Kuznets suggested that economic progress, in the early stages of the industrialization, is accompanied by increasing inequality, but that these disparities tend to disappear as the industrialization process deepens and the benefits of development are more widely distributed. This conjecture is inconsistent with observed patterns of inequality in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper examines the dyna...

Declining population as well as population aging has substantial impacts on the economy and on the society. By contrast, the size of the population usually does not matter for economic development, if it is stable; Switzerland and Sweden, for example, are rich countries with fewer than 10 million people. However, the process of declining does matter, particularly when it is accompanied by a sig...

The literature on electronic government (e-government) often assumes that there exists one suitable model that can be adopted in all contexts. This chapter emphasizes the constitutive role of political and institutional context in the design, implementation, and impacts of e-government initiatives, the understanding of which require a geographically-specific analysis. It begins with a summary o...

Tony Atkinson has produced a first-rate paper carefully documenting recent trends in the distribution of income and earnings in advanced industrial nations. He demonstrates the important point that there is considerable heterogeneity among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations in both the level of economic inequality and in changes in the dispersion of income and ...

This paper investigates the relationship between fluctuations in economic growth, unemployment, and voting along a left–right axis. I estimate a model that explains how political fluctuations are caused by economic fluctuations in the OECD countries. I find that higher economic growth causes a shift to the left of policy sentiments. I hold the provision of social insurance by the welfare state ...

Objective. To examine the relationship between firm-level cooperation, inequality, and redistribution in 18 advanced industrialized democracies. Methods. The relationships are investigated using multiple regression analyses of institutional, political, and economic variables. Results. Multilevel models reveal that contrary to neocorporatism, firm-level cooperative ties have significant inegalit...

• Empowerment of the poor is one ingredient in effective poverty reduction. • A demand-driven participatory approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency. • Accountability is the central lever for participatory governance. • Capacity building is necessary for making participatory governance a reality. In its research activities, the Development Centre aims to identify and analyse problems whos...

The United States has a mortality disadvantage relative to its political and economic peer group of other rich democracies. Recently it has been suggested that there could be a role for social policy in explaining this disadvantage. In this paper, we test this "social policy hypothesis" by presenting a time-series cross-section analysis from 1970 to 2010 of the association between welfare state...

This article tests the subset of public choice models for social security that have empirical implications. The data, collected from OECD countries for the years 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990, provide some support for each of the theories. Higher median voter age, more income heterogeneity, greater similarity in family size, and variables that make a public pension program more profitable are all ...

The aim of this research is to identify the transformative role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in transition economies (TEs). We investigated how ICT spending influences the socioeconomic and sociopolitical changes in TEs belonging to two regional groups (Central and Eastern European and Latin American) from 2004 to 2010. Moreover, we compare the effects of ICT in TEs to th...