Perhaps the single greatest achievement of social policy in the United States over the last three decades has been reducing poverty in old age. The transition from work to retirement is no longer economically perilous for the vast majority of older American workers. For most married couples, the...

This paper assesses Italy’s 2019 tax and benefit reforms, analyses hypothetical reforms and proposes a reform package that balances goals of reducing poverty, encouraging employment and fiscal sustainability. Using the OECD’s Tax-Benefit and the EUROMOD microsimulation models, it shows that...

The paper is based on an individual life-cycle model, which describes the purely economic components of human capital. The present value of human capital is determined by all future income flows, which at the same time constitute the individual as well as the total tax base of a nation....

In this paper I consider the normative arguments that justify a public social security system as a redistributive device when goverment is concerned with individual utility and poverty. Redistribution can be done using social security, income taxation or both. The main objective of this paper is...

The statutory pension insurance system is set up according to the principle of participatory equivalence. This principle seeks to hold pension claims at a specific ratio to paid contributions so that a redistribution of income does not take place. In truth, however, there is a massive...

Die gesetzliche Rentenversicherung ist nach dem Prinzip der Teilhabe-Äquivalenz aufgebaut. Dies soll bewirken, dass die Rentenansprüche in einer bestimmten Relation zu den gezahlten Beiträgen stehen, also vorrangig keine Umverteilung stattfindet. In Wahrheit gibt es jedoch eine massive...

Though the main benchmark used to assess pension reforms continues to be the expected resulting fall in future government spending, the impact of policy changes on pension adequacy is increasingly coming to the fore. As yet, there does not seem to be a broad consensus in policymaking circles and...

Since the 1990s reforms have changed substantially both the nature of state pension provision and the level of generosity. This article tries to assess the impact of these changes using estimates of pension wealth for a number of hypothetical cases. By focusing on all prospective pension...

In this lecture, I will try to start answering the question of whether the pension reforms enacted in Europe since the 1990s will prove to be sustainable. This broad question has embedded in it both theoretical and empirical sub-questions. On the theoretical side, I will need to see how best to...

Europe’s pensions landscape has changed dramatically since the 1990s. This paper tries to assess better the impact of these changes using a broad social sustainability framework. Pension wealth estimates for a variety of hypothetical cases are used to assess the ability of systems to alleviate...