The twin predicaments of German labour market performance and welfare state performance triggered an ongoing debate on reforming the German model. Recently, this debate has yielded an outcome in the form of the so-called Hartz laws, a bundle of labour market policies aimed at the reduction of...

The rise and fall of policies regulating early exit from labour markets remains enigmatic for comparative politics. Most explanations focus on structural or institutional causes. A missing source of national variation, this discussion paper argues, lies in cross-country differences in voters...

Das Konzept der Nettosozialleistungsquote (NSLQ) von W. Adema hat in jüngster Zeit einige zentrale Annahmen der vergleichenden Wohlfahrtsstaatenforschung erschüttert. Nicht nur die quantitative Dimension des Wohlfahrtsstaates in OECD-Ländern, sondern auch seine strukturelle Zusammensetzung...

Among policy-makers and academics there is a controversial discussion whether the tax mix influences labor market performance in advanced industrialized countries. Many economists argue that the total tax burden rather than the tax-mix matters for aggregate employment, whereas neither the burden...

In most industrialized countries the tax burden of poor people has increased dramatically over the last few decades. This book analyses both the political origins of this increase and its consequences for the labour market.

This paper has been prepared as a part of a broader Ezoneplus project that evaluates European Monetary Union (EMU) and its enlargement to prospective members in central and eastern Europe. The project is financially supported by European Commission (HPSE-CT-2001-00084). It contains the following...