Welfare State vs. Market Forces in a Globalization Era

Assaf Razin, Efraim Sadka and Alexander Schwemmer

No 13937, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Globalization radically changes income distribution and triggers intense international tax competition. Therefore, globalization entails an extensive restructuring of the welfare state. We analyze a parsimonious model of an open economy, in its trade and finance transactions with the rest of the world, governed by voter-majority-controlled welfare state. We analyze the interactions between taxation, provision of social benefits, and globalization. We demonstrate how these interactions are grounded on trade-related and macro-related fundamentals, familiar from a standard open-economy model: (i) Degree of trade border frictions, (ii) Degree of international finance frictions, (iii) Relative factor abundance that determines the capital intensity of the country’s exports; and, (iv) Domestic savings and productivity of domestic investment, which determines whether the country is a financial capital exporter or importer. We address the issues of whether the welfare state enhances (or inhibits) the trade and financial openness driven by diminished border effects; whether globalization chips away at the generosity of the welfare state; and, whether the welfare state efficiently spreads out the gains from globalization from winners to losers.

Date: 2019-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13937 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Welfare State vs. Market Forces in a Globalization Era (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13937

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13937

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().