Since the turn of the millennium, voters in the industrialized countries are increasingly expressing their dissatisfaction. Based on the theoretical concepts of justice by Hayek (1976), Rawls (1972, 2001) and Brennan and Buchanan (2000 [1985]) we argue that the growing dissatisfaction is rooted in the asymmetric pattern in monetary policies since the 1980s for two reasons. First, the structural...

The aim of this study was to examine the complex interactions between political traditions, policies, and public health outcomes, and to find out whether different political traditions have been associated with systematic patterns in population health over time. We analysed a number of political, economic, social, and health variables over a 50-year period, in a set of wealthy countries belongi...

The paper evaluates the distributional effects of conventional and unconventional monetary policies for the USA. The distributional effects are evaluated for the overall impact on the income distribution, using Gini index. The paper also assesses the effects of conventional and unconventional monetary policies on the different parts of income distribution, employing corresponding percentile rat...

In-Work Benefits for Married Couples: An Ex-Ante Evaluation of EITC and WTC Policies in Italy This paper investigates labor supply and redistributive effects of in-work benefits for Italian married couples using a tax-benefit microsimulation model and a multi-sectoral discrete choice model of labor supply. We consider two in-work benefit schemes following the key principles of the Earned Income...

— Many economists argue that the Chinese state and collectively owned enterprises are fundamentally inefficient and better economic performance requires large-scale layoff of the state and the collective sector workers. This paper argues that the productivity of state and collectively owned enterprises depends on the level of aggregated demand. If the government undertakes expansionary policies...

This article investigates the effects of macroeconomic policy (monetary and fiscal) on output growth during financial crises characterized by a “sudden stop” in net capital inflows in developing and emerging market economies. We investigate 83 sudden stop crises in 77 countries over 1982-2003 using a baseline empirical model to control for the various determinants of output losses during sudden...

This essay explores the roots of redistributive social solidarity in the developed democracies. Banting and Kymlicka (this volume) define social solidarity as a worldview widespread among the populace, with civic, democratic and redistributive dimensions, whereby individuals tolerate views and practices they dislike, accept democratic decisions even if those run counter to their beliefs or inte...

This paper examines the mechanism through which pro-growth policies such as government spending on infrastructure might a¤ect the dynamics of inequality. We develop a model in which government-provided infrastructure is not only the engine of growth, but also a critical determinant of the distributions of wealth, income, and welfare. Government spending on infrastructure by itself is shown to b...

This paper investigates the role played by labor market risk in shaping individual social policy preferences and political orientations. Do outsiders in the labor market, which are insecure about their future income, express a higher redistributive demand than their insider counterparts do? Does their marginalization in the labor market translate into political disenchantment? When they take pa...