This report collects and draws conclusions from research papers of Area 1. It summarises the results against the background of the existing literature, focusing in particular on the challenges arising on welfare states from globalisation, post-industrialisation, and demographic changes. The...

The reconciliation of family and work is one of the "new social risks" contemporary welfare states are challenged to address. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the roles of work and family in women's life trajectories, shedding light on determinants and welfare outcomes of...

Fears of job losses and of increasing inequality loom large in current debates on how globalization is affecting our economies. By fundamentally changing the organization of production and work, globalization creates complex and changing patterns of winners and losers. Globalization thus creates...

It is expected that binding biophysical constraints have the potential to slow growth and impede the improvement of other key macroeconomic variables. Using a DYNK (Dynamic New Keynesian) model of the EU27, we study two different environmental policy options and evaluate their impact on...

With reference to the use of material and energy resources, we seek to • underline the need for a marked socio-ecological transition. Business-as-usual will fail in the face of an unprecendented rise in global demand, a rising price level and volatility of raw materials and indications of...

Long-term beneficial welfare state reforms not only face opposition from powerful insiders and beneficiaries of the system in place. While potential losers from a policy change are often relatively easy to spot, ewll-designed reforms generate mostly diffuse gains, and the potential winners are...

In this contribution we describe how green policies should be designed to activate private innovation forces for ecological transitions. We look at the evidence on the current deployment of green policies and the current performance of the private green innovation machine. We try to assess how...

In this paper we compare several types of economic dependency ratios for a selection of European countries. These dependency ratios take not only into account the demographic structure of the population, but also the differences in age-specific economic behaviour such as labour market activity,...

We explain economic growth by both politics, i.e. government activity including spending as well as regulation, and institutional quality and its interaction with politics. This extends previous work on institution building in transition by looking at its impact and, at the same time,...

This paper investigates the economic, labor market and institutional factors that make regions and countries attractive for highly skilled migrants vis-`a-vis lowskill migrants. Based on micro-data for 11 EU countries, a discrete choice model estimated at the NUTS-2 level shows that location...