This overview summarises the key findings of the analytical chapters of this report. It sketches a brief portrait of increasing income inequality in OECD countries and the potential driving forces behind it. It reviews changes in these driving forces and examines their relative impact on inequality. In particular, it looks at the role of globalisation and technological changes, regulatory refor...

Social values shape policy outcomes. We examine the role of postmaterialism, a widely used concept in the social sciences, for the mix of capital and labour taxation chosen by a society. Following political scientist Inglehart, we define the degree of postmaterialism as the relative importance which individuals or a society as a whole ascribe to non-material values over material things. We inco...

This paper is the first attempt in the literature to investigate the effects of public social security on aggregate consumption in a time-series setting for a developing country, Turkey that has one of the most generous social security systems in the OECD region. In order to quantify the social security variable, the paper uses the social security wealth (SSW) series calculated for Turkey in a ...

All advanced industrial nations appear to be experiencing a jobs problem. There simply appear to be too few decent employment opportunities to go around. This difficulty manifests itself somewhat differently in different countries. But no Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nation appears to have been able to fully escape rising wage inequality (sometimes coupled with d...

Using the currency demand and DYMIMIC approaches estimates about the size of the shadow economy in 18 Asian and 21 OECD countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) over 1998/99 in 18 Asian countries is 25.8% and i n 21 OECD countries 16.7% of " official " GDP. The average size of the shadow economy labor force (in percent of the official labor fo...

A large literature concurs that social determinants of health (SDH) are demonstrable, important, and insufficiently attended to in policy and practice. A resulting priority for research should be to determine how the social determinants of health can best be addressed. In this paper we support the more effective transfer of social determinants research into policy by: (1) describing a qualitati...

The compensation hypothesis states that governments adopt social programs to compensate individuals for accepting high trade exposure. Previous empirical studies has tested this hypothesis by analysing the effects of international trade on social welfare spending, finding ambiguous conclusions. We test this hypothesis from a different perspective. Using the International Social Survey Programme...

In this paper we investigate the importance of labor market institutions such as unemployment insurance, unions, …ring regulation and minimum wages for the evolution of male wage inequality across countries. We derive a simple log-linear equation of the wage di¤erential as a function of the institutional parameters, total factor productivity, …nal good prices and relative skill supply. Our esti...

While policy makers widely recognise the fact that education serves as an engine for economic growth through the accumulation of human capital, education is also strongly associated with boosting levels of social capital. Indeed, an important justification for the large expenditures on education within many democratic nations is its social, and not just economic, impact – the benefits an educat...