A core principle of the welfare state is that everyone pays taxes or contributions in exchange for universal insurance against social risks such as sickness, old age, unemployment, and plain bad luck. This solidarity principle assumes that everyone is a member of a single national insurance pool, and it is commonly explained by poor and asymmetric information, which undermines markets and creates the perception that we are all in the same boat. Living in the midst of an information revolut...

The transformation of night-watchman states into welfare states is one of the most notable societal developments in recent history. In 1880, not a single country had a nationally compulsory social policy program. A few decades later, every single one of today's rich democracies had adopted programs covering all or almost all of the main risks people face: old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment. These programs rapidly expanded in terms of range, reach, and resources. Today, all rich ...

A leading economist discusses the potential of happiness research (the quantification of well-being) to answer important questions that standard economics methods are unable to analyze.Revolutionary developments in economics are rare. The conservative bias of the field and its enshrined knowledge make it difficult to introduce new ideas not in line with received theory. Happiness research, however, has the potential to change economics substantially in the future. ...

Welfare state reform occurs in all advanced capitalist democracies, but it does not occur in identical ways, to the same degree or with similar consequences. In Comparative Welfare State Politics, Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis explain the political opportunities and constraints of welfare state reform by asking 'big' questions. Why did we need a welfare state in the first place? How did we get it? Why did we get different worlds of welfare and do we still have them? What does the wel...

There are fewer people living in extreme poverty in the world today than 30 years ago. While that is an achievement, continuing progress for poor people is far from assured. Inequalities in access to key resources threaten to stall growth and poverty reduction in many places. The world's poorest have made only a small absolute gain over those 30 years. Progress has been slow against relative poverty as judged by the standards of the country and time one lives in, and a great many people in...

How nations can promote peace, prosperity, and stability through cohesive political institutions"Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." So wrote Adam Smith a quarter of a millennium ago. Using the tools of modern political economics and combining economic theory with a bir...

Perceptions of Africa have changed dramatically. Viewed as a continent of wars, famines and entrenched poverty in the late 1990s, there is now a focus on “Africa rising†? and an “African 21st century.†? Two decades of unprecedented economic growth in Africa should have brought substantial improvements in well-being. Whether or not they did, remains unclear given the poor quality of the data, the nature of the growth process (especially the role of natural resources), conflicts that affect par...

In this pioneering work, Paul R. Abramson and Ronald Inglehart show that the gradual shiftfrom Materialist values (such as the desire for economic and physical security) to Post-materialist values (such as the desire for freedom, self-expression, and the quality of life) is in all likelihood a global phenomenon. Value Change in Global Perspective analyzes over thirty years worth of national surveys in European countries and presents the most comprehensive and nuanced discus...

This book considers why institutional forms of modern capitalist economies differ internationally, and proposes a typology of capitalism based on the theory of institutional complementarity. Different economic models are not simply characterized by different institutional forms, but also by particular patterns of interaction between complementary institutions which are the core characteristics of these models. Institutions are not just simply devices which would be chosen by 'social engine...

In Governing for the Long Term, Alan M. Jacobs investigates the conditions under which elected governments invest in long-term social benefits at short-term social cost. Jacobs contends that, along the path to adoption, investment-oriented policies must surmount three distinct hurdles to future-oriented state action: a problem of electoral risk, rooted in the scarcity of voter attention; a problem of prediction, deriving from the complexity of long-term policy effects; and a problem of ins...

The book analyses the influence of corruption on economic growth and environmental protection, examining corruption from different perspectives. It contributes to several streams of the literature and assembles evidence of the influence of corruption on two important variables in human welfare: income and environmental policies. The material evinces the detrimental effect that corruption has on economic growth and on the stringency of environmental policies. It also shows that standard tec...

With the ever-increasing interdependence across individuals, groups, international organizations, and nation-states an increasingly significant policy concern in the contemporary turbulent world of globalization is the question of state failure. There has been a growing academic interest in the determinants of state failure and an acute awareness across the international community of the need for dealing with issues of instability in states.The contributors to this volume represent...