, but also in the social andcultural outlook of Western European societies. Eric Hobsbawm’s statementthat “[h]istorians of the twentieth century in the third millennium will...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within thecontext of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerablehouseholds in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey andfind that, of three different types of risks that we...

The debate on the Welfare State is mainly focused on a supposed trade-off between growthand equity, more precisely, on the sustainability of social programmes and their effects on individualincentives to work and save. In this paper we focus on the relation between Welfare State andaggregate...

Wenn von Reformen der Gesellschaft oder demUmbau des Wohlfahrtsstaates die Rede ist, sindwirtschaftliche Zusammenhänge und soziale Veränderungsprozessenicht die alleinigen Faktoren,die in politischen Maßnahmen zu berücksichtigensind. Die Vorstellungen über die ideale Gesellschaft,die...

Electronic coordination may drastically reduce transport costs, especially for digital or digitalizable products where local markets may actually shrink to a point in space. In the present paper we use a model with differentiated products to analyze the impact of declining transport costs on...

What is the appropriate degree of centralization in the context of industrial policy? The basic advantage of centralization results from internalization of external effects. While most of the literature stresses the superior information of regional authorities as a countervailing force, the...

I analyze the welfare implications of protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) in developing countries through its impact on innovation, market structure, and technology transfer. FDI, tariffs, and joint ventures (JV) are introduced to the strategic IPR literature. In a North-South trade...

This model examines the impact of a fairtrade labelling scheme on global and country-specific welfare in a two-stage north-south trade framework. In the first stage (the producer market) two northern processors buy a commodity from a group of small scale agricultural producers in the south...

I study the influence of minimum quality standards in a partial-equilibrium model of vertical product differentiation and trade in which duopolistic firms face quality-dependent costs and compete in quality and price in two segmented markets. Three alternative standard setting arrangements are...