Future Funding of Welfare

John Lapidus ()
Additional contact information
John Lapidus: University of Gothenburg

Chapter Chapter 16 in The Quest for a Divided Welfare State, 2019, pp 223-234 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Does a country have to move towards a divided welfare state? Is it an economic necessity that forces it to create more private and semi-private welfare solutions? The advocates of a divided welfare state often rely on William Baumol and his so-called cost disease, according to which services become relatively more expensive over time as it is more difficult to increase productivity in the service sector. The chapter focuses on how Baumol is deeply misunderstood, knowingly or unknowingly, by the advocates of a divided welfare state. It is true that services get relatively more expensive over time, but this applies also to private and semi-private services. Even more importantly, the cost disease means that goods get relatively cheaper while Sweden gets more and more prosperous.

Keywords: Cost disease; Internet of things; Artificial intelligence; Future funding of welfare; Divided welfare state; Hidden welfare state (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
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:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-24784-3_16

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030247843

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-24784-3_16

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().