In the modern welfare state a substantial part of an individual's tax bill is transferred back to the same individual taxpayer in the form of social transfers. This provides a rationale for financing part of social insurance through mandatory savings accounts. We analyze the behavioral and...

This paper deals with the so-called ‘double dividend’ of an environmental tax reform. In a model with only labor and a polluting input as factors of production, we find that society faces a trade-off between internalizing environmental externalities and raising revenues in the least...

This paper discusses recent reforms of social insurance in the Netherlands. It describes how a serious economic crisis in the beginning of the 1980s set the stage for the subsequent reform process. The most fundamental reforms were introduced in the areas of sickness insurance, which was...

This paper draws on the literature on the double dividend to explore whether an environmental tax reform yields not only a cleaner environment but also non-environmental benefits. In doing so, it investigates how environmental tax reforms impact welfare, the distribution of income, and...

This paper extends the standard generational accounting methodologyby incorporating prospective changes in the economic environment,assigning the benefits of government purchases to generations,distinguishing between public consumption and public investment,and transforming the generational...