Sustainable Social Spending

Assar Lindbeck

No 739, Seminar Papers from Stockholm University, Institute for International Economic Studies

Abstract: The paper discusses a number of threats to the financial sustainability of social spending: increased internationalization of national economies, gradually higher relative costs of producing a number of human services, the “graying” of the population, slower productivity growth in the private sector, low employment rates, and various types of disincentive effects related to the welfare state itself, including moral hazard. I argue that threats from gradually rising costs of providing human services and disincentive effects of welfare-state arrangements, in particular moral hazard and benefit dependency, are more difficult to deal with than the other threats. I also discuss the choice between ad hoc policy reforms and automatic adjustment mechanisms, delegated to administrative bodies, for dealing with these threats.

Keywords: Sustainable fiscal policy; Baumol’s disease; moral hazard; automatic adjustment mechanisms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H31 H53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2005-10-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv, nep-mac and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:344417/FULLTEXT01 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Sustainable social spending (2006)
Working Paper: Sustainable Social Spending (2005)
Working Paper: Sustainable Social Spending (2005)
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:hhs:iiessp:0739

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Seminar Papers from Stockholm University, Institute for International Economic Studies Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hanna Christiansson ().