Taxes and cash transfers reduce income inequality more in France than elsewhere in the OECD, because of the large size of the flows involved. But the system is complex overall. Its effectiveness could be enhanced in many ways, for example so as to achieve the same amount of redistribution at...

For policy reforms to increase a society's welfare, reliable information on people's prefer-ences and expectations is crucial. Representative opinion polls, often involving simplified questions about the complex topics under debate, are an important source of information for both policy-makers...

Ageing combined with generous welfare state schemes makes the present fiscal policy in Norway unsustainable, despite large government petroleum revenues. We estimate to what extent two suggested reforms of the public pension system improve fiscal sustainability and stimulate employment, two main...

Large petroleum revenues make Norway an enviable fiscal loner. The fiscal policy rule adopted from 2001 transforms petroleum wealth into foreign assets, and only the real return on the financial fund should be spent annually. Despite this ambitious saving of the petroleum wealth, we find it...

Assessments of fiscal sustainability (FS) problems should be based on present values of government revenues and expenditures over an infinite horizon. The paper shows that realistic assumptions imply that the growth rate of government expenditure components may exceed both the steady state...

The Norwegian pension reform of 2006 intends to (1) improve long run fiscal sustainability by reducing the growth in public old-age expenditures, (2) strengthen labour supply incentives, and (3) maintain the main redistributive features of the present system. We assess to what extent the reform...

The main goal of the Norwegian pension reform of 2011 is to improve long run fiscal sustainability, not least through stronger labour supply incentives. We assess to what extent the reform is likely to live up to these intentions. To this end we combine a dynamic microsimulation model, which...

The Swedish employment rate is high in an international comparison and has been rising during recent decades. This pattern is especially pronounced among the elderly and women and reflects labour supply behaviour in these groups. The policy survey in this report suggests that the main drivers of...

This paper studies interrelations between two benefits in the Swedish social insurance system: the sickness insurance and the temporary parental benefit. The level of compensation differs between the two benefits creating an economic incentive for parents to claim temporary parental benefit when...

Based on the observation of an unabated trend towards higher social spending ratios in advanced countries, the study analyzes the risk of “social dominance”, where social expenditures dominate fiscal policy, and undermine growth and fiscal sustainability. We scrutinize this risk by analyzing...