The paper provides a selective survey of methods and findings concerning the impact of tax and welfare policies on employment, unemployment, and economic growth in OECD countries. The paper examines a number of facets of tax and welfare policy and concludes that cross-country macroeconomic...

argue that the offsetting effect of social security contributions on household retirement saving depends on how closely the social security programme imitates a private retirement saving plan (i.e. the ‘actuarial’ component of the social security programme) the closer the design of the...

Demographic crisis and imprudent commitments have induced a crisis in publicpension programmes in OECD countries. Will present and prospective cutbacks leadto greater private saving, either in the form of private pension provision or in otherforms of saving? The paper surveys existing evidence,...

Several policy issues arise in this context. If households are unable or unwilling to move inold age, their consumption behaviour may be constrained by asset illiquidity...

Public pension programmes in many OECD countries are in difficulties. With anageing population, and declining participation of working age men in paid work,existing pension arrangements are far too costly in many countries, both now and inthe future. This paper examines the evidence as to...

The paper examines the trend in public sector – private sector wagedifferentials in the 1980s and 1990s, using a variety of econometricmethods...br>

"Right to Buy" (RTB) was a large-scale UK housing policy whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy their properties at heavily subsidised prices. The policy increased the national homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between 1980 and the late 1990s. A key feature of RTB is...

The object of this paper is to examine the impact of type of pension scheme on retirement behaviour. The well-documented decline in the labour-force participation of older women and older men (in particular) is common to most industrialised countries. The proportion of men aged 55 to 64 in...

This report surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and the elderly in OECD countries. It updates a previous Department of Social Security report — Whiteford and Kennedy, 1995, based on data from the mid- to late-1980s — including information up to...