Search results for "wealth"

Pensions, Economic Growth and Welfare in Advanced Economies

2020

In this chapter, we analyse the effects of PAYG and funded pension systems on welfare. The debate on the choice between alternative systems focuses on their effects on savings, capital accumulation, labour supply, economic growth and inequality and the potential benefits of mixed systems in which a PAYG system with notional accounts is complemented by a funded pensions system. The main findings are as follows. Firstly, the redistribution of income among individuals makes the PAYG system an important part of any mixed system. Secondly, the design of the pension system should efficiently balance incentives and distortions with equality and insurance against individual idiosyncratic risks. Thi…

Aukso vilna ir auksavilnis avinas: antikinių literatūros šaltinių liudijimai ir interpretacija

2018

The Golden Fleece figures in Greek mythology as the objective of the voyage of the Argonauts. The incompatability of the object of the search with the effort invested in its acquisition has furthered discussion of the real meaning of the Golden Fleece, which has generally been accepted to be a metaphor since antiquity. Modernity, especially at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, has been productive and inventive in the decipherment attempts of the metaphor’s hidden meaning. A number of interpretation theories has been developed, which, though interesting and wellargumented, are sometimes highly divergent from the interpretation of the Golden Fleece in the ancient sources. A proper unde…

Backing out of private pension provision - Lessons from Germany

2012

Financing pensions in the EU is a challenge. Many EU countries introduced private pension schemes to compensate declining public pension levels due to reforms made necessary by demographic change. In 2001, Germany introduced the Riester pension. Ten years after introduction the prevalence rate of this voluntary private pension scheme approximates 37 %. However, numerous criticisms raise doubts that the market for Riester products is transparent. Using the 2010 German SAVE survey, this article investigates terminated and dormant Riester contracts on a household level for the first time. Respectively 14.5 and 12.5 % of households who own or have owned a Riester contract terminated or set dorm…

The Global Side of the Investment-Saving Puzzle

2009

In this paper, we reexamine the long-standing and puzzling correlation between national saving and investment in industrial countries. We apply an econometric methodology that allows us to separate idiosyncratic correlation at the country level from correlation at the global level. In a major break with the existing literature, we find no evidence of a long-run relationship in the idiosyncratic components of saving and investment. We also find that the global components in saving and investments commove, indicating that they react to shocks of a global nature.

FISCAL POLICY, MACROECONOMIC STABILITY AND FINITE HORIZONS

2003

In this paper we analyse the stabilisation properties of distortionary taxes in a New Keynesian model with overlapping generations of finitely-lived consumers. In this framework, government debt is part of net wealth and this adds a number of interesting channels through which fiscal policy could affect output and inflation. Output volatility, in presence of technology shocks, is not substantially affected by the operation of automatic stabilisers but we find interesting composition effects. While the presence of finitely-lived households strengthens the stabilisation performance of distortionary taxes through the reduction of the volatility of consumption, it does so at the cost of more vo…

“Changing Landscapes, Transforming Histories: A Reading of Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore”, in Englishes, vol. 12, n. 34, 2008

2008

Income Equality and Income Taxation

1994

In every society the distribution of income plays an essential role — not only for economists but also for social scientists and politicians. Most people agree that the laissez-faire allo-cation is not equitable but that some redistribution using taxes has to take place. Most of the literature has supposed that a Bergson- Samuelson social welfare function is the appropriate tool for capturing social values in such analyses. However, there are some objections against this approach. First, interpersonal comparability of the individual utilities is needed — an extremely strong and questionable claim. Second, most writers have worked with a concave transformation of individual cardinal utilitie…

More planet and less profit? The ethical dilemma of an oil producing nation

2019

Every oil producing nation is confronted with a complex and fundamental ethical dilemma. On the one hand, there are moral arguments for the nation to use the petroleum resource for the benefit of society and make it available for countries who do not have this natural resource endowment. On the other hand, there are moral arguments for not extracting and using fossil fuels because of CO2 emissions. In short, this creates tension between the need for government revenues to finance welfare benefits and the objective of preserving the environment. A complicating factor is that a nation's domestic oil and gas activities are in its nature global because the activities have a direct impact on the…

Voennye dejstviȃ v Livonnii v načale XVIII v. v doneseniȃh iz Berlina anglijskogo posla Filippa Plantamura

2019

An important element in current historical research is the analysis of diplomatic relations focusing on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. They show the history of the Polish-Lithuanian state, its internal and foreign policy from a different historical perspective. In 1700, the Great Northern War broke out and changed the political power system in Central and Eastern Europe for the next decades. Diplomats from foreign courts were interested in this war, including Philippe Plantamour, secretary of the British embassy in Berlin. He sent his reports to the British Isles in which he posted information on warfare in Livonia. The aim of the article will be to analyze diplomatic reports that can …

Early modern state formation in the margins? A review of early modern popular politics and limited royal power in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth …

2017

The traditional historiography of early modern state-building has usually followed the western European paradigm of historiography, the usual models being France, England, Brandenburg-Prussia and Sweden. Regions that do not follow this paradigm have simply been left out and labeled “backward” or as “lagging behind”. In this literary review, our focus is on two different and rather surprising cases of early modern state formation: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Spanish colonial empire in Latin America. By following the scholarship on these two large conglomerates, we focus on two scholarly concepts: the idea of early modern realms as composite/conglomerate states, and state forma…