Ensuring adequate living standards to a growing number of elderly while restraining the growth of pension spending represents the main challenge for Italian pension policy. There is a need for an in-depth analysis of the economic conditions of the elderly which in order to target resources to...

Why do some states default on their debt more often than others? We argue that sovereign default is the outcome of a political struggle among different groups of citizens. It is more likely to happen if: (i) domestic debt-holders are relatively weak; (ii) the the political costs of the financial...

This paper shows that increasing government social expenditures can make a substantive contribution to increasing household consumption in China. The paper first undertakes an empirical study of the relationship between the savings rate and social expenditures for a panel of OECD countries and...