Increasing longevity and declining fertility rates are shifting the age distribution of populations in industrialized countries toward older age groups. Some countries will experience this demographic shift before others will. In this DataWatch we compare the effects of population aging on health spending, retirement policies, use of long-term care services, workforce composition, and income ac...

This paper is about recent developments in the distribution of income in industrialized, and particularly, the G-7 countries. Limiting the geographical focus in this way ignores the important changes taking place in transition economies and in the developing world, but I have chosen to focus on the countries I know best, which is why a small, offshore European island receives disproportionate a...

The costs of health administration are compared across several countries, accompanied by discussion of some of the variations in the definition of health administration. The influence of American health accounting on other countries is examined, and findings are presented regarding the relative costs of insurance-based and direct-delivery systems. Data are presented on health administrative spe...

A clear break in the post-World War I1 pattern of rapid productivity growth was a virtually universal phenomenon across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, in most of them beginning in the early 1970s. This development had implications for both the evolution of aggregate supply, as well as the growth of real income and the types of macroeconomic and structura...

This paper studies the impact of equity considerations on the stability of international agreements between heterogeneous countries. We show that allowing countries to finance abatement projects in developing countries which, due to equity-reasons, have no binding emission targets can reduce the number of cooperating countries and thereby be welfare-decreasing. Equity-concerns in industrialized...

Despite the attraction of certain utopias and the convincing strength of some of the social and philosophical theories underlying attempts to change the social structure and to achieve a more egalitarian society, social inequalities have not disappeared and seem even to be increasing worldwide. Inequalities in health are part of the social inequalities present in our society and one of their mo...