It is vividly debated how the ongoing process of European integration will a¤ect the need and scope for welfare state activities. To some this process signals that welfare state activities have to be rolled back, while others stress that international integration may increase the need for (explicit or implicit) social insurance arrangements. This paper discusses these issues by first considerin...

In an era of ‘permanent austerity’ (Pierson, 2001) and financial crisis, the issue of financing welfare state provisions is topical. Moreover, the future of welfare state funding in countries with ageing populations is no doubt raising increasing interest in scholarly as well as policy circles. Yet the financing side of welfare provision has traditionally been given little attention and remains...

Within a two-sector-two-country model of trade with aggregate scale economies and unionisation, a move to a more generous welfare state in one country increases welfare in that country and can have positive spill-over effects on the other. Furthermore, synchronised expansions of social security are more welfare enhancing than unilateral ones. Our results counter the fears that a race to the bot...

Using a public finance approach, this study investigates welfare costs between seignorage and consumption taxes in a standard growth model. One of these two taxes is used to finance exogenous public spending to balance the government budget. The steady-state welfare cost of consumption taxes is lower if the consumption effect dominates the leisure effect. This paper compares equilibrium along t...

This study shows the different developmental stages of welfare state development in Japan and Mainland China, and discusses current challenges of the welfare state systems in these two countries. It may serve as a source for comparison of social policy practices in both countries, since it reveals striking similarities in the attitude of governments of Japan and China (after 1978) towards depen...

This paper extends and synthesizes the various approaches used in the recent welfare migration literature to both offer the most comprehensive set of tests to date for welfare migration and to determine the relative importance of short-distance moves in welfare migration flows. The current study follows on the finding of McKinnish (2005) of welfare migration effects obtained by comparing welfar...

This paper provides a comparative historical analysis of the emergence, consolidation, and reform of the Chilean and Uruguayan welfare states. While until the 1970’s both countries built strikingly similar social protection systems, they subsequently advanced divergent strategies of reform, with Chile following the retrenchment path and Uruguay pursuing the maintenance avenue. My objective is t...