Am 19. Dezember stellte das ifo Institut im Rahmen seines vorweihnachtlichen Pressegesprächs seine Prognose für das Jahr 2003 vor. Die Expansion der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Produktion dürfte im ersten Quartal 2003 nahezu zum Stillstand kommen. Erst im weiteren Jahresverlauf ist nach und nach...

The welfare state can be seen as an insurance device that makes lifetime careers safer, increases risk taking and suffers from moral hazard effects. Adopting this view, the paper studies the trade-off between average income and inequality, evaluating redistributive equilibria from an allocative...

Globalisation means gains from trade, but not for everyone. As gains from trade come along with factor price convergence, substantial fractions of the working classes in the high-wage countries of the West are likely to belong to the group of losers. In this situation it is tempting for the...

This paper argues that increased factor mobility incurs the risk of dismantling the welfare state, even though this state may have useful allocative functions. It will be difficult to finance the welfare state with taxes on capital and it may be necessary to subsidize this factor in the sense...

This paper discusses how an industrialized country could defend the wages and social benefits of its unskilled workers against wage competition from immigrants. It shows that fixing social standards harms the workers and that fixing social replacement incomes implies migration into unemployment....

The analogy between the economic problems of the Mezzogiorno region and East Germany has been initially contested by many authors. This paper argues that there are striking similarities in the two regions, in terms of the causes of their economic predicament. With an aggregate labour...

How will the contribution rates to the German social security system develop over the next 40 years? While some observers predict only a minor increase from 21 percent today to 24 percent in 2040, others foresee a dramatic increase - to levels even above 30 percent. Using the the reports of the...