The trend towards activation has been one of the major issues in recent welfare and labour market reforms in Europe and the US. Despite considerable initial variation across national models with respect to the scope and intensity of activation, redefining the link between social protection and...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an "optimal" tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

How has globalization affected the relative taxation of labor and capital, and why? To address this question we build and analyze a new database of effective macroeconomic tax rates covering 150 countries since 1965, constructed by combining national accounts data with government revenue...

This paper addresses issues related to higher education in selected EU Member States and its contribution to the creation of wealth. Special emphasis was placed on the shape of education policy in selected countries through an analysis of the main indicators characterizing the same. The paper...

This paper analyses major pension system regulation in four European countries: Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. It is focused on the government's and social partner's efforts to provide old-age security benefits, and how these regulatory approaches have shaped the current...

Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of "temporal autonomy": the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life....