The paper starts with a brief look at social expenditure patterns and the importance of different social policy areas, in particular the role of social assistance policy within social protection systems. It then looks at the objectives of social...

The paper discusses the use of material deprivation measures for an analysis of poverty in OECD countries. Its main goal is to identify suitable survey questions that might be used in comparative analysis, as a first step towards the construction of...

Many OECD countries have in recent decades experienced periods of relatively rapid growth in nonemployment benefit expenditures and recipiency rates which have not subsequently been reversed. By contrast, in a number of OECD countries the number of...

This paper explores the impact of policies and institutions on employment and unemployment of OECD countries in the past decades. Reduced-form unemployment equations, consistent with standard wage setting/pricesetting models, are estimated using...

For a number of reasons, incomes vary strongly with age. The nature of this variation is of interest for a wide range of policy purposes. Since age structures differ across countries, knowledge about the incomes earned by different age groups is also...

All discussions about the desirability of policy reforms rest on judgements about their effects on individuals and societal well-being. Yet, suitable measures for assessing how well-being is changing over time or compares across countries are...

This paper discusses how social disadvantage affects the learning experiences of households with fewer economic resources, at each stage of the individuals' life-course, and on some of the "social" effects of such learning. It argues that while...

Finding a suitable balance of work and family life is not an easy task for parents who face multiple, and potentially conflicting, demands. Childcare policies play a crucial role in helping parents reconcile care and employment-related tasks. But...

One of the key institutional outcomes of China’s economic reforms has been to create a new role for employers that is separate from the state, and allows enterprises to concentrate on their business. To protect workers, the government has set up...

This is the 2005 edition of a Net Social Expenditure paper that contains information on net (after tax) public and private social expenditure. These indicators supplement the detailed historical information on gross (before tax) publicly mandated...

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal...

This report tries to explain observed changes in fertility rates across OECD countries, with an emphasis on socio-economic considerations. It aims to extend the understanding of fertility-related behaviours in different ways: first, by explaining...

Policies designed to advance the march toward private financing and delivery of social services follow five main pathways. While some of these approaches to privatization are more direct and transparent than others, all may be pursued simultaneously....

Results presented in this paper based on the new database on immigrants and expatriates in OECD countries, show that (i) the percentage of the foreign-born in European OECD countries is generally higher than the percentage of foreigners; (ii)...

With the emerging international competition to attract highly skilled migrants, the determinants of their choice of residential location are increasing in importance. Besides expected wages and job opportunities, the costs of migration and the...

Some people make great claims about the advantages to be gained from greater reliance on the private sector for the provision of social protection. Many of the claims for great macroeconomic advantages do not stand up to scrutiny. However, there is...

This report provides evidence on income distribution and poverty in 27 OECD countries over the second half of the 1990s, using data that correct for many of the features that limit cross-country and intertemporal comparisons in this field. Patterns...

Most Western countries have a long tradition of employment service provision by public bodies and non-profit organisations, but not by for-profit organisations. The creation of a quasi-market arrangement is not a simple choice for government. This...

The OECD regularly produces estimates of tax burdens and benefit entitlements for a range of “typical household” situations. The results of these calculations (published in the Benefits and Wages and Taxing Wages series) are frequently used to...

Macro-based effective tax rate (ETR) measures do not provide information on the level or distribution of marginal effective tax rates thought to influence household behaviour. They also do not capture differences in average ETRs facing different...