Private versus public financing of education and endogenous growth

This paper examines interactions between education policy and growth. The analysis is carried out in an OLG model with two types of individuals: skilled and unskilled. An increase in public education reduces private costs of education, increases the proportion of skilled individuals, and tends to promote growth. On the other hand, education spending crowds out physical capital and reduces learning-by-doing. A marginal increase in the education subsidy can lower growth. It is yet shown that pure public education maximizes the long-run growth rate. Importantly, a partial subsidy to education can result in lower growth than pure private education. Received: 7 March 1999/Accepted: 25 November 1999     

公共机构养老发展分析

２１世纪,我国将进入快速人口老龄化时期。随着经济发展和老年人口增加,老年群体将日益分化,对养老方式的需求呈多元化趋势。发展公共机构养老不仅能够缓解家庭分散照顾老人的矛盾,而且有利于创造新的就业机会。目前,养老机构存在的主要问题是缺乏规范、无序竞争、优惠政策不足。     

Private support and social security

The issue is addressed whether assistance to persons in need can be left to the ‘family’ and the ‘community’. In that case people depend on their social networks. The support a person receives through a given network of social ties is examined. However, ties are diverse and subject to change. By means of a model of the dynamics of social ties, the conditions for adequate private support are analyzed. The sustainability of private support over time is examined by incorporating the impact on social ties of lending and receiving support. It is shown that support is only an effective alternative in a limited number of situations. Received: 2 January 1997 / Accepted: 2 February 1998     

Private provision of public goods between families

We consider a two-stage voluntary provision model where individuals in a family contribute to a pure public good and/or a household public good, and the parent makes private transfers to her own child. We show not only that Warr’s neutrality holds, regardless of the different timings of parent-to-child transfers, but also that there is a continuum of Nash equilibria which individuals’ contributions and parental transfers are indeterminate, although the allocation of each’s private consumption and total public good provision is uniquely determined. Furthermore, impure altruism or productivity difference in supplying public goods may not break our results above.     

Private versus public financing of education and endogenous growth: A comment on Bräuninger and Vidal

This note shows that the long-run effect in the case of a low skill trap in Br?uninger and Vidal (Journal of Population Economics (2000) 13:387–401) contains a mistake. While not affecting the paper's basic intuition, this implies that the discussion in the short-run analysis also applies in the long-run. Received: 24 April 2001/Accepted: 9 June 2001 I wish to thank Alessandro Cigno and an anonymous referee for useful comments. Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno.     

Hunan Province promotes old-age social security system and 1.14 million elderly are included in basic living allrowance

On 24th March 2011,Hunan held a working meeting on ageing, whicharranged the construction of old-age social security system to be accelerated in 2011.Also,services for the aged would be promoted,and the quality and standard of elderly living would be improved continuously.     

Effects of public education and social security on fertility

Introducing a fertility decision and child care cost into an overlapping generations model with public education and social security, we examine the effects of these public policies on fertility. We show that an increase in income tax, which finances social security benefits and public investment in education, increases fertility. On the other hand, with a constant tax rate, a change in the allocation from social security benefits to public investment in education decreases fertility and, with a constant social security tax, the effect of education tax on fertility is neutral.      

Social security reform and the support for public education

Old age pensions and public education account for a large share of public budgets. We link both programs through a tax-transfer system that is also sensitive to labor market distortions. We analyze the impact that alternative pension reforms have, through the political process, on publicly financed education. We explain how changes in the pension system design affect the link between the two programs and also labor market incentives. These effects, if they exist, act in opposite directions. Overall, we find that most proposals that entail a partial privatization of pensions reduce the willingness of the society to fund public education.     

Mixed estimation of old-age mortality

"Section 2 will first extend the method of mixed estimation to maximum likelihood estimation in general. Then, we will review generalized linear models with logistic and Poisson regressions as examples. In Section 3 we discuss different approaches for formulating the auxiliary information in practice. Section 4 first reviews the method of Coale and Kisker, provides empirical estimates for it, and then proceeds with the mixed estimation variant. In Section 5 we apply the methods to the estimation of mortality at ages 80+ in Finland in 1980-1993. We will first consider the evidence for mortality crossover between males and females....Then we will estimate life expectancies at age 100." (EXCERPT)     

On the political economy of social security and public education

This paper analyzes simultaneous voting on the wage tax rate and investment in public education with three overlapping generations and ability differences inside each cohort. Wage tax revenue finances public education and social security benefits. The presence of ability differences introduces a time-consistency problem with repeated voting. This can be solved by trigger strategies, which do not punish upward deviations in the wage tax rate. If there are multiple equilibria, then higher tax rates are associated with more education. Surprisingly, the median voter may be a young citizen, even when cohorts are of the same size.

Social security policy with public debt in an aging economy

This paper analyzes a social security policy with public debt in an overlapping generations growth model. In particular, the paper considers a situation in which population aging causes a heavy burden of social security payments where public debt is issued by the government to finance the payment. In the model presented below, an economy with an aging population may achieve two dynamically inefficient equilibria. Under certain conditions, the effects of pension reform and population aging on capital accumulation are entirely different between the two equilibria. Received: 23 July 2001/Accepted: 22 August 2002 I am deeply grateful to an anonymous referee and Professor A. Cigno, the Editor of this journal, for their valuable comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Kazuyo Tanimoto and Kiheiji Nishida for their research assistance. Any remaining errors are my own. The research reported here was conducted as part of a larger study, the “Project on Intergenerational Equity” at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University. Financial support from Kani Hoken Bunka Zaidan is also gratefully acknowledged. Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno.     

Social security, public education, and growth in a representative democracy

This paper studies the relationship between public education and pay-as-you-go social security in a representative democracy, where the government reacts both to voting and lobbying activities of workers and pensioners. While an intergenerational conflict prevails concerning actual social security contributions, workers may prefer public education for its positive effect on later pension benefits. Population aging diminishes the relative lobbying power of pensioners, leading to a higher contribution rate, educational expansion, and higher per capita income growth. Received: 05 April 1999/Accepted: 20 December 1999     

Differential fertility and intergenerational mobility under private versus public education

We study differential fertility and intergenerational mobility in an overlapping-generations framework with skilled and unskilled individuals. Assuming unskilled parents are less productive in educating children, we show that they choose higher fertility but less investment for child education than skilled parents. Public education reduces the fertility gap but may increase intergenerational mobility under certain conditions. We also find very different responses of fertility differential and intergenerational mobility to a variation in a preference or technology parameter. As the ratio of skilled to working population rises towards its steady state, average income rises, average fertility falls, but income inequality first rises and then falls.     

流动人口社会保障问题的公共政策思考

随着社会经济改革开放的深入发展,以农民工为主体的流动人口数量还将持续增加,作为一个特殊的人口群体将长期存在。流动人口突破了城乡二元结构的樊篱,为就业增加了竞争力,为城市增加了活力,为现代化增添了动力,也有力地推动了政府职能转变和管理服务方式转变。然而,绝大部分流动的劳动力没有养老、工伤、医疗、失业等基本的社会保障。流动人口在我国经济发展中扮演了重要角色,但现有的社会保障机制并没有完全覆盖每年近2亿的流动人口。由于一些流动人口缺乏基本的就业、医疗、保险等社会保障,因此可能会引发一些治安问题和不安定因素。所以,建立有效的流动人口保障机制,是"以人为本"精神和社会公正的最好体现,也是实现社会安定团结局面的一个治本之策。本文简要分析了当前我国流动人口社会保障的现状以及建立流动人口社会保障的必要性和紧迫性,并从公共政策的角度提出了若干建议。     

Reassessing the decline in parent-child old-age coresidence during the twentieth century

The share of the elderly living with an adult child decreased monotonically throughout the twentieth century, while the probability of reaching old age and the number of years lived in old age increased. As a result, the expected number of life-years lived with adult children while in old age may have increased, decreased, or stayed the same. I estimate that the number of life-years lived in old-age coresidence with adult children stayed roughly constant between 1900 and 1940, while the rate of coresidence declined. Life years lived in old-age coresidence then declined substantially between 1940 and 1990. Moreover, the number of life-years lived in old-age coresidence in 1990 would have been roughly half as great as it actually was had there been no improvements in mortality between 1900 and 1990. And if fertility had remained at its 1900 levels, life-years lived in old-age coresidence would have been about 45% higher in 1990 than it actually was. The results imply that analyses of the change in familial assistance to the elderly should also consider changes in mortality.     

Trends in old-age functioning and disability in Japan, 1993-2002

Disability is a burden to individuals and society. Population ageing, combined with the fact that disability is most common among the elderly, has focused attention on trends in old-age disability. This study estimates trends in functioning and disability among Japanese elderly from 1993 to 2002 and contrasts the patterns with those found in the USA. Japan is an especially interesting country because its age structure is relatively old, and it currently has the highest life expectancy in the world despite the fact that just 50 years ago its life expectancy was in the bottom half of all countries. As in the USA, disability rates have fallen. If it were not for the gains in disability between 1993 and 2002, there would have been 1.1 million more disabled elderly in 2002. The reductions were experienced broadly across socio-demographic and economic groups. Increases in education across cohorts are associated with the declines in disability.     

Resolving inconsistencies in trends in old-age disability: Report from a technical working group

In September 2002, a technical working group met to resolve previously published inconsistencies across national surveys in trends in activity limitations among the older population. The 12-person panel prepared estimates from five national data sets and investigated methodological sources of the inconsistencies among the population aged 70 and older from the early 1980s to 2001. Although the evidence was mixed for the 1980s and it is difficult to pinpoint when in the 1990s the decline began, during the mid- and late 1990s, the panel found consistent declines on the order of 1%-2.5% per year for two commonly used measures in the disability literature: difficulty with daily activities and help with daily activities. Mixed evidence was found for a third measure: the use of help or equipment with daily activities. The panel also found agreement across surveys that the proportion of older persons who receive help with bathing has declined at the same time as the proportion who use only equipment (but not personal care) to bathe has increased. In comparing findings across surveys, the panel found that the period, definition of disability, treatment of the institutionalized population, and age standardizing of results were important to consider. The implications of the findings for policy, national survey efforts, and further research are discussed.     

The centenarian question and old-age mortality in the Soviet Union, 1959–1970

Are claims of extraordinarily low mortality levels in the USSR justifiable? Applying a recently developed methodology appropriate for nonstable populations to 1959 and 1970 census data from the Soviet Union, we find that mortality is generally understated for the country as a whole and for various regions and republics. This is particularly so for the republics composing the Central Asian region and the Caucasus. Age overstatement appears to be extremely pronounced in the oldest segments of the population. Using the new methodology, we can derive the age distribution that is uniquely implied by a given life table and a set of age-specific rates of growth obtained from two censuses. When we use the official Soviet life tables in this procedure, we find that the reported number of centenarians is at least 28.9 percent overstated for males and 7.5 percent for females. If one were to posit that Soviet mortality during 1959 to 1970 was, in fact, no better than the Swedish mortality experience during roughly the same time period, then the true number of centenarians could be no more than 2 percent of that reported.     

The choice among past trends as a basis for the prediction of future trends in old-age mortality

We explored the extent to which projections of future old-age mortality trends differ when different projection bases are used. For seven European countries, four alternative sets of annual rates of mortality change were estimated with age–period log-linear regression models, and subsequently applied to age-specific all-cause mortality rates (80+) in 1999 to predict mortality levels up to 2050. On average, up to 2050, e80 is predicted to increase further by 2.33 years among men and 4.03 years among women. Choosing a historical period of 25 instead of 50 years results in higher predicted gains in e80 for men but lower gains for women. Choosing non-smoking-related mortality instead of all-cause mortality leads to higher gains for women and mixed results for men. In all alternatives there is a strong divergence of predicted mortality levels between the countries. Future projections should be preceded by a thorough study of past trends and their determinants.