Despite recent economic gains for women, a substantial gender gap in financial security during old age remains, making women more dependent than men upon Social Security. Social Security plays an important role in providing for women's economic security. The implications for women of several proposed changes in Social Security policy, including the call for the partial privatization of Social S...

At this point, it is nearly impossible to escape discussion of the aging of the baby boom and its implications for Social Security. No set of reasonable demographic and economic assumptions yields a forecast of long-term solvency for the program as it exists today (Board of Trustees 1997; Congressional Budget Office (CBO) 1997). Some reform is necessary. The open questions are which reforms and...

Based on a simple overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility, we show that the effectiveness of childcare support and social security reform depends much on the openness of the economy, altruism, and initial fertility. For example, introducing a child allowance, which is often expected to mitigate demographic pressures, might be ineffective in a closed economy. Downsizing a social ...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to examine the distribution of dominant values, actors, and ideological advocacy coalitions influencing the Social Security debate across two presidential administrations. METHODS Through content and cluster analyses, we analyzed federal legislative hearing testimonies on Social Security reform spanning 11 years. RESULTS Witnesses consistently expres...

Social Security is in trouble. With declining population growth and rising life expectancy, the cost of Social Security benefits is rising relative to payroll tax revenues. As a result, the Social Security retirement fund is expected to run out around 2030.1 Recently, the 1994–1996 Advisory Council on Social Security (1997) proposed three different plans to address the problem. Interestingly, a...

Reform and equity are terms that have frequented political discourse, technical documents, and conceptual discussions in recent decades in different proposals with different ideological references. To understand the importance and centrality of these themes in the contemporary debate in Latin America implies a more in-depth reflection on health policy in the sphere of social policies and to def...

This paper studies the long-run aggregate and welfare effects of eliminating Social Security in a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium life-cycle model where parents and their children are linked by voluntary and accidental bequests. Social security in this model with impure altruism has a smaller effect on capital accumulation than in a pure life-cycle model, a bigger effect than in a mode...

A reform process is under way in Italy. Achieving financial sustainability of the social security system has been the first objective characterizing the reforms of 1990s, but these have also introduced rules which aim at a more actuarially fair system. Indeed the social security system prevailing in Italy, financed on a PAYG basis, was, at the end of the 1980s, clearly unsustainable and also ex...

This study aims at understanding the link among labor, mental distress, and psychosocial rehab from the point of view of people with either mental disorders or psychoactive substance addiction, regarding the meaning of laboring in their lives. The study took place in Psychosocial Attention Centers(CAPS), in the city of Goiânia, State of Goiás, Brazil. There were eight participants of both gende...

The baby boom generation’s entry into retirement early in the next century will place enormous pressure on public spending in the United States. The increase in the percentage of the population that is aged will inevitably drive up the burden of paying for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs. Concern over the future financing of public retirement programs has stim...