Migration and the Welfare State: Dynamic Political-Economy Theory

Assaf Razin, Efraim Sadka and Benjarong Suwankiri

No 7996, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We develop a dynamic politico-economic theory of welfare state, featuring three groups of voters: skilled workers, unskilled workers, and old retirees. The welfare-state is modeled by a proportional tax on labor income to finance a demogrant in a balanced-budget manner to capture the essence of inter- and intra-generational redistribution of a typical welfare system. Migrants arrive when young and their birth rate exceeds the native-born birth rate. We characterize political-economic equilibrium policy rules consisting of the tax rate, the skill composition of migrants, and the total number of migrants, in terms of demographic and labor productivity characteristics. We find that political coalitions will form among skilled and unskilled voters or among unskilled and old voters in order to block the other group from coming into power. As a consequence, the ideal polices of the unskilled voters always feature in any political economy equilibrium.

Keywords: Generous welfare state; Pay as you go; Skill composition of migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F0 G0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7996 (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: Migration and the Welfare State: Dynamic Political-Economy Theory (2010)
Working Paper: Migration and the welfare state: Dynamic Political-Economy Theory (2009)
Working Paper: Migration and the Welfare State: A Dynamic Political-Economy Theory (2009)
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:7996

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7996

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 ().