Download or read book Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World written by Axel Börsch-Supan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2025-03-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A global analysis of the effects of social security reforms on the retirement incentives and labor force trends of older workers. Employment among older men and women has increased dramatically in recent years, reversing a downward trend in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World examines how changing retirement incentives have reshaped labor force participation trends among older workers. The chapters feature country-specific analyses for Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They find that while there is significant heterogeneity across countries, the reforms of recent decades have generally reduced the implicit tax on work at older ages. These changes correlate positively with labor force participation. The studies exploit the variation in the timing and extent of reforms of retirement incentives and employ microeconometric methods to investigate whether this correlation reflects a causal relationship. Policy changes appear to have contributed to rising labor force activity, but other factors like the role of women in the labor force, improved health, and changes in private pensions likely also play important roles.

Download or read book Economic Regulation and Its Reform written by Nancy L. Rose and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation of government economic intervention in broad segments of industry throughout the world. Many industries historically subject to economic price and entry controls have been largely deregulated, including natural gas, trucking, airlines, and commercial banking. However, recent concerns about market power in restructured electricity markets, airline industry instability amid chronic financial stress, and the challenges created by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed commercial banks to participate in investment banking, have led to calls for renewed market intervention. Economic Regulation and Its Reform collects research by a group of distinguished scholars who explore these and other issues surrounding government economic intervention. Determining the consequences of such intervention requires a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of imperfect regulation. Moreover, government interventions may take a variety of forms, from relatively nonintrusive performance-based regulations to more aggressive antitrust and competition policies and barriers to entry. This volume introduces the key issues surrounding economic regulation, provides an assessment of the economic effects of regulatory reforms over the past three decades, and examines how these insights bear on some of today’s most significant concerns in regulatory policy.

Download or read book Rethinking Investment Incentives written by Ana Teresa Tavares-Lehmann and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments often use direct subsidies or tax credits to encourage investment and promote economic growth and other development objectives. Properly designed and implemented, these incentives can advance a wide range of policy objectives (increasing employment, promoting sustainability, and reducing inequality). Yet since design and implementation are complicated, incentives have been associated with rent-seeking and wasteful public spending. This collection illustrates the different types and uses of these initiatives worldwide and examines the institutional steps that extend their value. By combining economic analysis with development impacts, regulatory issues, and policy options, these essays show not only how to increase the mobility of capital so that cities, states, nations, and regions can better attract, direct, and retain investments but also how to craft policy and compromise to ensure incentives endure.

Download or read book Making Sense of Incentives written by Timothy J. Bartik and published by W.E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bartik provides a clear and concise overview of how state and local governments employ economic development incentives in order to lure companies to set up shop—and provide new jobs—in needy local labor markets. He shows that many such incentive offers are wasteful and he provides guidance, based on decades of research, on how to improve these programs.

Download or read book Democracy Public Expenditures and the Poor written by Philip Keefer and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2003 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countries vary systematically with respect to the incentives of politicians to provide broad public goods, and to reduce poverty. Even in developing countries that are democracies, politicians often have incentives to divert resources to political rents, and to private transfers that benefit a few citizens at the expense of many. These distortions can be traced to imperfections in political markets, that are greater in some countries than in others. The authors review the theory, and evidence on the impact of incomplete information of voters, the lack of credibility of political promises, and social polarization on political incentives. They argue that the effects of these imperfections are large, but that their implications are insufficiently integrated into the design of policy reforms aimed at improving the provision of public goods, and reducing poverty.

Download or read book Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reforms written by Jun Rentschler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countries around the world are spending up to $500 billion per year on subsidising fossil fuel consumption. By some estimates, the G20 countries alone are spending around another $450 billion on subsidising fossil fuel production. In addition, the indirect social welfare costs of these subsidies have been shown to be substantial – for instance due to air pollution, road congestion, climate change, and economic inefficiency, to name a few. Considering these numbers, there is no doubt that fossil fuel subsidies cause severe economic distortions that compromise countries’ prospects of achieving equitable and sustainable development. This book provides a guide to the complex challenge of designing, assessing, and implementing effective fossil fuel subsidy reforms. It shows that subsidy reform requires a careful balancing of complex economic and political trade-offs, as well as measures to mitigate adverse effects on vulnerable households and to assist firms with implementing efficiency enhancing measures. Going beyond the purely fiscal perspective, this book emphasises that smart subsidy reforms can contribute to all three dimensions of sustainable development – environment, society, and economy. Over the course of eight chapters, this book considers a wide range of agents and stakeholders, markets, and policy measures in order to distil the key principles of designing effective fossil fuel subsidy reforms. This book will be of great relevance to scholars and policy makers with an interest in energy economics and policy, climate change policy, and sustainable development more broadly.

Download or read book Externalities Incentives and Economic Reforms written by International Monetary Fund and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The paper emphasizes the role of institutions and incentives in the presence of externalities. An economy with multiple public decision makers is likely to experience “overspending,” “undertaxing,” “overborrowing,” and “overinflation” unless effective institutions exist for overcoming coordination failure. External financing may weaken incentives for adjustment over the longer run unless assistance is made conditional on fundamental institutional reforms. The paper also analyzes reforms that strengthen incentives to provide effort. Uncertainty regarding future taxes reduces present effort and the responsiveness of output to market signals. In addition, the paper addresses the adverse effects of bank insurance and soft budget constraints.

Download or read book Corporate Income Taxes under Pressure written by Ruud A. de Mooij and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2021-02-26 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book describes the difficulties of the current international corporate income tax system. It starts by describing its origins and how changes, such as the development of multinational enterprises and digitalization have created fundamental problems, not foreseen at its inception. These include tax competition—as governments try to attract tax bases through low tax rates or incentives, and profit shifting, as companies avoid tax by reporting profits in jurisdictions with lower tax rates. The book then discusses solutions, including both evolutionary changes to the current system and fundamental reform options. It covers both reform efforts already under way, for example under the Inclusive Framework at the OECD, and potential radical reform ideas developed by academics.

Download or read book Reining in the Competition for Capital written by Ann R. Markusen and published by W.E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 2007 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book How Reform Worked in China written by Yingyi Qian and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-11-24 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A noted Chinese economist examines the mechanisms behind China's economic reforms, arguing that universal principles and specific implementations are equally important. As China has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, economists have tried to understand and interpret the success of Chinese reform. As the Chinese economist Yingyi Qian explains, there are two schools of thought on Chinese reform: the “School of Universal Principles,” which ascribes China's successful reform to the workings of the free market, and the “School of Chinese Characteristics,” which holds that China's reform is successful precisely because it did not follow the economics of the market but instead relied on the government. In this book, Qian offers a third perspective, taking certain elements from each school of thought but emphasizing not why reform worked but how it did. Economics is a science, but economic reform is applied science and engineering. To a practitioner, it is more useful to find a feasible reform path than the theoretically best way. The key to understanding how reform has worked in China, Qian argues, is to consider the way reform designs respond to initial historical conditions and contemporary constraints. Qian examines the role of “transitional institutions”—not “best practice institutions” but “incentive-compatible institutions”—in Chinese reform; the dual-track approach to market liberalization; the ownership of firms, viewed both theoretically and empirically; government decentralization, offering and testing hypotheses about its link to local economic development; and the specific historical conditions of China's regional-based central planning.

Download or read book Making Schools Work written by Eric A. Hanushek and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Educational reform is a big business in the United States. Parents, educators, and policymakers generally agree that something must be done to improve schools, but the consensus ends there. The myriad of reform documents and policy discussions that have appeared over the past decade have not helped to pinpoint exactly what should be done. The case for investment in education is an economic one: schooling improves the productivity and earnings of individuals and promotes stronger economic growth and better functioning of society. Recent trends in schooling have, however, lessened the value of society's investments as costs have risen dramatically while student performance has stayed flat or even fallen. The task is to improve performance while controlling costs. This book is the culmination of extensive discussions among a panel of economists led by Eric Hanushek. They conclude that economic considerations have been entirely absent from the development of educational policies and that economic reality is sorely needed in discussions of new policies. The book outlines an improvement plan that emphasizes changing incentives in schools and gathering information about effective approaches. Available research and analysis demonstrates that current central decisionmaking has worked poorly. Concentrating on inputs such as pupil-teacher ratios or teacher graduate degrees appears quite inferior to systems that directly reward performance. Nonetheless, since experience with such alternatives is very limited, a program of extensive evaluation appears to be in order. Attempts to institute radical change on the basis of currently available information involve substantial risks of failure. Many people today find proposals such as charter schools, expanded use of merit pay, or educational vouchers to be appealing. Yet there is little evidence of their effectiveness, and widespread adoption of these proposals is sure to run into substantial problems of im

Download or read book Reforming Infrastructure written by Ioannis Nicolaos Kessides and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.

Download or read book Understanding the tax reform debate background criteria questions written by and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Shopping Mall High School written by Arthur G. Powell and published by Boston : Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 1985 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second report from "A Study of High Schools," based on interviews with teachers, students and parents.

Download or read book The OECD Report on Regulatory Reform written by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 1997 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Report on the significance, direction, and means of reform in regulatory regimes in member countries. Contents: 1. Why reform regulations? 2. Effects of regulatory reform 3. Supporting public policy goals 4. Strategies for successful reform.

Download or read book IMF Staff Papers Volume 50 No 2 written by Mr.Robert P. Flood and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2003-07-11 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines sources of economic growth in East Asia. The conventional growth-accounting approach to estimating the sources of economic growth requires unrealistically strong assumptions about either competitiveness of factor markets or the form of the underlying aggregate production function. The paper outlines a new approach utilizing nonparametric derivative estimation techniques that does not require imposing these restrictive assumptions. The results for East Asian countries show that output elasticities of capital and labor tend to be different from the income shares of these factors. The paper also explores the compensating potential of private intergenerational transfers.

Download or read book Reforms Opportunities and Challenges for State Owned Enterprises written by Edimon Ginting and published by Asian Development Bank. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: State-owned enterprises (SOEs) play significant roles in developing economies in Asia and SOE performance remains crucial for economy-wide productivity and growth. This book looks at SOEs in Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, and Viet Nam, which together present a panoramic view of SOEs in the region. It also presents insights from the Republic of Korea on the evolving role of the public sector in various stages of development. It explores corporate governance challenges and how governments could reform SOEs to make them efficient drivers of the long-term productivity-induced growth essential to Asia's transition to high-income status.