Download or read book Redistribution Through Public Employment written by Mr.Alberto Alesina and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1999-12-01 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines the regional distribution of public employment in Italy and documents two sets of facts. The first is the use of public employment as a subsidy from the North to the less wealthy South. We calculate that about half of the wage bill in the South of Italy can be identified as a subsidy, with both the size of public employment and wage levels used as a redistributive device. The second set of facts concerns the negative effects of subsidized public employment on individuals’ attitudes toward job search, education, and “risk-taking” activities. We conclude that heavy reliance on public employment distorts incentives and discourages the development of market activities in the South.
Download or read book Redistribution Through Public Employment written by Alberto Alesina and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1999-12 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public employment is often used for reasons which have little to do with providing efficiently public goods and services. Many governments use public employment for other purposes, including redistribution across income groups or regions, as a way of reducing unemployment, or for patronage. While these practices are widespread, Italy is a particularly good example of a country where public employment has been used to achieve a multitude of goals. In particular, the distribution of public jobs has been one of the main channels through which public resources have been directed from the richer North toward the less wealthy South. For this reason Italy is an especially interesting case.
Download or read book State Distribution of Public Employment in written by and published by . This book was released on 1948 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Public Versus Private Production Decisions written by Jukka Pirttila and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We analyze the decision rules governing public employment policy, capital allocation between private and public sector, and the size of the public sector in a two-type and two-sector optimal nonlinear income-tax model with endogenous wages. The government can reduce wage inequality in the private sector by employing more unskilled workers and fewer skilled workers than is necessary to minimize cost at the prevailing gross wage rate and, if skilled labor and capital are complementary, by favoring public-sector capital accumulation. Therefore, production efficiency holds neither in public employment decision nor in capital allocation. The effects of public employment and investment on income inequality increase when the size of the public sector increases. The optimal size of the public sector is also shown to be relatively large when public employment and investments reduce wage inequality. These results help explain the growth in the public-sector size and why a larger government does not necessarily hamper growth.
Download or read book The Redistribution Recession written by Casey B. Mulligan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Redistribution, or subsidies and regulations intended to help the poor, unemployed, and financially distressed, have changed in many ways since the onset of the recent financial crisis. The unemployed, for instance, can collect benefits longer and can receive bonuses, health subsidies, and tax deductions, and millions more people have became eligible for food stamps. Economist Casey B. Mulligan argues that while many of these changes were intended to help people endure economic events and boost the economy, they had the unintended consequence of deepening-if not causing-the recession. By dulling incentives for people to maintain their own living standards, redistribution created employment losses according to age, skill, and family composition. Mulligan explains how elevated tax rates and binding minimum-wage laws reduced labor usage, consumption, and investment, and how they increased labor productivity. He points to entire industries that slashed payrolls while experiencing little or no decline in production or revenue, documenting the disconnect between employment and production that occurred during the recession. The book provides an authoritative, comprehensive economic analysis of the marginal tax rates implicit in public and private sector subsidy programs, and uses quantitative measures of incentives to work and their changes over time since 2007 to illustrate production and employment patterns. It reveals the startling amount of work incentives eroded by the labyrinth of new and existing social safety net program rules, and, using prior results from labor economics and public finance, estimates that the labor market contracted two to three times more than it would have if redistribution policies had remained constant. In The Redistribution Recession, Casey B. Mulligan offers hard evidence to contradict the notion that work incentives suddenly stop mattering during a recession or when interest rates approach zero, and offers groundbreaking interpretations and precise explanations of the interplay between unemployment and financial markets.
Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 48 No 3 written by Mr.Robert P. Flood and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2002-01-18 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the financial implications of the 1956 crisis of nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egypt. It examines the regional distribution of public employment in Italy. The paper quantifies the impact of changes in the U.S. monetary policy on sovereign bond spreads in emerging market countries. Specifically, the paper explores empirically how country risk, as proxied by sovereign bond spreads, is influenced by U.S. monetary policy, country-specific fundamentals, and conditions in global capital markets. Modeling the IMF’s statistical discrepancy in the global current account is also discussed.
Download or read book Redistributive Public Employment written by Alberto Alesina and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politicians may use disguised' redistributive policies in order to circumvent opposition to explicit tax-transfer schemes. First, we present a theoretical model that formalizes this hypothesis; then we provide evidence that in US cities, politicians use public employment as such a redistributive device. We find that city employment is significantly higher in cities where income inequality and ethnic fragmentation are higher.
Download or read book Designing Fiscal Redistribution The Role of Universal and Targeted Transfers written by Mr.David Coady and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2020-06-26 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a growing debate on the relative merits of universal and targeted social assistance transfers in achieving income redistribution objectives. While the benefits of targeting are clear, i.e., a larger poverty impact for a given transfer budget or lower fiscal cost for a given poverty impact, in practice targeting also comes with various costs, including incentive, administrative, social and political costs. The appropriate balance between targeted and universal transfers will therefore depend on how countries decide to trade-off these costs and benefits as well as on the potential for redistribution through taxes. This paper discusses the trade-offs that arise in different country contexts and the potential for strengthening fiscal redistribution in advanced and developing countries, including through expanding transfer coverage and progressive tax financing.
Download or read book Occupational Change in Europe written by Daniel Oesch and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What types of jobs are growing: well-paid managerial jobs or low-paid auxiliary jobs, high-end professional jobs or bottom-end service jobs? Can occupational change transform affluent countries into enlarged middle-class societies? Or, on the contrary, are we heading towards a future of increasingly divided class societies? Do changes in the employment structure allow forthcoming generations to move towards more rewarding jobs than those held by their parents - or is downward mobility the more likely outcome? This book throws new light on these timely questions by drawing on extensive evidence of employment data on the pattern of occupational change in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland since 1990. It documents the change in the employment structure, and examines the five underlying driving forces: technology, globalization, education, migration, and institutions. The book discusses whether governments really have no other choice than either occupational upgrading with soaring unemployment or full employment with expanding low-end jobs. The book gives a clear picture of the future of work, skills, and employment in today's Europe, contributing to the debate in economic sociology and labour economics.
Download or read book Integrated Renewable Resource Management for U S Insular Areas written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Optimal Redistributive Taxation written by Matti Tuomala and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tax systems raise large amounts of revenue for funding public sector's activities, and tax/transfer policy, together with public provision of education, health care, and social services, play a crucial role in treating the symptoms and the causes of poverty. The normative analysis is crucial for tax/transfer design because it makes it possible to assess separately how changes in the redistributive criterion of the government, and changes in the size of the behavioural responses to taxes and transfers, affect the optimal tax/transfer system. Optimal tax theory provides a way of thinking rigorously about these trade-offs. Written primarily for graduate students and researchers, this volume is intended as a textbook and research monograph, connecting optimal tax theory to tax policy. It comments on some policy recommendations of the Mirrlees Review, and builds on the authors work on public economics, optimal tax theory, behavioural public economics, and income inequality. The book explains in depth the Mirrlees model and presents various extensions of it. The first set of extensions considers changing the preferences for consumption and work: behavioural-economic modifications (such as positional externalities, prospect theory, paternalism, myopic behaviour and habit formation) but also heterogeneous work preferences (besides differences in earnings ability). The second set of modifications concerns the objective of the government. The book explains the differences in optimal redistributive tax systems when governments - instead of maximising social welfare - minimise poverty or maximise social welfare based on rank order or charitable conservatism social welfare functions. The third set of extensions considers extending the Mirrlees income tax framework to allow for differential commodity taxes, capital income taxation, public goods provision, public provision of private goods, and taxation commodities that generate externalities. The fourth set of extensions considers incorporating a number of important real-word extensions such as tagging of tax schedules to certain groups of tax payers. In all extensions, the book illustrates the main mechanisms using advanced numerical simulations.
Download or read book Jobs and Growth written by Mr.Martin Schindler and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five years after the onset of the global financial crisis, Europe’s economy is still fragile. Notwithstanding recent positive signs amid calmer financial markets, medium-term growth is likely to remain frail owing to continuing weaknesses and vulnerabilities at the country level and in the fabric of European institutions and banks, especially in the euro area. In addition, unemployment in many countries has reached very high levels. The IMF research collected in this volume provides a number of guideposts that offer an opportunity for stronger and better-balanced growth and employment in Europe after what has been a long and dismal period of crisis.
Download or read book The Political Geography of Inequality written by Pablo Beramendi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-26 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses two questions - why some political systems have more centralized systems of interpersonal redistribution than others, and why some political unions make larger efforts to equalize resources among their constituent units than others. This book presents a new theory of the origin of fiscal structures in systems with several levels of government. The argument points to two major factors to account for the variation in redistribution: the interplay between economic geography and political representation on the one hand, and the scope of interregional economic externalities on the other. To test the empirical implications derived from the argument, the book relies on in-depth studies of the choice of fiscal structures in unions as diverse as the European Union, Canada and the United States in the aftermath of the Great Depression; Germany before and after Reunification; and Spain after the transition to democracy.
Download or read book Democracy and Redistribution written by Carles Boix and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employing analytical tools borrowed from game theory, Carles Boix offers a complete theory of political transitions, in which political regimes ultimately hinge on the nature of economic assets, their distribution among individuals, and the balance of power among different social groups. Backed up by detailed historical work and extensive statistical analysis that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, this book explains, among many other things, why democracy emerged in classical Athens. It also discusses the early triumph of democracy in both nineteenth-century agrarian Norway, Switzerland and northeastern America and the failure in countries with a powerful landowning class.
Download or read book Fiscal Redistribution and Social Welfare written by Mr.David Coady and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-03-08 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiscal policy is a key tool for achieving distributional objectives in advanced economies. This paper embeds the discussion of fiscal redistribution within the standard social welfare framework, which lends itself to a transparent and practical evaluation of the extent and determinants of fiscal redistribution. Differences in fiscal redistribution are decomposed into differences in the magnitude of transfers (fiscal effort) and in the progressivity of transfers (fiscal progressivity). Fiscal progressivity is further decomposed into differences in the distribution of transfers across income groups (targeting performance) and in the social welfare returns to targeting due to varying initial levels of income inequality (targeting returns). This decomposition provides a clear distinction between the concepts of progressivity and targeting, and clarifies the relationship between them. For illustrative purposes, the framework is applied to data for 28 EU countries to determine the factors explaining differences in their fiscal redistribution and to discuss patterns in fiscal redistribution highlighted in the literature.
Download or read book Group Interests Individual Attitudes written by Michael J Donnelly and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What drives support for or opposition to redistributive taxation and spending? Why is ethnic diversity associated with inequality and a lack of redistribution? This book argues that many individuals, recognizing that they live in a world of uncertainty, use the groups of which they are a member as a heuristic to understand how welfare states are likely to impact them. This leads to reduced support for redistribution among the wealthy, whose disproportionate influence over policy in turn leads to less redistribution. Group Interests, Individual Attitudes develops the argument with a series of empirical implications, which are then tested using data from a variety of sources. It examines regional and ethnic politics in the United Kingdom, Germany, Slovakia, Canada, and Italy, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence, existing and new surveys, and observational and experimental methods. The evidence is largely consistent with a heuristic theory, allowing us to see group politics in a new light.
Download or read book Local Redistribution and Local Democracy written by Clayton P. Gillette and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The traditional theory of urban finance argues against local redistribution of wealth on the assumption that such action is likely to chase away the relatively wealthy, leaving only the impoverished behind. Nevertheless, Clayton P. Gillette observes, local governments engage in substantial redistribution, both to the wealthy and to the poor. In this thoughtful book, Gillette examines whether recent campaigns to enact "living wage" ordinances and other local redistributive programs represent gaps in the traditional theory or political opportunism. He then investigates the role of the courts in distinguishing between these explanations. The author argues that courts have greater capacity to review local programs than is typically assumed. He concludes that when a single interest group dominates the political process, judicial intervention to determine a program's legal validity may be appropriate. But if the political contest involves competing groups, courts should defer to local political judgments.
