The welfare state and demographic dividends

Notes on Demographic Changes and the Welfare State

The flow of unskilled, low-earning migrants to developed countries with a comprehensive social security system, including retirement benefits, has attracted both public and academic attention in recent years. Being relatively low earners, the migrants typically are net beneficiaries of the welfare state in the short run.1 Therefore, an almost unanimous opposition to migration may arise in the p...

East Asian Economic Development: Two Demographic Dividends.

The important of the demographic dividend to East Asian economic growth is now widely recognized. During the last four decades of the 20 Century the working age populations grew much more rapidly than the dependent populations fueling growth in per capita income. Over the coming decades, however, demographic change is seemingly unfavorable. In the coming decades the working-age populations of m...

The Welfare State and Competitiveness

In all modern industrial countries, redistributive expenditures are a larger component of the government budget than consumption of goods and services. In this paper, we use a general equilibrium, two-country model with exportables, importables and nontraclables to study redistribution across different types of agents in a world characterized by the presence of labor unions and distortionary ta...

The Welfare State and Redistribution

Because it taxes and spends, the welfare state is by definition redistributive, but this does not automatically entail that it creates more equality. A quick historical glance at social reform will dispel of any notion that the welfare state was pursued for egalitarian reasons. Its foundations were typically laid by conservative reformers who, like Bismarck, sought primarily to reproduce, rathe...

Normalization and the Welfare State