India is a country with a population of 1.2 billion and around 400 million poor people remain excluded from the formal economy. India does not offer a social security number for its residents. Rather, there exist variant forms of identification documents. In 2009, the Government of Indian...

Abstract In diesem Beitrag wird eine spezifische Handlungsstrategie von erwerbsfähigen Arbeitslosen im Umgang mit den Anforderungen an Selbstverantwortliclikeit und Eigeninitiative unter Bedingungen von zunehmender Unsicherheit vorgestellt. Es handelt sich dabei um Personen, die sich...

Abstract In recent years, a handful of countries have converted the financing of their social security systems from pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) to partial or full funding. Privatization is viewed as one way to insulate social security from the political and demographic pressures that currently...

Abstract The President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security proposed three plans for reforming Social Security. All of them would create individual accounts financed by diverting funds from the Social Security Trust Fund. One of the three Commission proposals (Model 1) would not restore...

Abstract We study the design of retirement and disability policies and illustrate the often observed exit from the labor force of healthy workers through disability insurance schemes. In our model, two types of individuals, disabled and leisure-prone ones, have the same disutility for labor and...

Under reasonable projections, the unified budget deficits over the next decade will average 3.5 percent of GDP. Compared to a balanced budget, the unified budget deficits will reduce annual national income a decade hence by 1 to 2 percent (or roughly $1,500 to $3,000 per household per year, on...

In a campaign speech given in Iowa, George Akerlof argues that the Bush administration has hamstrung its good administrators and opted time and again for waving a magic wand to solve problems instead of facing reality. The problem may be most severe in the case of the deficits, where if we don't...

Social Security privatization, in any form, will only highlight the problems that individuals face when left on their own to make saving and investment decisions. The 401(k) experience is a case in point. Making everyone a money manager is not the way to improve retirement income security for an...

The funding troubles of Social Security have been greatly exaggerated in an effort to push a privatization agenda. Privatization has laudable goals—increased choice and higher returns—but few would choose to risk their secure retirement income and unfortunately higher returns cannot be...

The U.S. economy is now on a sound footing for sustained expansion. This is a remarkable state of affairs in light of the powerful contractionary forces that have been at work since early 2000 — the bursting of the high-tech bubble of the 1990s, corporate scandals, slow growth among our major...