Explore the vast range of titles available.

The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate different burden sharing rules with respect to abatement of carbon emissions. We evaluate seven different rules both in terms of their redistributive impact and by the extent to which they realize the aim of optimal abatement. We show that the Lindahl solution, where the burden sharing rule of carbon abatement is determined by each region’s willingness to pay, is to be preferred above the non-cooperative Nash outcome. Poor regions however would prefer the social planner outcome with a global permit market, because then the burden sharing rule has a secondary role of income redistribution by means of transfers from rich to poor, on top of its primary role of assigning abatement burdens. Based on these findings, we argue that in order to control global greenhouse gas emissions, the level of individual country emission abatement effort should be a function of their willingness to pay to curb climate change, rather than their historical emissions or ability to abate.

The focus in welfare state support in the Netherlands has been shifted from workfare and activation policies to social investment strategies. The discourse on basic income and the related municipal experiments highlights this shift. We address the inspiration found in basic income and behavioural economic and motivational psychological theoretical insights for the design of the experiments and for new avenues of minimum income protection and providing participation opportunities for the disadvantaged. The emerging new paradigm also implies a shift in the cultural values and principles on which welfare state policies are implicitly founded. This means that in these endeavours particular social values are put more upfront, such as personal autonomy (capacitating people by providing opportunities and therewith ‘free choice’) and trust (activating people by putting trust in their self-management capacities) which in day-to-day policy practice means more tailor-made, demand-oriented integrated mediation and coaching while rewarding people instead of penalising them.

Persisting unemployment, poverty and social exclusion, labour market flexibility, job insecurity and higher wage inequality, changing patters of work and family life are among the factors that exert pressure on welfare states in Europe.This book explores the potential of an unconditional basic income, without means test or work requirement, to meet the challenges posed by the new social question, compared to policies of subsidized insertion in work. It also assesses the political chances of basic income in various European countries.These themes are highly relevant to policy-makers in the field of labour markets and social security, economists, political philosophers, and a social science audience in general.

Persisting unemployment, poverty and social exclusion, labour market flexibility, job insecurity and higher wage inequality, changing patterns of work and family life are among the factors that exert pressure on welfare states in Europe. This book explores the potential of an unconditional basic income, without means test or work requirement, to meet the challenges posed by the new social question, compared to policies of subsidized insertion in work. It also assesses the political chances of basic income in various European countries. These themes are highly relevant to policy-makers in the field of labour markets and social security, economists, political philosophers, and a social science audience in general.

We explore a new argument that seeks to explain the near absence of the labor-managed firm or cooperative, despite a range of inefficiencies attributed to the present-day capitalist firm. We derive the crucial condition for the emergence of labor-managed firms and show that it is unduly restrictive from an efficiency point of view. The policy implication is that public intervention to promote labor-managed firms should primarily be in the form of start-up subsidies rather than in providing permanent tax subsidies.

A large literature explaining patterns of redistribution makes use of the median voter theorem. Using a novel approach, this contribution shows that in OECD countries the decisive voter, determined by the earner who sees her preferred tax rate being implemented, on average sits around the 50 th percentile in the income distribution, although significant within and between country differences exist. Under the assumption of a lognormal distribution of gross income, we derive the required tax rate to align the observed gross and net Gini coefficients in OECD countries. This estimated tax rate is compared to the tax rate preferred by the median income earner, which gives a new index capturing a nation’s deviation from the median voter position, measured as the difference between the estimated percentile position of the decisive voter and the 50 th percentile position of the median voter. We provide a comparative overview of this index over time and between countries. We also locate the positions of alternative versions of the decisive voter, among which following the ‘one dollar, one vote’ rule, in a Lorenz curve diagram.

With Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght have managed to combine three ambitious goals in an exceptionally attractive format.1 Their book is first a lively political treatise in the tradition of \"realistic utopianism,\" arguing for the radical proposal to rejuvenate the Western social model- under threat of automation, globalization, and ageing populations-by installing a basic needs-covering unconditional income at its core. It is, secondly, a surefooted didactic exposition of the topic's public economics and political economy aspects, taking off from the two Belgian authors' earlier collaboration in the French language primer l'Allocation Universelle (2000), duly broadened and assiduously updated to include many of the major developments and contributions of the last decades, from trials with unconditional cash grants in the developing world, Euro-dividend ideas, and the revival of experimentation with basic income-like arrangements. Thirdly, Basic Income marks the final stage of Van Parijs's ongoing effort from Real Freedom for All (1995)2 onwards, to bring political philosophy to bear on a definitive moral justification of the controversial unconditionalities of a basic income (individuality, universality, and obligation-freeness) from the perspective of liberal egalitarianism, as worked out by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin.3The eight chapters of Basic Income proceed from a lucid exposition of the nature and consequences of inserting basic income's three unconditionalities in the household-based, work- and means-tested environment of existing social security in Chapter 1, working from there to articulate the \"radical proposal\" in the national context of affluent welfare state economies. The territorial context is widened only in Chapter 8 to include brief speculations on a global basic income, and a more detailed plea for a low-level supranational basic income in a European Transfer Union based on the authors' own ongoing work. We leave aside these issues in this review. What goes on between this first and last chapter answers to the threefold aims mentioned above: political treatise, didactic exposition, and philosophical defense.

This paper focuses on a qualitative comparison between European football and U.S. team sports with respect to the effects of the number of goals per match, impartial errors of the referee, and overtime versus ties on the natural level of competitive balance. The more goals and the more perfect the referee, the more drastic are the measures needed to maintain competitive balance. Taking into account that the optimal level of competitive balance is lower in open leagues than in closed leagues, the combined effect of these factors may explain why in U.S. team sports special measures are in force to maintain competitive balance, which are absent in Europe.

This article provides operational measures for comparing welfare states in terms of the concept of post-productivism, as pioneered by Goodin in this Journal, and discusses the normative relevance of such comparisons. Post-productivism holds that it is desirable to grant people a high level of personal autonomy, through the welfare state's labour-market institutions and transfer system, and maintains that on average, people would choose to make use of their autonomy by working less, hence earning less and having more free time. By contrast, existing welfare states, for example as classified in Esping-Andersen's three-way split of liberal, social-democratic and corporatist regimes, are largely ‘productivist’, as their policies try to design social rights so as ensure economic self-reliance through full-time work. The question is whether they actually succeed in doing so. With a limited dataset of thirteen OECD countries for 1993, three conditions of personal autonomy – income adequacy, temporal adequacy and absence of welfare-work conditionality – are discussed in terms of policy outputs, which can be read off from easily accessible OECD statistics. Two closely related concepts are explored: comprehensive post-productivism, measuring the extent to which welfare states approximate the ideal of personal autonomy, and restricted post-productivism, which follows from two common goals shared by all welfare states (avoidance of poverty and reduction of involuntary underemployment), and expressly focuses on the policy outputs on which the productivist and post-productivist perspectives specifically disagree: welfare-work unconditionality, voluntary underemployment and average annual hours of work per employee. After showing that ranking the thirteen cases puts the Netherlands at the top and the United States at the bottom, in conformity with Goodin's earlier work, it is shown that restricted post-productivism is not positively associated with the poverty rate, and negatively with the rate of involuntary underemployment. This finding sets the stage for our discussion of normative issues underlying a preference for either productivist or post-productivist arrangements of work and welfare. Suggestions for further research are given in the final section.