The recent decades of public employment have passed in a continuous wave between the maintenance of the Weberian “bureaucratic ideal” (Weber, 1978, pp. 220–221) and the new trend of the seventies, the 3Es (economy, effectiveness, efficiency) The essence of the “fight” can be summarised in the way how, and by how much, individual countries deviate from the ideal of the public servant independent...

Many of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries use global budgeting to control all or certain portions of their health care expenditures. Although the use of global budgets as a cost-containment tool has not been implemented in the United States in any comprehensive way, recent health care reform initiatives have increased the need for research into such tools. In g...

The first section of this paper reviews the most recent evidence on inequality in 18 Latin American countries and shows that in all but four the changes in inequality over the 1990s were small and insignificant. The distribution depends on the ownership and rate of return on assets, particularly human capital. In the short run changes in these two variables tend to be offsetting-growth widens s...

We examine the distribution of hours of work across industrial sectors in OECD countries. We find large disparities when sectors are divided into three groups: one that produces goods without home substitutes and two others that have home substitutes — health and social work, and all others. We attribute the disparities to the countries’ tax and subsidy policies. High taxation substantially red...

In this paper we study the evolution of the labor share in the OECD since 1970. We show it is essentially related to the capital-output ratio; that this relationship is shifted by factors like the price of imported materials or the skill mix; and that discrepancies between the marginal product of labor and the real wage (due to, e.g., product market power, union bargaining, and labor adjustment...

This paper discusses issues that arise in the comparison of estimates of wealth holdings and their distribution in light of data for selected OECD countries. We find large differences in the level of wealth, depending on whether the mean or median levels are compared across countries. Sensitivity of wealth estimates to survey design are evident in that even within countries, these ranking of tw...

Governments in the OECD note rising immigration with alarm and grapple with policies aimed at selecting certain migrants and keeping out others. Economists appear to be well armed to advise governments since they are responsible for an impressive literature that examines the characteristics of individual immigrants, their absorption and the consequences of their migration on both sending and re...

This paper examines the sensitivity of inequality and poverty measures to the adult equivalence scale and the unit of analysis. Comparisons are made using parametric equivalence scales, and income units include individuals, equivalent adults and households. The role of the correlation between equivalent income and household size, and the weight attached to children, is examined analytically. Em...

Centralized wage-setting institutions are considered to be more effective at reducing wage inequality. In this paper, I offer an expansive cross-national analysis of the effects of recent liberalization in wage-setting institutions on wage inequality in the OECD, taking into special consideration the effects of EU and EMU membership. A qualitative comparison of liberalization occurring within E...

This paper examines income inequality over stages of the later-life course (age 45 and older) and systems that can be used to mitigate this inequality. Two hypotheses are tested: • Levels of income inequality decline during old age because public benefits are more equally distributed than work income; • Because of the progressive nature of government benefits, countries with stronger public inc...