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Poland
Marga Peeters & Loek Groot, World Economics, June 2012
This paper investigates the fiscal pressure, or the level of public expenditure on old and young economically inactive people, arising from demographic change in relation to the labour market space, or the proportion of the working age population not in full-time employment. The exercise is carried out for 50 countries that cover 75% of the world population. The pressure-to-space indicator ranks Poland, Turkey and Greece high, although, apart from Turkey and India, developing countries generally rank low due to low spending on the old (pensions, healthcare) and on the young (education, family costs). Peculiarly, economies with higher pressure have more space. The hypothesis that ageing economies have started using their labour market space in anticipation of higher demographic pressure is rejected. It is important to note that raising the retirement age in developed economies by five years alleviates fiscal pressure by almost 30% and creates 10% more labour market space.
David Henderson, World Economics, March 2000
Despite some searching and unanswered criticisms of its treatment of statistical evidence, the UNDP Human Development Report has become established as a widely-quoted and influential survey of the world scene. The 1999 Report, reviewed here, focuses on ‘globalization’. This is described as a dominant influence on the recent economic fortunes of developing countries in particular, and as a primary cause of continuing poverty and growing inequality in the world. The author argues that the Report provides neither argument nor evidence in support of this thesis; that it takes no account of other factors that have strongly influenced economic performance; that its main prescription for the world, of reforms in ‘global governance’, is largely beside the point; and that its whole approach is crudely anti-liberal. The author concludes by placing the Report, as also the economists who have aligned themselves with it, in the wider context of anti-liberalism today.
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