Pensions Nightmare after 1999

Economists have long argued that the current state method of financing old-age pensions is a time-bomb that may blow up in the lap of future generations. Professor Norman Barry (right), of the University of Buckingham, welcomes the proposals in the Green Paper on welfare but argues that government must act much more rapidly to avoid burdening future Britons with the enormous dimensions of the pensions of the debt the American Government is building up fonts coming citizens.     

Resolving employment rights disputes – options for reform Commentary on the Green Paper

This commentary explores some of the main issues raised in the recent Green Paper ‘Resolving Employment Rights Disputes–Option for Reform’. The Green Paper is the first comprehensive review of the industrial tribunals since their inception in 1964, and an assessment is made of various options for reform outlined in the Paper.     

Regulating Audit beyond the Crisis: A Critical Discussion of the EU Green Paper

With the European Commission making global leadership claims in the field of audit regulation, the content of its 2010 Green Paper on ‘Audit Policy: Lessons from the Crisis’ warrants careful scrutiny. Important issues raised in the Green Paper include regulatory oversight, competition in the audit market, the dangers of having very few firms with the capacity to audit global transnational corporations, professional judgement, innovative audit practices and, last but not least, social responsibility. This article analyses the principal perspectives and assumptions underpinning the construction of the Green Paper. The aims are threefold: to enhance understanding of the contemporary regulatory mindset of the European Commission, contribute to policy debate and inspire future research.     

Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles

The October 1993 Green paper's four regulatory options are analysed: Professor Beesley concludes that they lack clarity and puts forward his own proposals to simplify and unify the system in London and the rest of the country.     

No Case for Home-Taping Levy

Successive Governments have been unremittingly lobbied by the recording industry to impose a levy on blank cassette tapes to compensate it for the'negative externality' of home taping. Thomas Coskeran argues that the Government should rescind the Green Paper and seek a solution in the re-allocation of property rights.     

Reforming the NHS

How should the National Health Service be reformed? David Green, director of the IEA Health Unit, analyses the Government's proposals.     

The legal professions and trade unionism: the ‘Dicey’ dilemma

Are the legal professions simply glorified trade unions? In 1867 Dicey's consideration of the question proved inconclusive. Recent evidence, culminating in the trade union like defence of their practices by the professions following the Government's 1989 Green Paper, seems to have resolved his dilemma.     

Poverty trap,boom and bust periods and growth. A nonlinear model for non-developed and developing countries

This work investigates the qualitative and quantitative dynamics of a Solow–Swan growth model with differential savings as proposed by Böhm and Kaas (J Econ Dyn Control 24:965–980, 2000) assuming the shifted Cobb–Douglas (SCD) production function (see Capasso et al. in Nonlinear Anal. 11:3858–3876, 2010) which makes it possible to consider the long-run dynamics of non-developed and developing countries as well as that of developed economies. The resulting model is described by a nonlinear discontinuous map generating both a poverty trap and complex dynamics. Furthermore, multistability phenomena may emerge: besides the “vicious circle of poverty”, long-run behaviours may include boom and bust periods. Complex basins can emerge, hence, economic policies trying to raise the capital per capita may fail and economies may be captured by the poverty trap.     

Financial liberalization: Poverty trap or chaos

We construct an overlapping generations model in which people are subject to limited pledgeability and uncertainty over entrepreneurial projects. We show that whether financial liberalization generates a poverty trap, an endogenous fluctuation, or both depends on the interaction of pledgeability and uncertainty. Endogenous fluctuation requires a high level of both pledgeability and uncertainty. Poverty trap requires a low level of both. For an intermediate level of both, the initially poor are trapped in poverty while the initially rich fluctuate endogenously.     

Road pricing and the 'new deal for transport'

There are several good reasons why motorists should be charged for using roads, and it is important to understand these and to distinguish between them.
Alternatives, however attractive, fail to stand up to close scrutiny. The change of government attitude showed in the recent White Paper is to be welcomed, but of the three specific proposals, two are questionable. Road pricing should not be used as a major welfare tool.     

从农转非小区看城市化进程中的社会问题--重庆高新区农转非小区调查

作者通过对重庆高新区农转非小区的调查,得出以下结论:政策补偿标准低,补偿方式简单易使农转非小区贫困化;农转非人员集中安置弊端多.文章最后给出解决建议.     

GOOD BOOKS-AND OTHERS

Book Reveiwed in this article
PRIVATISATION AND THE WELFARE STATE Ed Julian Le Grand and Ray Robinson
A CARNIVAL OF BUNCOMBE H. L. Mencken
AN END TO ALLEGIANCE Individual Freedom and the New Politics Geoffrey Sampson
MUTUAL AID OR WELFARE STATE: Australia's Friendly Societies David Green and Lawrence Cromwell
UTOPIA ON TRIAL: VISION AND REALITY IN PLANNED HOUSING Alice Coleman
THE ECONOMICS OF ENERGY SELF-SUFFICIENCY Eileen Marshall and Colin Robinson
TRADE, INCOME LEVELS AND DEPENDENCE Michael Michaely     

A new contract for welfare: partnership in pensions

The government's Green Paper proposes reducing state pension costs whilst encouraging private sector provision. The success of the proposed ‘stakeholder pension schemes’ depends on regulation. However, regulation can penalise those it is intended to protect. This is a sensitive issue, since stakeholder pension schemes are expected to attract financially vulnerable, lower paid, employees. Whilst the flat rate accrual of the state second pension confers some benefit, certain groups are put in a difficult position by the retention of means-tested benefits.     

Sex and the state: will Supporting Families help or harm the family?

The Green Paper, Supporting Families , is a remarkable hotchpotch of conceptual confusion, logical contradiction and empirical obtuseness. Its message is that there is little to choose between the socially supported institutional family of life-long monogamy and any private arrangement for handling sexuality, procreation and child-rearing, the state claiming that it can and will deal with the problems. But Supporting Families merely echoes the 'arguments,' and reflects the prejudices, of anti-family commentators in politics, education, pressure groups and the media. The personal, social and economic problems of the dismemberment of the institutional family will not be solved until public opinion rejects this consensual muddle.     

Housing Allowances and Economic Efficiency

Housing allowances aim to make rental housing affordable for the recipients. Whether affordability for tenants is achieved in an economically efficient way is the question that is discussed in this essay. Three aspects of efficiency are focused on: disincentives to work, over‐consumption of housing and horizontal inefficiency. These topics are tackled through a discussion that focuses mainly on the principles, but also on some of the outcomes, of the means‐tested housing allowance systems in six Western countries: Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Sweden. Conclusions concern the apparent unimportance of the poverty trap or the unemployment trap specifically for rental housing, the concept of notional rent used to tackle over‐consumption, and the frequent existence of some form of horizontal inefficiency.     

Comment:The Statistical Relationship between the Money Supply and the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement

A controversy has recently broken out as to whether the PSBR influences the money supply in the UK. Clearly if this relationship does not exist much of the basis of the government's macroeconomic strategy falls away since the government is acting on the assumption that by controlling the PSBR it will be able to control money supply growth and hence inflation in the medium term. This argument has been forcibly stated in the recent Green Paper on Monetary Control (Cmnd 7858) and is enshrined in the Medium-term Financial Strategy that was announced in the March Budget.     

Non-smooth dynamics and multiple equilibria in a Cournot–Ramsey model with endogenous markups

We consider a Ramsey model with a continuum of Cournotian industries where free entry generates an endogenous markup. The model produces two different regimes, monopolistic and Cournotian monopolistic competition, resulting in non-smooth dynamics. We analyze the global dynamics of the model, demonstrating it may exhibit heteroclinic orbits connecting multiple equilibria. Small transitory changes in parameters can lead to large permanent effects and there can be a poverty trap separating a low-capital and high-markup equilibrium from a high-capital low-markup equilibrium. We apply results from the mathematics of non-smooth dynamic systems, which provide a more general framework for understanding regime switching.     

Reinventing auditing,redefining consulting and independence

This paper deals with recent developments in auditing, taking KPMG's ‘business measurement process’ as its example. From this example it is discussed how and why auditing is currently being ‘reinvented’. The ‘reinvention’ of auditing, it is argued, represents a fundamental break with the established epistemological dualism between auditing and management advisory services,¹ that is central to most literature on auditor independence, including the European Commission's Green Paper. Consequently, it is not only auditing that is being reinvented, it is also consulting and independence, and the consequences of this rupture are finally discussed. The paper concludes that the auditor cannot be independent because auditing is no longer independent.     

Pollution,mortality and time consistent abatement taxes

We study dynamically consistent policy in a neoclassical overlapping generations growth model where pollution externalities undermine health but are mitigated via tax-financed abatement. With arbitrarily constant taxation, two steady states arise: an unstable ‘poverty trap’ and a ‘neoclassical’ steady state near which the dynamics might either be monotonically convergent or oscillating. When the planner chooses a time consistent abatement path that maximizes a weighted intergenerational sum of expected utility, the optimal tax is zero at low levels of capital and then a weakly increasing function of the capital stock. The non-homogeneity of the tax function along with its feedback effect on savings induces additional steady states, stability reversals and oscillations.     

Homelessness and Inequality

Homelessness and housing insecurity in the United States are not so much a housing problem or a poverty problem as a visible sign that growing wealth inequality has left millions of people unable to earn enough to afford adequate housing. The classical economists David Ricardo and Henry George linked wealth inequality by arbitrage to unequal income and wages. The greater the inequality of wealth, the greater the inequality of income and the lower the wages at the bottom. Neoclassical economics has largely obscured this relationship. Consequently, proposals from both conservatives and liberals to address homelessness focus narrowly on housing. Ultimately, reducing wealth inequality requires national tax reform and a return to vigorous antitrust enforcement. However, cities can reduce local inequality by making property tax assessments uniform, or, better yet, by shifting to taxing land only.