Retirement income security in the United Kingdom.

This article examines the U.K. retirement income security system from the American perspective. It addresses issues that most concern U.S. analysts: how the United Kingdom has kept its future public pension costs at a manageable level, the extent to which privatization of public pensions has contributed to low pension costs, the popular appeal of individual pension accounts, and the impact of privatization on retirement income. These issues are best understood in the context of the U.K. pension program's particular institutional structure and policies, two of which--"contracting out" of public pensions, and strong reliance on means-tested benefits--have been largely rejected in the evolution of U.S. policy to date. Particular use is made of recently available data on coverage rates for public and private pension programs over the total working population and administrative records on inactive personal pension accounts.     

Electoral engineering in Chile: the electoral system and limited democracy

On the eve of Chile's transition from military to elected government, the outgoing regime enacted an electoral engineering project intended to conserve the constitutional order it encoded in 1980. An analysis of 1989 and 1993 general elections shows that the way votes are translated into seats favors, as intended, the second largest electoral block, the Chilean Right. This bias, along with the number of appointed senators and the special majorities required for constitutional amendments, gives the Right a minority veto power on any reform initiative. Moreover, the electoral system produces incentives for parties, candidates and voters that enhances this balance of power. The role that the electoral system plays in Chile therefore consolidates a limited form of democracy, rather than a liberal one.     

From Chicago to Santiago: Neoliberalism and Social Security Privatization in Chile

This article examines the ideology and principles that inspired the privatization of social security in Chile during the Pinochet regime. The article highlights the role of the state in the establishment of a fully funded, defined contribution system, as well as the importance of the transmission of ideas from the halls of the University of Chicago to Chile's centers of power. In the case of Chile, the ideas of freedom espoused by Milton Friedman and Frederick von Hayek were applied by a repressive authoritarian regime that violated human and political rights. Furthermore, these ideas served to legitimize a political and economic system based on the deprivation of freedom. Although social security reform was a critical component of a revolution going on in Chile in the 1970s, the ultimate purpose of this article is to show that the effects of this reform are by no means limited to Chile. The Chilean reform has been adopted by countries in Latin America and other parts of the world, and it has critically affected those societies as well. The article shows that the establishment of the fully funded, defined contribution system has been very costly, both for the state and the insured, while coverage has dramatically declined. The article concludes that the market economic reforms have enhanced only the freedom of those who could take advantage of the new economy, and that few of the promises made during the Pinochet regime by the neoliberal economists came true.     

Mandating private pensions: experience in four European countries.

This study examines the experience of four countries--the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom--in which the mandating of private pensions exists or has been considered. Proposals to mandate private pensions in the United States have been introduced in Congress several times. The analysis of foreign thinking presented here provides a background on the reasoning behind such a policy and on the integration of private and public systems and the problems involved. A prime reason for mandating private pensions--instead of seeking higher social security benefits or additional social security layers--has been the pressure to avoid higher payroll taxes. Some countries already had such high contribution rates that they sought other means to improve benefits. Adding a layer of private pensions, it was thought, does not involve Government mechanisms and keeps the money in the private sector. Yet mandating by law creates many problems, and no country has fully implemented such legislation.     

The Political-Economic Dimension of Pensions: The Case of Japan

This article examines how pensions are interwoven with the public and private financial system in Japan and the consequences for pension reform. A growing literature focuses on the multifaceted ways in which pensions are interwoven with the larger political economy. This study builds on this literature and finds that (a) public and private pensions have been integrated deeply into Japan's system of developmental finance, (b) this integration has created new economic and political problems as governments have attempted to shift away from its developmental model through deregulation, liberalization, and administrative reform, and (c) because pension reform is intimately linked with these reforms, it involves addressing fundamental issues regarding the role of the state, finance, and firms. These findings collectively illustrate that pension reform is not only driven by issues of fiscal viability and benefit levels, but also by the nature of the way in which pensions are integrated into a country's system of finance.     

美国应急志愿者管理制度及其经验借鉴

为了提高应急志愿者的组织化与专业化程度,美国建立了完善的应急志愿服务体系,实施了严格的应急志愿者认可与保护制度,并对无组织归属的志愿者进行了有效的管理。借鉴美国的经验并结合中国实际,文章提出了完善我国应急志愿者管理制度的建议。     

The State of American Federalism, 2004: Is Federalism Still a Core Value?

Federalism as a political issue was conspicuously absent fromthe 2004 presidential contest. Unlike many previous campaigns,neither party's candidate made much mention of problems besettingstates and localities. The war against global terrorism andthe changing situation in Iraq shaped the election. Progresswas made on homeland security, but intergovernmental wranglingover federal grants continued unabated. Federal-state feudswere common in several policy areas, including education, environmentalprotection, and health care. State finances received a revenueboost as economic growth picked up, but rising costs for Medicaid,education, employee pensions, and prisons clouded states' financialforecasts. The U.S. Supreme Court decided several cases witha federalism dimension, and these decisions plus those of thepast several years suggest the Court has moved not so much togrant more power to the states but to prune back the power ofCongress. Much of what has happened during the first Bush administrationmust be seen against the larger background of changes in theAmerican political party system. Changes in party organizationand policy control, especially during the first Bush administration,reaffirm David Walker's assessment that over the past quartercentury American federalism has become more nationalized.     

Class bases of universal social policy

Abstract. Institutional pension policy is held to be one of the trade marks of the celebrated Scandinavian model. Universal national pensions guarantee a decent livelihood to every citizen irrespective of socio-economic status. Income-related pensions that are paid on top of the national pensions secure the standard of living achieved during the working career. This Scandinavian institutionalism has usually been associated with long-lasting working class hegemony, consolidated by the deliberate goal of abolishing means-testing from national pensions and expanding the scope and quality of income-related pensions. However, some studies challenge this interpretation. Instead, they emphasize the crucial role played by the middle classes. By using survey data from Finland, this study seeks to determine which socio-economic groups are in favour of the present Finnish pension policy model characterized by universal basic pensions and income-graduated work-merit pensions. The results show that workers and farmers are more willing to introduce means-testing and flat-rate pensions than white-collar workers. Correspondingly, these groups are more sceptical of income-graduated benefits. Middle classes, especially upper white-collar workers, support income graduated benefits and are more reluctant than workers and farmers to introduce means-tested or flat-rate pensions. Thus, the results indicate that the support for the present institutional pension policy model in Finland is strongest among the middle strata. But the results also indicate that this support is greatly dependent on benefit form, and when debating on the class basis of the Scandinavian universalism, we must be more explicit in specifying which aspects of universalism are at stake.     

在分散与统一之间——美国食品安全监管事权划分探析

美国食品安全事权划分,在形式上呈现分散特征,联邦层面有十多个机构参与食品监管事务,州、地方、部落、领地有3000多个独立的监管机构来保障本地食品安全,这种分散特征主要是由美国的宪政体制、权力结构的分散性和政策输出的不确定性造成的。但在实际运行过程中,各监管机构之间通过正式的和非正式的协调活动,彼此之间分享了权力,共享了食品安全监管标准,达到了一定的统一性。我国食品安全事权划分可在明晰监管机构间的责任、保持事权划分稳定性以培养专业能力、建立倒金字塔式的监管任务结构方面借鉴美国的经验。     

The Future of Public Sector Pensions

The dramatic rise in life expectancy and longer retirement has created serious concerns about the long‐term affordability of public sector pensions. Drawing on insights from a recent inquiry into public sector pension reform, commissioned by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition and led by the author, this article outlines the challenge faced by policy makers and sets out how it should be addressed. It argues that, with 12 million people active in this part of the pensions system, and estimates that the gap between contributions and payments will grow from £3bn to £10bn in the next decade, the government has no choice but to enter the ‘lions’ den’ of pensions’ policy. It contends that any long‐term solution is to be crafted cannot be based solely on economics, but must also answer fundamental questions of ethics and equity.     

State and local pension plans' equity holdings and returns

This article explores recent trends in the size and performance of the equity investments of state and local pension plans. It also provides a context for the discussion about investing Social Security trust fund reserves in private equities. Equity holdings and returns for five of the largest private pension plans were compared with those of state and local pension plans. Key findings discussed in the article include: Equities were the largest investment in the aggregate portfolio of state and local pension plans in 1999 and represented 67 percent of the $3 trillion in aggregate state and local pension assets. Equity allocation of the five private plans resembled that of the aggregate. About 80 percent of state and local pension plan holdings were domestic equities in 1999. The five largest plans had about the same domestic/foreign allocation of equity investments during that same period. In 1999, state and local pension plans held about 11 percent of the U.S. equity market, which includes foreign equities held in the United States. State and local pension plans held about 10 percent of domestic equities in the U.S. equities market that same year. Returns on equity investments over a 10-year period were more than 17 percent for both private pensions and state and local pension plans. Although private plans tend to have slightly higher total returns, the difference stems from the higher equity asset allocation of the private pensions that were studied.     

美国联邦政府的宽带薪资试验及其启示

20世纪80年代以来,随着内外部环境的变化,建立在严格的职位分类基础之上的美国联邦政府传统薪资系统受到越来越多的挑战。为此,美国联邦政府开始探索适用于政府部门的新型薪资结构,宽带薪资试验就是这种尝试之一。三项宽带薪资试验对于美国政府机构乃至美国私营企业的薪资体系创新都产生了深远的影响。试验不仅揭示了宽带薪资是公共部门薪资体系的发展方向之一,而且对我国公共部门的薪资体系改革具有重要的借鉴意义。     

The Second Time as Tragedy? Welfare Reform under Thatcher and the Coalition

The welfare reforms of the Coalition government are marked by the legacy of Thatcherism. Social security reforms in the 1980s reshaped the system towards reliance on means‐tested benefits. Negative policy feedback created by the opacity and perverse effects of means‐testing has made these benefits an easy target for the Coalition, at least so far as working age people are concerned. Different policy feedbacks affect policy towards old age pensions. The government is locked into promoting private pensions, and is extending this commitment with automatic enrolment. To make private pensions pay, it has to reverse the slide to means‐testing. The implication is that the pronounced bias against the working poor and in favour of older people in Coalition policy is not simply a matter of electoral preferences: rather, it reflects the political effects of previous policy decisions.     

EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS: PROBLEMS OF ASSESSMENT

Abstract: The paper focuses on the Coombs Commission's recommendations on efficiency and effectiveness in the Commonwealth Public Service. The recommendations involve the allocation of organizational responsibility for efficiency and effectiveness to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Public Service Board, Treasury and the Auditor-General and individual responsibility to the departmental manager through the establishment of a "Forward Estimating Budgetary" process. However the Commission has given little guidance in the matter of the technological tools which must be developed in order to secure its implementation.
The Commonwealth Public Service Board has developed over the last two years a program of Staff Utilization Reviews (S. U. Rs) as one of its management improvement programs. The paper canvases the technological aspects of efficiency and effectiveness drawing upon the development and operational experience of the S.U.R. program. It concludes that much resource-intensive work must be done before the Commission's recommendations can be implemented but Australian and overseas experience confirms the potential fruitfulness of that work.     

Weighted student funding in the Netherlands: A model for the U.S.?

Although a relatively new idea in the U.S., weighted student funding (WSF) for individual schools has a long history in the Netherlands. This country of about 16.5 million people has been using a version of WSF for all its primary schools (serving children from age 4 to 12) for 25 years. In this article we describe and evaluate the Dutch system and explore what insights there might be for the U.S., taking into account the very different cultural and normative contexts of the two countries. We find that, compared to those with few weighted students, Dutch schools with high proportions of weighted students have almost 60 percent more teachers per pupil as well as more support staff per teacher. Even these large resource advantages, however, are not sufficient by themselves to eliminate all quality shortfalls in the high‐weight schools, where quality is measured by school policies and practices. We conclude that weighted student funding for schools within districts in the U.S. is not likely to deliver the same highly progressive funding patterns as in the Netherlands because of the complex, multilayered U.S. education system and the absence of a political consensus in favor of generous weights. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Environmental Policy As Learning: A New View of an Old Landscape

Environmental policy in the United States has always been characterized by high levels of political conflict. At the same time, however, policy makers have shown a capacity to learn from their own and others' experience. This article examines U.S. environmental policy since 1970 as a learning process and, more specifically, as an effort to develop three kinds of capacities for policy learning. The first decade and a half may be seen in terms of technical learning, characterized by a high degree of technical and legal proficiency, but also narrow problem definitions, institutional fragmentation, and adversarial relations among actors. In the 1980s, growing recognition of deficiencies in technical learning led to a search for new goals, strategies, and policy instruments, in what may be termed conceptual learning . By the early 1990s, policy makers also recognized a need for a new set of capacities at social learning, reflecting trends in European environmental policy, international interest in the concept of sustainability, and dissatisfaction with the U.S. experience. Social learning stresses communication and interaction among actors. Most industrial nations, including the United States, are working to develop and integrate capacities for all three kinds of learning. Efforts to integrate capacities for conceptual and social learning in the United States have had mixed success, however, because the institutional and legal framework for environmental policy still is founded on technical learning.     

Pension Reform in Germany and Austria: System Change vs. Quantitative Retrenchment

This article first outlines the differences in outcome of pension reform in Germany and Austria. The 2001 German pension reform cut benefits very little, but it started a system changing transformation process by strengthening the second (occupational pensions) and third pillar (private pensions). The 2003 Austrian pension reform, pushed through against major opposition from the labour unions, contains very few elements of policy innovation, but benefits have been cut back much more significantly than in the German case. The paper explains the difference in outcomes (system change in Germany, retrenchment in Austria) by looking at the structure of political institutions. The federal government in Austria is much less constrained by formal veto players than the German government, which had to engage in extensive coalition-building to get the pension bill through the second chamber of parliament. Therefore the influence of informal veto players (mainly unions) was much higher in Germany. The impact on the reform outcome was the positive discrimination of occupational pensions and less severe cuts in the benefit levels. The concluding thesis is that for successful and long-term sustainable welfare state reform, a small number of formal veto players is a valuable resource. A large number of formal veto players is an obstacle to retrenchment reforms, although it might encourage policy innovation, because political actors will look for other policy venues to increase their leverage.     

U.S.‐Style Leadership for English Local Government?

Significant changes in the political management of local authorities in the United Kingdom are now taking place as a result of legislation passed by the Labour government since 1997. The new political management models aim to modernize local governance by strengthening local leadership, streamlining decision making, and enhancing local accountability. These changes owe much to U.S. experience: They involve the introduction of a separation of powers between an executive and an assembly, and they allow local authorities to introduce directly elected mayors for the first time ever. Is U.K. local government beginning to adopt what might be described as U.S.‐style approaches to local governance? The evidence suggests the new institutional designs for U.K. local authorities represent a radical shift toward U.S.‐style local leadership and decision making. However, the U.K. central state remains heavily involved in the details of local decision making, to an extent that would be unthinkable in the United States.     

Research on immigrant earnings

As the first in a trio of pieces devoted to incorporating immigration into policy models, this review of research on immigrant earnings trajectories brings to light several findings. Controlling for demographic and human capital characteristics, immigrants often start their U.S. lives at substantially lower earnings, but experience faster earnings growth than natives with comparable years of education and experience. The extent to which the earnings trajectories of immigrants and natives differ varies by country of origin, with the source-country's level of economic development being a key determinant of the size of the U.S.-born/ foreign-born difference. The earnings profiles of immigrants from economically developed countries such as Japan, Canada, or Western Europe resemble those of U.S. natives who are of the same age and education level. In contrast, the earnings of immigrants from developing nations tend to start well below those of U.S. natives with comparable education levels and experience, but rise more rapidly than their U.S. counterparts. Comparing the earnings profiles of immigrants of similar age, sex, and years of schooling, over time and across groups, a strong inverse relationship emerges between their initial earnings and their subsequent U.S. earnings growth. In other words, the lower (higher) the initial earnings are, the higher (lower) the earnings growth. These and other research results have important implications for the projection of immigrant earnings and emigration in microsimulation models, as discussed in the two articles following this one: (1) "Adding Immigrants to Microsimulation Models" and (2) "Incorporating Immigrant Flows into Microsimulation Models".     

A practical analysis of shared‐appreciation mortgages

Abstract

When the development of large‐scale public housing projects was discontinued in the 1970s in both Canada and the United States, the policy response was very different. This article reviews the nature of the dissimilar low‐income housing policy paths, documenting the role of federal housing policy in the evolution of a significant nonprofit “third sector” in Canada's housing system; the decision of the U.S. federal government to rely on the private sector for subsidized rental supply; and, with very little help from the federal government, the ‘bottom‐up” attempt to develop a nonprofit housing sector in communities throughout the United States. In Canada, a permanent stock of good‐quality, nonprofit social housing was created along with a growing and increasingly competent community‐based housing development sector.

The Canadian experience demonstrates that it takes time to build the capacity of the nonprofit sector. The U.S. experience demonstrates that there is a great deal of community‐based talent ready and willing to provide nonprofit housing if reliable and adequate funding is available. Canada has made outstanding progress relative to the United States in the area of affordable housing supply, creating yet another small but significant difference in the quality of life for lower income households. The general Canadian approach to consistent national support of nonprofit and cooperative housing can be applied in the United States. Canada's relative success is not based on unique structural or systemic differences—that is, it is a matter of political choice and political will. The United States should look to Canada's 20‐year experience to determine whether some of the mechanisms used to support Canada's nonprofit sector might be transferable to the United States.