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The increase in life expectancy is arguably the most remarkable by‐product of modern economic growth. In the last 30 years we have been gaining roughly 2.5 years of longevity every decade both in Europe and in the United States. This progress has outpaced the most optimistic scenarios and documented that demographic projections are no more reliable than economic forecasts. This book looks closely into those challenges, raising a few fundamental issues at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. Among these: is it possible to turn the challenges faced by ageing and longevity into a long‐term productive opportunity? Can advanced economies engineer a healthy ageing scenario with long‐term spillovers in terms of enhanced technological progress and acceleration of long‐term growth? What is the microeconomic relationship between ageing and productivity, and how can specific policies postpone any age‐related decay in productivity at the firm and individual levels?

This book examines the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the social and economic context of poverty and economic crisis in developing and transition countries. It challenges the assumption — implicit in AIDS policy — that differences in sexual behavior are adequate to explain differences in HIV prevalence between populations. Using an epidemiological approach, the book shows how people who are malnourished, burdened with parasites and infectious diseases, and who lack access to medical care are more vulnerable to all diseases. It explains the specific mechanisms by which undernutrition, micronutrient deficiency, malaria, soil-transmitted helminths, schistosomiasis, and other parasitic illnesses increase the risk of HIV transmission and epidemic spread of HIV/AIDS in poor populations. A theme throughout the book is that the sexual transmission of HIV diverts attention from the social and economic context of profound poverty. The distraction of sex is compounded by Western stereotypes of African sexuality, perpetuated through reliance on anecdotal evidence and the construction of a notion of fundamental dissimilarity among peoples of different world regions. The book evaluates current methods in epidemiology and health economics, which do not take account of the interactions among diseases that increase risk of transmission of HIV in poor populations. It criticizes HIV-prevention policies as narrow, shortsighted, and dead-end because they fail to address the economic and social context in which risky behaviors occur. Finally, the book offers pragmatic solutions to social, economic, and biological factors that promote disease transmission, including the spread of HIV.

Important results in the applied welfare literature are used to extend a conventional Harberger cost-benefit analysis. A conventional welfare equation is obtained for marginal policy changes in a general equilibrium economy with tax distortions. It is extended to accommodate internationally traded goods, time, income taxes, and non-tax distortions, including externalities, non-competitive behaviour, public goods, and price-quantity controls. The welfare analysis is developed in stages, and where possible is explained using diagrams, to make it more amenable to the different institutional arrangements encountered in applied work. Computable welfare expressions are solved using demand-supply elasticities. In a conventional cost-benefit analysis, lump sum transfers are used to separate the welfare effects of individual policy variables. This is important because it allows policy evaluation to be divided across specialist agencies. These transfers are carefully examined to identify the important role played by the marginal social cost of public funds (MCF) in policy evaluation when governments balance their budgets with distorting taxes. This book separates income effects for marginal policy changes in the shadow value of government revenue. As a scaling coefficient that converts efficiency effects into dollar changes in private surplus, it makes income effects irrelevant in single (aggregated) consumer economies, and conveniently isolates distributional effects in heterogeneous consumer economies. This decomposition is used to test for Pareto improvements, and to examine the separate, but related roles of the shadow value of government revenue and the MCF in applied work.

Among the nations most seriously affected by the Great Recession, Ireland has been hailed as a ‘poster child’ for austerity, particularly following the country’s exit from a severe austerity programme, agreed with the Troika of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Commission (EC), and its return to economic growth. In this multidisciplinary book, Ireland’s leading social scientists present the first systematic study of the Great Recession, austerity, and recovery in Ireland. Over seventeen chapters, the book assesses the effects of the recession and austerity programme on Ireland’s economy, business and financial systems, consumption, regulation, politics, relations with international agencies, workplaces, the labour market, migration, public service reform, inequality, the housing market, and culture. The book is critical of Ireland’s delineation as Europe’s ‘poster child’ for austerity. It sets out the great social costs entailed by the cutbacks implemented under austerity. It shows how many of the reforms agreed with the Troika were implemented partially and incompletely. It argues that Ireland’s economic recovery can largely be attributed to the importance of foreign direct investment and exports in the Irish economy and the revival of leading economies outside the Eurozone with which the country has well- and long-established trading relationships.

This book seeks to explain why and how banks ‘game the system’. More specifically, its objective is to account for why banks are so often involved in cases of misconduct and why those cases often involve the exploitation of tax systems. To do this, a case study is presented in Part I of the book. This case study concerns a highly complex transaction (often referred to as ‘cum-ex’) designed to exploit a flaw at the intersection of the tax system and the financial markets settlements system. It was entered into by a very large number of banks and other financial institutions. A number of factors make the cum-ex transaction remarkable, including the sheer scale of the financial amounts involved, the large number of banks and financial institutions involved, the comprehensive failure of the controls infrastructure in this highly regulated sector, and the fact that authorities across Europe have found it so difficult to deal with the transaction. Part II of the book draws out the wider significance of cum-ex and what it tells us about modern banks and their interactions with tax systems. The account demonstrates why the exploitation of tax systems by banks is practically inevitable due to a variety of systemic features of the financial markets and of tax systems themselves. A number of possible responses to the current position are suggested in the final chapter.

In spite of recurrent criticism and an impressive production of alternative indicators by scholars and NGOs, GDP remains the central indicator of countries’ success. This book revisits the foundations of indicators of social welfare, and critically examines the four main alternatives to GDP that have been proposed: composite indicators, subjective well-being indexes, capabilities (the underlying philosophy of the Human Development Index), and equivalent incomes. Its provocative thesis is that the problem with GDP is not that it uses a monetary metric but that it focuses on a narrow set of aspects of individual lives. It is actually possible to build an alternative, more comprehensive, monetary indicator that takes income as its first benchmark and adds or subtracts corrections that represent the benefit or cost of non-market aspects of individual lives. Such a measure can respect the values and preferences of the people and give as much weight as they do to the non-market dimensions. A further provocative idea is that, in contrast, most of the currently available alternative indicators, including subjective well-being indexes, are not as respectful of people’s values because, like GDP, they are too narrow and give specific weights to the various dimensions of life in a more uniform way, without taking account of the diversity of views on life in the population. The popular attraction that such alternative indicators derive from being non-monetary is therefore based on equivocation. Moreover, it is argued in this book that “greening” GDP and relative indicators is not the proper way to incorporate sustainability concerns. Sustainability involves predicting possible future paths, therefore different indicators than those assessing the current situation. While various indicators have been popular (adjusted net savings, ecological footprint), none of them involves the necessary forecasting effort that a proper evaluation of possible futures requires.

Despite growing consensus on the ‘right’ policies for reconstruction and peacebuilding in post-conflict societies, there is still little knowledge how the implementation of such policies impacts the durability of peace. This book aims to address this void by analysing the timing and sequencing of post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding processes. It brings together insights from thematic analyses and country experiences, presented by experts from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. The thematic chapters deal with, among others, issues of poverty reduction and social development; economic reforms and reconstruction; democratization; DDR and reconciliation. The case-study chapters cover ongoing and terminated conflicts in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The central questions the book poses are: when different peacebuilding reforms, interventions, and measures can best be implemented to increase the chances that a peace process will be successful and durable; how these different peacebuilding reforms, interventions, and measures interact and relate to one and other; whether there is a particular sequence in which certain measures and policies can best be implemented to increase the chances that a peace process will be successful; and what type of peacebuilding projects and programmes are best initiated by different international actors and at what time. The book concludes that while there clearly is no magic sequence of peacebuilding, there are some priorities that clearly merit prioritization and do not conflict significantly with other priorities. It is argued that these ‘people-centred priorities’ can be used to guide the timing and sequencing of peacebuilding interventions in specific cases and contexts.

When taxes are introduced on carbon and energy, and the revenue is used to reduce other taxes, will a positive effect be achieved both for the environment and for the economy? In 1990, Finland was the first country that introduced a tax on CO₂. Later, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Slovenia, Germany, and the UK followed suit with tax reforms that shifted taxation from labour to carbon and energy. Over the years, CO₂ and energy taxes have gradually been raised, so that in Europe taxes of more than 25 billion EUR a year have been shifted. In this book, these experiences with carbon‐energy taxation, along with tax‐shifting programmes lowering other taxes, are examined in detail. Availability of unique and original data, including sector‐specific energy prices and taxes, as well as the use of advanced statistical techniques, such as co‐integration analysis and panel‐regression techniques along with the time‐series‐estimated macro‐economic model – Energy–Environment–Economy model for Europe (E3ME), makes this analysis truly comprehensive. Results of the analysis show that even though the taxes implemented have been relatively modest, they have, in the countries examined, contributed to a reduction in the emissions of greenhouse gases of up to 7 per cent, while for five of the countries a small increase in economic activity is recorded as a result of the tax‐shifting, with other impacts separated out. Due to concerns for competitiveness, the largest industrial emitters of greenhouse gases within Europe continue to benefit from exemptions from the carbon‐energy taxation schemes, as outside Europe there are major emitters without any economic penalties attached to greenhouse gas emissions. On basis of the lessons from carbon‐energy taxation learned in Europe, the editors of the book indicate how carbon‐energy taxation could usefully be combined with emissions trading, and they discuss how the recommendations from IPCC for a gradually escalating carbon price could be accomplished while preventing carbon leakage.

The book covers the global economy and the various pressures faced by central banks. It also provides some ideas for reforming existing monetary policy strategies. The events of the past fifteen years in monetary policy are essentially the story of two mistakes, one triumph, and the real possibility of another mistake to come. Prior to the global financial crisis, many central bankers were glib about the connection between finance and the real economy. This is partly because the last three decades saw many financial crises with apparently little lasting impact on the global economy. Another mistake was the failure to adequately appreciate how interconnected the world’s financial systems had become. The triumph was the recognition that price stability is a desirable objective. Whether low and stable inflation is the cause or the consequence of economic performance during the past three decades remains hotly debated, however. There is also the prospect of another financial shock to come. The outlook at the end of 2016 is clouded by at least three sets of forces. On the domestic front, central banks face a difficult and protracted exit from ultra-loose monetary policies; it is largely a problem of their own making. There is also an unwillingness to implement needed structural economic reforms that lie outside the scope of monetary policy. On the international front, there is limited appetite for cooperation and differences in views about the proper role and function of central banks. Central banking is not broken, but it is in need of repair.

This book mounts a critique of current health economics and provides a new way of looking at the economics of health and health care. It argues that health economics has been too dominated by the economics of health care and has largely ignored the impact of poverty, inequality, poor housing, and lack of education on health. It is suggested that some of the structural issues of economies, particularly the individualism of neo liberalism which is becoming more and more pervasive across the globe, need to be addressed in health economics. The book instead proposes a form of collective decision making through communitarianism, placing value on participation in public life and on institutions, such as health care. It is envisaged this form of decision making can be used at the local, national, or global levels. For the last, this would mean a major revamp of global institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Examples of the impact of the new paradigm on health policy in general but also more specifically on priority setting and equity are included.

This book addresses key questions about whether inequality in incomes, wealth, and education have been widening in a consistent fashion across 30 rich nations. It considers possible drivers of these developments, and it scrutinises scrutinizes whether this widening is exacerbating social problems and undermining the healthy functioning of democratic processes. It sets out to answer these questions by looking in depth at the experience of 30 countries over the past 30 years, examining what has actually been happening to these inequalities and investigating how this can be related to social and political outcomes such as poverty, family structures, health and health inequalities, crime, political participation, and attitudes and values. This brings out that although many countries have seen some increase in income inequality, country experiences have varied widely, that an immediate impact on average levels of social problems is difficult to see though there may be some interaction with political behaviours and changes to social gradients. What does stand out is that policies matter both in terms of ameliorating background inequality pressures and mitigating the extent to which inequalities in income spill over to other domains.

There has been a remarkable upsurge of debate about increasing inequalities and their societal implications, reinforced by the economic crisis but bubbling to the surface before it. This has been seen in popular discourse, media coverage, political debate, and research in the social sciences. The central questions addressed by this book, and the major research project GINI on which it is based, are: Have inequalities in income, wealth and education increased over the past 30 years or so across the rich countries, and if so why? What are the social, cultural and political impacts of increasing inequalities in income, wealth, and education? What are the implications for policy and for the future development of welfare states? In seeking to answer these questions, this book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on economics, sociology, and political science, and applies this approach to learning from the experiences over the last three decades of European countries together with the USA, Japan, Canada, Australia, and South Korea. It combines comparative research with lessons from specific country experiences, and highlights the challenges in seeking to adequately assess the factors underpinning increasing inequalities and in identify the channels through which these may impact on key social and political outcomes, as well as the importance of framing inequality trends and impacts in the institutional and policy context of the country in question.

This work provides a new, comprehensive, and empirically grounded study of household incomes in China that critically examines the long-term rise and recent apparent decline in inequality. It covers incomes and inequality nationwide as well as separately in the urban and rural sectors, with close attention to measurement issues and to underlying changes in the economy, institutions, and public policy. The chapters examine a range of related topics, including the inequality of wealth, the emergence of a new middle class, the income gap between the Han and the ethnic minorities, the gender wage gap, and the impacts of government policies, such as social welfare programs and the minimum wage. A distinguishing feature of the book is its use of data from the China Household Income Project (CHIP), a collaborative, international research project that has organized nationwide household surveys spanning 1988, 1995, 2002, 2007, and, most recently, 2013. The CHIP data make possible to provide a consistent picture of the evolution of China’s income and inequality from the late 1980s to the beginning of the Xi Jinping era. Analyses of the 2013 CHIP data, with comparisons to findings from past rounds of the survey, reveal new trends in China’s inequality.

Since the late 1990s, differentials in the level of private contributions to charitable organizations have become a central matter of public policy. Because private charitable contributions finance a variety of socially valuable activities (education, arts, etc.), many governments have tried to boost private philanthropy through active policy interventions. Furthermore, the temptation of relying on private contributions to finance the provision of public goods has increased substantially in recent years as fiscal constraints have become tighter. Yet there is little robust quantitative evidence regarding the differentials in private charitable giving across countries and more importantly very little consensus on why these differentials exist. By providing an original comparative and historical analysis across different countries, the chapters gathered in this conference volume aim at shedding new light on the determinants of private philanthropy, and ultimately, wish to provide interesting practical insights for improving tax policies toward charitable giving.

The 2008 financial crisis triggered the worst global recession since the Great Depression. Many OECD countries responded to the crisis by reducing social spending. Through eleven diverse country case studies (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States), this volume describes the evolution of child poverty and material well-being during the crisis, and links these outcomes with the responses by governments. The analysis underlines that countries with fragmented social protection systems were less able to protect the incomes of households with children at the time when unemployment soared. In contrast, countries with more comprehensive social protection cushioned the impact of the crisis on households with children, especially if they had implemented fiscal stimulus packages at the onset of the crisis. Although the macroeconomic ‘shock’ itself and the starting positions differed greatly across countries, while the responses by governments covered a very wide range of policy levers and varied with their circumstances, cuts in social spending and tax increases often played a major role in the impact that the crisis had on the living standards of families and children.

Climate justice requires sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its resolution equitably and fairly. It brings together justice between generations and justice within generations. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals summit in September 2015, and the Conference of Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in December 2015, brought climate justice center stage in global discussions. In the run up to Paris, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, instituted the Climate Justice Dialogue. The editors of this volume, an economist and a philosopher, served on the High Level Advisory Committee of the Climate Justice Dialogue. They noted the overlap and mutual enforcement between the economic and philosophical discourses on climate justice. But they also noted the great need for these strands to come together to support the public and policy discourse. This volume is the result.

The book takes stock and looks ahead on the development and implementation of competition policy in the European Union (EU) fifty years after the Treaty of Rome. Competition policy has emerged as a key policy in the EU, since today there is consensus that competition is the driving force for economic efficiency and the welfare of citizens. In this period, merger control has been introduced (in 1989) and reformed (in 2004); case law has established Articles 81 and 82 as fundamental tools to control and prevent anti-competitive behavior; state aid control has consolidated and evolved towards a more economic approach; and the authority of the EC and the judicial review of the Court of First Instance (CFI) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are firmly established. The book provides an account of the more economic approach to competition policy and reflects the main areas of interest, learning, open issues, and progress in the area: the design of competition policy institutions; the evolution of the implementation of competition policy and its convergence or divergence with US practice; restrictive practices, cartels, abuse of dominance, merger control, state aids, the interaction of competition policy, and regulation; and studies its application to telecoms, banking, and energy sectors. All the chapters are covered by top specialists combining theoretical with practical knowledge and discussing the economic underpinnings of the application of the law and the main cases.

Economics students are taught to “think like an economist” and law students are taught to “think like a lawyer.” But what of the burgeoning, intersecting discipline of Law and Economics? How does someone learn to “think like a person in the field of Law and Economics”? This book points the way by applying the major methods of Law and Economics to issues such as art vandalism, sales of human kidneys, and the ownership of meteorites. The book uncovers the common themes of Law and Economics, themes that cut across the traditional legal categories of property, contracts, and torts, and themes that account for both rational and less-than-rational decision-making. While exploring these themes, readers of the book visit the British Museum and a deserted isle, mingle with Vladimir Nabokov, John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham, and consider the purchase of heroin—and in the process learn to think like a Law and Economics practitioner.

After experiencing slow growth for much of the post-Independence period, the Indian economy has experienced powerful changes of significant magnitude since the mid-1980s. Post-reform India has defied established economic patterns and, in the process, created a few paradoxes. In this concise edition of The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy in the 21st Century, select chapters from the original have been compiled to give students of economics a brief but comprehensive overview of the Indian economy, contributing to a finer understanding of India’s growth path. In discussing these issues, this concise handbook adopts a context-rich, research-based, non-ideological approach; provides a comprehensive yet forward-looking coverage of economic issues; includes political and social aspects and draws on policymaker and market-participant perspectives; brings to the fore the various aspects of India’s performance that now attract global attention; and debates the relative importance of external factors compared to domestic reforms.