Communicating the need for additional savings in the face of retiree health benefit cutbacks.

In preparing for retirement, employees need to consider not only their pension benefits but also the challenge of financing their retirement health care needs. Various trends evolving in our society indicate that future retirees will be increasingly dependent on their own retirement savings. Evidence suggests that employees are not fully aware of the significance of health costs in retirement and must be educated to the need to save for retiree health care expenses. This article discusses the issues of Medicare reduction and retiree health benefit cutbacks and the relative communication and education challenges such issues pose to employers.     

PROVIDING INCOME SECURITY TO THE ELDERLY: THE ROLE OF PROGRAMS OTHER THAN SOCIAL SECURITY

Social Security retirement benefits have had a dramatic effect on the elderly's economic well-being over the last four decades. Many other facets of federal law have also enhanced the elderly's income security and should not be overlooked, however. Today, the elderly receive income from an amalgam of publicly and privately organized programs and individual provisions. The primary goal of these programs is to provide adequate income to the elderly. While all the major components of this loosely configured system, as we know it now, have evolved in the last 45 years, they have not developed at the same rate. It is important to understand this point because the relative role of the various income sources for future groups of the elderly will be somewhat different than for current ones     

Recent trends in health care expenditure and utilization in OECD countries

Conclusions High unemployment and low economic growth continue to plague many OECD countries, putting strong pressures on governments to reduce social spending. Health is the second largest social expenditure program and has been one of the fastest growing. Health care financing and delivery systems which were designed to achieve access have not proven themselves effective in ensuring efficient production and consumption of services.The inability to measure the effects of health expenditures on health outcomes, the lack of clinical standards of appropriateness of treatment, and indeed the sensitivity of health status to non-medical systems' aspects of society further confound the problems of developing policies to promote efficiency and equity. Moreover, future demographic and technological changes could place substantial new budgetary pressures on governments.Understanding the nature of the problem, effective measures taken, and the transferability of such measures to particular situations or systems are essential for preserving access while assuring efficiency under current as well as future economic and demographic constraints.Invited address at the Twenty-Third International Atlantic Economic Conference and the International Health Economics and Management Conference, April 20–27, 1987, Munich, West Germany. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the OECD.     

Responsibility within civil society and range of urban poverty

The decentralized, subsidiary action of the urban poor within the neighborhood articulates the responsibility of these citizens within the metropolis. This article makes use of the work of J. Habermas, R. Blank, and W.J. Wilson in order to show how such citizen action on the part of the poor can, in the face of devastation, be resistant, communal, located action. Collaborative engagement assists them in coming to their own vision and in determining their world’s material and symbolic framework. In their collaboration and through the resulting interpretive community, they achieve a responsibility which engages them in caring for the future of the common life. Upon the basis of their action from within their neighborhoods, the urban poor, as they rebuild their neighborhoods, move into civil society so that the entire metropolis may benefit.     

水域山新产品全国发布引领中国生态健康产业

6月28日，2011年沙棘生态论坛暨水域山沙棘果汁新产品新闻发布会在北京隆重举行，多名相关领导和行业专家与内蒙古水域山饮品有限责任公司董事长刘志峰、水域山沙棘果汁产品代言人张涵予等出席论坛，一起深入探讨了中国沙棘生态产业的发展现状以及未来趋势，并共同见证了水域山沙棘果汁新产品的全国正式发布，为国内果汁饮料市场以及生态健...     

Legislative organization and congressional review of agency regulations

Although researchers have demonstrated that legislators possessa variety of instruments with which to limit bureaucratic discretion,it is not clear to what extent these instruments are used bylegislators whose preferences are representative of chambermajorities. This article examines the role that committee membership,preferences, and other factors play in legislators' use of congressionalreview, a new instrument through which agency regulations canbe nullified by joint resolutions of disapproval. It uses logisticregression to demonstrate that in the 105th House of Representatives,legislators were more likely to seek to disapprove agency regulationsthe greater the divergence of their preferences from the medianmember of the committee of jurisdiction. Committee membership,however, did not affect the use of congressional review. Theseresults, which diverge from previous research in several respects,underscore that it is not yet possible to draw definitive conclusionsabout the connection between the organization of Congress andlegislative-executive relations that hold across policy areasand instruments of political control.     

Globalization and labour-market adjustment: how fast and at what cost?

In this paper we argue that the flexibility of an economy'slabour market plays a role in determining the gains from tradeliberalization, the level of short-run adjustment costs, andthe relative value of these two measures. To do so, we describethe model introduced in Davidson and Matusz (2000) which allowsus to solve for adjustment costs when workers vary accordingto ability and jobs differ in terms of the skills that theyrequire. We then report results based on simulations of thismodel. We find that economies with sluggish labour markets havethe least to gain from liberalization. The reason is that whilethe removal of trade barriers creates large benefits, they arealmost completely offset by large short-run adjustment costs.In contrast, we find that with either very flexible or veryslothful labour market gains from liberalization are alwayssignificantly larger than the short-run adjustment costs.     

Retirement income adequacy: good news or bad?

Estimating replacement rate targets, and using them to assess the current state of retirement savings adequacy, has been the focus of much attention and analysis. Building on his earlier work published in Benefits Quarterly, the author conceptually defines retirement income adequacy, estimates replacement rate targets and reviews research on the current state of baby boomers' retirement savings. He concludes that, despite existing data limitations, researchers have made considerable strides in recent years in thinking about saving for retirement and the adequacy of workers' preparation for it. These advances suggest that singular rules of thumb for replacement rates are naive and that estimates should take into account the unforeseen risks that individuals face.     

Survivorship bias in performance studies

Recent evidence suggests that past mutual fund performance predictsfuture performance. We analyze the relationship between volatilityand returns in a sample that is truncated by survivorship andshow that this relationship gives rise to the appearance ofpredictability. We present some numerical examples to show thatthis effect can be strong enough to account for the strengthof the evidence favoring return predictability.