Maintaining Social Ties: Social Capital in a Global Information Age John F. Helliwell Abstract Recent research has documented that social and economic relations remain strikingly local, at least especially when viewed in the light of many discussions of globalization. The main evidence for this is that the density of social and economic exchanges declines far more with distance, and with the cr...

This paper presents an overview of our current state of knowledge regarding poor motivation of 14-16 year old school pupils in the UK. A number of experts in the field from a variety of disciplines presented papers on this topic to a series of seminars held at the London School of Economics between 2002 and 2003. These papers, summarised here, present evidence from a historical, comparative, an...

Public and private expenditure on educational institutions accounts for about 6% of the collective GDP of the OECD member countries, or roughly $1,300 billion dollars each year. This figure understates the true opportunity cost of educational investments, since it does not take into account forgone earnings. Overall, it should be clear that the provision of education represents a major commitme...

The escalating costs of traditional social security systems are forcing countries to reevaluate the formal programs that provide income maintenance support to the aging. This article suggests a reform strategy built around three systems, or “pillars,” to provide old-age security—a public pillar with mandatory participation, a private, mandatory savings plan, and a voluntary savings system. Thre...

Kuznets suggested that economic progress, in the early stages of the industrialization, is accompanied by increasing inequality, but that these disparities tend to disappear as the industrialization process deepens and the benefits of development are more widely distributed. This conjecture is inconsistent with observed patterns of inequality in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper examines the dyna...

Declining population as well as population aging has substantial impacts on the economy and on the society. By contrast, the size of the population usually does not matter for economic development, if it is stable; Switzerland and Sweden, for example, are rich countries with fewer than 10 million people. However, the process of declining does matter, particularly when it is accompanied by a sig...

The literature on electronic government (e-government) often assumes that there exists one suitable model that can be adopted in all contexts. This chapter emphasizes the constitutive role of political and institutional context in the design, implementation, and impacts of e-government initiatives, the understanding of which require a geographically-specific analysis. It begins with a summary o...

Tony Atkinson has produced a first-rate paper carefully documenting recent trends in the distribution of income and earnings in advanced industrial nations. He demonstrates the important point that there is considerable heterogeneity among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations in both the level of economic inequality and in changes in the dispersion of income and ...

This paper investigates the relationship between fluctuations in economic growth, unemployment, and voting along a left–right axis. I estimate a model that explains how political fluctuations are caused by economic fluctuations in the OECD countries. I find that higher economic growth causes a shift to the left of policy sentiments. I hold the provision of social insurance by the welfare state ...

Objective. To examine the relationship between firm-level cooperation, inequality, and redistribution in 18 advanced industrialized democracies. Methods. The relationships are investigated using multiple regression analyses of institutional, political, and economic variables. Results. Multilevel models reveal that contrary to neocorporatism, firm-level cooperative ties have significant inegalit...