The marginal cost of public funds with an aging population

"As populations in the United States and other advanced economies grow older, the burden of social security and health care financing is expected to rise markedly. Payroll, income, and other taxes on working populations are projected to rise accordingly. The marginal welfare cost to workers of social security and other public expenditures is analyzed within the context of a two-period life cycle model. By relaxing separability assumptions that have become common in the literature, the theoretical structure properly incorporates the effect of these public expenditures on labor supply. Comparative statics results indicate that changing age structure is likely to raise the marginal welfare to workers of social security, education, and other public expenditures. Illustrative calculations for the United States confirm this result, suggesting that the cost to workers of incremental social security benefits may easily double by 2025-2050."     

人口老龄化与社会福利状况:国际比较及其启示

国际比较表明,无论是与人口老龄化程度相当的国家相比,还是与经济发展水平相当的国家相比,中国在公共福利支出和社会养老保障制度方面都存在明显的不足和滞后。人口老龄化挑战的真正涵义是:能否在经济、社会转型和人口迅速老龄化的条件下,建立起公平、合理、有效的国家制度安排和社会应对机制。解决人口老龄化问题的根本出路不仅在于加快经济发展,弘扬传统文化,而且在于完善社会保障制度、增加公共福利支出。     

Welfare Attitudes Towards Anti-poverty Policies in China: Economical Individualism,Social Collectivism and Institutional Differences

Public attitudes towards welfare programs is a crucial topic in the field of social policy research. Current studies on welfare attitudes has long been a lack of an explicit conceptualization, and mainly conducted at the individual level with the focus on self-interest. This study distinguished the dimensions of welfare attitudes into responsibility, efficiency and effectiveness, and examined the factors that influence welfare attitudes towards anti-poverty policies in China. Data used in this study came from Chinese National Survey of Public Welfare Attitudes in 2018 with a final sample size of 8296 respondents from three deliberately selected provinces in China. It concluded that welfare attitudes share the traits of economical individualism, social collectivism and institutional differences. Positive perception of work ethics and social cognition about income inequality were two important factors associated with welfare attitudes towards anti-poverty policy. People who were against indolence, idleness and male breadwinner and who were highly sensitive of income inequality were more supportive of the notion that government is responsible for protecting their livelihood, nevertheless, less satisfied with the current standard of substance allowance and performance of policy implementation, indicating an orientation of both individualism and collectivism of welfare attitudes. Besides, welfare attitudes were also motivated by institutional differences such as regional disparities and migrant identity. Therefore, this study suggests that the government should be need-oriented in dealing with of the different dimensions of poverty, and should establish a more unified and generous social welfare system that benefits both the natives and migrants.

     

Conditional Solidarity: Social Class,Experiences of the Economic Crisis,and Welfare Attitudes in Europe

The aftermath of the Global Financial and Economic Crisis of 2007/2008 turned out as a veritable “stress test” for European welfare states. Aiming to stabilize citizens’ living conditions and mitigate socio-economic hardship, European governments have engaged in active crisis management. Yet, the protective capacities of European welfare states vary, as does individuals’ exposure to crisis-induced social risks. Hence, the crisis has impacted countries and the members of different social classes unequally. Against this backdrop, this paper asks how Europeans’ perceptions of the personal impact of the crisis are associated with their welfare attitudes, focusing on variations between social classes and across nations. Using cross-sectional Eurobarometer survey data from 2010 for 27 European countries, I find that perceived crisis impact is associated with greater support for welfare state responsibility and redistribution. However, this association is not homogeneous but moderated by an individual’s class position as well as national economic conditions and social spending levels. More specifically, on the individual level, perceived crisis impact is associated with more favourable welfare attitudes not only among its traditional supporters—such as the working class or the unemployed—but also among its traditional opponents, notably the self-employed. Furthermore, where social spending is higher, welfare state support is less strongly related to perceived crisis impact, suggesting that more encompassing welfare states mitigate the subjective impacts of the crisis. However, redistribution appears to be slightly more contested between those affected and those not affected by the crisis under better economic conditions. Given the challenges facing welfare states across Europe, it remains to be seen how stable a basis of popular support can be formed on these grounds.     

Assessing Asset Indices

The use of asset indices in welfare analysis and poverty targeting is increasing, especially in cases in which data on expenditures are unavailable or hard to collect. We compare alternative approaches to welfare measurement. Our analysis shows that inferences about inequalities in education, health care use, fertility, and child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes, are quite robust to the economic status measure used. Different measures—most significantly per capita expenditures versus the class of asset indices—do not, however, yield identical household rankings. Two factors stand out in predicting the degree of congruence in rankings. First is the extent to which expenditures can be explained by observed household and community characteristics. Rankings are most similar in settings with small transitory shocks to expenditure or with little random measurement error in expenditure. Second is the extent to which expenditures are dominated by individually consumed goods, such as food. Asset indices are typically derived from indicators of goods that are effectively public at the household level, while expenditures are often dominated by food, an almost exclusively private good. In settings in which individually consumed goods are the main component of expenditures, asset indices and per capita consumption yield the least similar results.     

“居住证”离户籍有多远？——基于广东地区的分析兼与上海比较

“居住证转办常住户口”已经成为一些地区的经验做法。基于户籍身份限制,广东地区流动人口与户籍人口的社会资源分配及福利存在一定差异,居住证时代对流动人口的公共服务将有所加强。“居住证转办模式”是由城市福利和承载力供需矛盾产生的审批和筛选机制,地区之间在户籍改革中是一种博弈关系。广东“居住证转办模式”的门槛和标准应该结合城市化目标和“双转移”战略,依城市类型和规模大小梯度设置,让居住证制度成为城市人口服务和管理工作的有效工具。     

The Optimal Trade-Off Between Quality and Quantity with Unknown Number of Survivors

In a model of endogenous fertility where individuals know the probability of child survival but not the final number of survivors, parents do not always formulate a precautionary demand for children. For some utility functions, parents have fewer children than what they would have in a situation in which the number of survivors is known earlier. The properties of the optimal economic policy depend on the degree to which the social welfare function takes ignorance into account. If social welfare is evaluated after parents know how many children survived, the parental response to uncertainty is socially inefficient. Individual decisions then should be corrected through tax or transfer on both births and education. This property helps determine the optimal public response to mortality crisis in the presence of educational externalities.     

美国社会的失业问题及相关救助制度

失业是美国社会长期存在的一个严重的社会问题 ,影响美国失业问题的因素是多种多样的。失业救助作为一项解决失业问题的制度 ,在整个美国社会福利体系中发挥着不可替代的作用。美国的失业救助包含两个主要方面 ,即失业保险和公共救助系统。探讨美国失业救助制度的内容和特点 ,对我国具有重要的现实借鉴意义。     

Social Support,Industrial Parks and FDI Location Choice Across Hungarian Counties

This study analyses the determinants of foreign direct investments in Hungarian counties in the period 2001–2011. Unlike previous studies, the role of local public policies was also tested. To this end, local government social welfare expenditures and special economic regulations are considered in the econometric model. The results highlight the importance of local government interventions in creating a favourable environment to attract FDI to Hungarian counties. Furthermore, market size, labour skills and agglomeration economies significantly influence FDI location choices.     

Expenditure Decentralization and Citizen Satisfaction with Healthcare: Evidence from Urban China

There has been considerable debate whether fiscal decentralization improves the provision of public goods. Based on individual-level data from a nationally representative survey and county-level data from national compendiums of financial statistics and demographic statistics, this study analyzes the effect of expenditure decentralization on citizen satisfaction with public healthcare in urban China. The results indicate a significantly positive effect of expenditure decentralization on citizen satisfaction with public healthcare. We also find evidence that the impact of decentralization is associated with residency status. Further investigation highlights the importance of local economic development in realizing the potential gains from a decentralized system. This study suggests that decision-making at lower levels of government is more responsive to local needs and that the efficiency gains of decentralization are not necessarily accompanied by equitable distribution of welfare.

     

Private versus public old-age security

We directly compare two institutions, a family compact—a parent makes a transfer to her parent in anticipation of a possible future gift from her children—with a pay-as-you-go, public pension system, in a life cycle model with endogenous fertility wherein children are valued both as consumption and investment goods. Absent intragenerational heterogeneity, we show that a benevolent government has no welfare justification for introducing public pensions alongside thriving family compacts since the former is associated with inefficiently low fertility. This result hinges critically on a fiscal externality—the inability of middle age agents to internalize the impact of their fertility decisions on old-age transfers under a public pension system. With homogeneous agents, a strong-enough negative aggregate shock to middle-age incomes destroys all family compacts, and in such a setting, an optimal public pension system cannot enter. This suggests the raison d’être for social security must lie outside of its function as a pension system—specifically its redistributive function which emerges with heterogeneous agents. In a simple modification of our benchmark model—one that allows for idiosyncratic frictions to compact formation such as differences in infertility/mating status—a welfare-enhancing role for a public pension system emerges; such systems may flourish even when family compacts cannot.     

Measuring public sector size in the advanced market economy countries: The problem of deflators

A great deal of scholarly attention has been directed to understanding the causes of the growth of the public sector in the developed market economy countries in recent decades. Unfortunately, this literature has been clouded by uncertainty over measurement of the central variable at issue, the relative size of the public sector. Traditionally, public sector size has been measured as the ratio of government expenditures to GDP, with both figures expressed in current national currencies. Recently, however, this standard approach has been criticized by those who argue that figures for government expenditures and GDP should be separately deflated to account for different rates of inflation in the public sector and the economy as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to explore the empirical relationship between same- and different-deflator indicators of public sector size, focusing on social expenditures in 19 developed market economy countries over the period 1960–1981. The analysis finds that same- and different-deflator indicators are generally strongly correlated and that the choice of deflators, while of some importance, is not of overriding significance in assessing four major explanation of public sector growth in the countries examined.     

Detecting Public Social Spending Patterns in Italy Using a Three-Way Relative Variation Approach

Studies on public social spending often fail to address the issues connected with budgetary constraints. Budget lines require public entities to partition resources among sectors of spending on the basis of preferred combinations and trade-offs. Standard exploratory tools do not allow to unveil this preference structure as they are hindered by the differences in budget scales and by the bounded nature of sector variability, i.e. an increase in one sector means a missed increase or a decrease in other sectors. In this work Italian public social spending is modeled with an alternative log-ratio methodology which allows to study relative variation patterns among sectors. It is also important to note that since the data is collected across time a three-way approach is recommended so that the variability of each mode is kept separate.

     

A Benefit Recipiency Approach to Analysing Differences and Similarities in European Welfare Provision

In comparative welfare state research, the question of how to measure and understand cross-country differences and similarities in extents of public welfare provision has led to a major discussion about the indicators that could be used for this purpose. Much scholarly attention approaching this so-called ‘dependent variable problem’ concentrates on social expenditure or on social rights data as indicators of ‘welfare stateness’ or ‘welfare generosity’. However, recently, micro-level data on benefit receipt as another promising but hitherto underused indicator was brought into this discussion. The article at hand extends existing knowledge about the conceptual, methodological and empirical potentials and challenges of this alternative indicator compared to the two prevailing indicators. For the empirical analysis, it uses cash benefit recipiency data from the EU-SILC to investigate differences and similarities in extents of public welfare provision between 29 European countries for the period 2003–2012. The study reveals parallels to findings from research in which indicators of social expenditure and social rights are applied, but it also adds new insights beyond their cost and paper reality. This is mainly the case where priority is given to household-related assistance benefits rather than individual insurance benefits. The main conclusion of the paper is that the benefit recipiency indicator—despite not being flawless and requiring further research—complements existing knowledge on differences and similarities in welfare provision by European welfare states.     

Envy and Pride: How Economic Inequality Deepens Happiness Inequality in South Korea

This paper examines how economic inequality at the local level affects individuals’ subjective well-being (SWB) through social comparison in Seoul, South Korea. We implement a multi-level analysis combining asset inequality, calculated using the actual transaction prices of apartments, and public opinion surveys conducted by Seoul Metropolitan City between 2008 and 2016. Our analysis shows that inequality negatively affects SWB among respondents whose family income is lower than the median (the envy effect), but drives up SWB among the other half (the pride effect). Further analysis on the effect of inequality on subjective class awareness corroborates a social comparison mechanism: the haves embrace an upper-class awareness as local inequality increases, while the have-nots embrace a lower class awareness. These findings suggest that, despite concerns about economic inequality and its negative consequences, calling for policy reform to reduce inequality may be unpersuasive to the better off members of society, especially if doing so increases individual financial burdens.

     

Population policy and individual choice

The general equilibrium implications of endogenous fertility for several social issues of population policy are examined. Laissez faire is found to lead to Pareto optimality within generations even in the presence of public goods and Malthusian diminishing returns. On the other hand, bequests emerge as a major potential source of Pareto inefficiency when parents care about the number and welfare of their offspring. Also considered are questions of intergenerational justice and equity using an intergenerational social welfare function. It is shown that maximizing the sum of utilities always leads to a larger population than maximizing per capita utility, but that the laissez-faire solution may lie outside the interval bounded by the two criteria.Invited Lecture at the First Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics, Rotterdam, 18–19 September 1987In preparing this paper, I have drawn heavily on joint work with Assaf Razin and Efraim Sadka, both of Tel-Aviv University, and on our book, Household and economy: Welfare economics of endogeneous fertility (Academic Press, New York 1987). I am indebted to two anonymous referees for helpful comments     

East Asian Newly Industrializing Countries: Economic Growth and Quality of Life

The world is much impressed by the rapid economic development of four Asian Tigers – Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. However, it has often been taken for granted by many people that their social development is equally satisfactory. In order to investigate whether this belief is true or not, this paper looks at the levels of social development these countries have attained. Various measures of their quality of life will be assessed. Specifically, poverty, income distribution and environmental degradation are discussed. Despite their economic success, this study has found that most tigers are plagued by problems of poverty, increasing income disparities and environmental degradation. Further, social expenditures of these countries have been too limited to eliminate or impact on these problems.     

韩国劳动力市场灵活稳定性状况研究

根据国际社会提出的灵活稳定性概念对韩国金融危机以后劳动力市场的灵活稳定性状况进行分析。韩国政府采取的许多改革措施没有使劳动力市场的稳定性得到提高,反而使灵活性不断下滑。社会保障体系的不完善及工会组织的政治化是造成韩国劳动力市场灵活稳定性无法提高的主要原因。     

Social security,social welfare and the aging population

This study examines the effects of pay-as-you-go social security programs in aging economies when the middle-aged both educate their dependent children and subsidize the retirement of the old. Using an overlapping generations framework in which agents are three-period lived but timing of death in the third period is uncertain, we analyze the effects of social security tax schemes, under various demographic assumptions, on capital accumulation, education expenditures, social welfare, and economic growth. We find that in many cases social security crowds out education, and reduces economic growth and social welfare. Received: 29 April 1998/Accepted: 3 March 1999     

人口有序管理的国际经验与中国实践——基于流动人口服务管理的视角

本文探讨了发达国家在人口登记管理、信息管理、流动人口调控及社会融合政策等方面的成功经验及植入我国的四大体制障碍——人口信息整合环节断裂、地方财权事权环节断裂、鼓励就业环节断裂、举家迁移环节断裂。基于人口有序管理良性循环的理论框架,论述了发达国家人口有序管理经验对我国流动人口服务管理的启示,即建立"双核心"人口管理信息系统;建立人口有序管理协作机制,突出"成本杠杆"作用;建立居住证制度,实现流动人口渐进式福利供给;改革分税制和转移支付制,实现公共福利均衡供给;建立以"城市功能定位"为导向的公共资源合理配置机制,促进人口与产业有机结合;建立以家庭团聚为重要维度的社会融合机制,体现对"事实移民"的人性关怀。