Social Security Model Research Articles

Unemployment, employment and poverty

Although unemployment has been pointed out as one of the greatest risk factors of poverty and social exclusion, there are few comparative studies describing the effects of unemployment on the disposable income of households. This article focuses on unemployment as income poverty risk among working age households, with data based on the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). It investigates differences in relative poverty rates between those working age households affected and those not affected by unemployment since the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. The study consists of eight OECD countries representing four different social policy models: encompassing model (Nordic countries), the corporatistic earned-benefits-principle model (Germany), the means-tested, targeted social security model (Australia) and the so-called liberal basic security model (UK, USA and Canada). The results classified the countries into three groups. In the encompassing model and Canada, no differences were found in the poverty rates of the working age unemployed and employed households; there was also no indication that this situation was changing. Canada, however, had higher poverty rates among all working age households compared with Nordic countries. The situation in Germany can be characterized as stable polarization: unemployment there was a great poverty risk, but the difference between the unemployed and others was not growing. In all the other countries unemployment constituted a great and growing poverty risk, creating a threat of polarization among working age households. The poverty risk of working age households does not seem to be directly connected to the unemployment rate or the share of long-term unemployment. This article asserts the importance of income transfers in poverty prevention. It also suggests that the significance of women’s paid employment as a poverty-reducing factor deserves further empirical study.

Systems Analysis of Social Security in a Transition Economy: The Ukrainian Case

This paper deals with a case study on the social security system in a transition economy in Ukraine. The severe socioeconomic crisis in Ukraine, including a huge decline of production, hyperinflation, and the informalization of the economy, caused both a substantial reduction of social security contributions and an increase in the number of people who need assistance. The creation of a sustainable economic system in the country requires the development of a new model of social security suited to the realities of a market economy. The objective of this paper is to investigate the current situation, trends, and possible ways of reforms in the Ukrainian social security system, taking into account specific features of the national economy, in particular the informal sector. The analysis focuses on the key component of social security - the pension system - and combines both qualitative and model-based approaches.

A Model of Conditional and Unconditional Social Security in an Efficiency Wage Economy: The Economic Sustainability of a Basic Income

This article identifies the circumstances under which the introduction of a basic income in an efficiency-wage economy leads to the desirable effects of lower unemployment, nondecreasing real incomes and profits, and an increase of secondary- versus primary-sector wages. The model analyses show that a moderate basic income can be compatible with lower unemployment, higher GDP,higher real incomes for workers, lower income inequality between workers, but a lower real income for the (voluntary) unemployed.

Social Security or Economic Insecurity? The Concentration of Unemployment (and Research) Within Households

ABSTRACTThe social security structure has been seen as a serious disincentive to the employment of women married to unemployed men. The implied significance of this disincentive is not apparent from verbal accounts, where only a minority of such women cite social security considerations as having any direct relevance in their own labour force experience. Recent research, critical of the social security model, has been conducted with a view to exploring the employment strategies of couples. In such research, economic structure is seen as the context of household employment strategies but not, it appears, as part of their substance; household level processes and ‘external’ economic processes are separated. In this respect, such approaches parallel the social security model. The present paper is based on an analysis of the household circumstances and employment histories of 790 couples in Hartlepool. Our findings suggest that ‘strategies’ regarding household income maintenance are patterned in relation to labour demand and occupational opportunity. This association contributes to the coincidence of spouses' employment status and is indicative of the problems of separating employment demand and labour supply processes, a separation which leads the social policy literature to overstate the significance of social security disincentives to employment.

O direito do trabalho no ano 2000

The article begins with the analysis of Edgard Morin on the year 2000, his symbology of numbers and the difference he establishes between theory and doctrine. It goes on to treat of the question of the socialist and social democrat models and their reflexes on our labor area, in what refers to paternalism and state intervention in the CLT (the labor code), corporations and the problem of parity in composition and the lay judges of the labor courts and also of the need to revise the model of union organization and social security. In what this last is concerned, the article examines section 194 of the Federal Constitution, that establishes its organization, commenting Laws # 8.212/91, section 3rd of the Law # 7.787/89, section 22, I, of Law # 8.212/91, section 195 of the Constitution and the eventual lacks constitutionality of these statutes, examining then Law # 8.213/91, known as the Benefits Law and the question of substitution of retirement for working time. The article ends with the prospect of a diminishing of state intervention from the year 2000 and the reflexes of this in the CLT, Labor Courts and Social Security.

A Median Voter Model of Social Security

This paper presents a theoretical median voter analysis of the determination of the level of social security. The framework for the analysis is a continuous-time, overlapping-generations model with nonaltruistic households facing borrowing constraints in the capital market. A majority voting equilibrium is shown to exist in which the median voter is liquidity-constrained. The desired level of social security for each voter is a declining function of the preexisting level of social security. As a consequence, in a sequence of votes on social security beginning with a zero level, the program initially overshoots its steady state value. Copyright 1989 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

Social Security As a Wage Subsidy Over The Life Cycle

The benefits received under Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance depend upon the earnings history of the earnings history of the individual. Several recent papers have argued that the Social Security payroll tax has a high yield when benefits are collected upon retirement, (cf. Burkhauser andTurner [1981a] and Blinder, Gordon and Wise [1980]). Consequently, Social Security provides a subsidy to work effort during a person's working life. This paper incorporates this subsidy into a life-cycle framework in order to examine the effects of Social Security on an individual's lifetime labor decision. The individual's life-cycle labor-supply decision includes the decision on when to retire. Several recent life-cycle models of Social Security (Sheshinski [1978], Diamond and Mirrless [1978] and Crawford and Lilien [1981]) have modeled retirement as a labor-force-participation decision in which an individual must choose at each point in time whether or not to remain in the labor force. However, the individual is not given the option of working part time. Is is shown in this paper that this restriction distorts the individual's optimal retirement decision. In the present paper, labor supply is completely variable. In order to focus on the effects of Social Security on the optimal labor path, a in which the optimal labor path is constant over the life-cycle is first presented. This serves as a base model upon which the effects of several variations can be observed.

A model of social security and retirement decisions

Abstract : The paper analyzes the potential inducement to retire earlier and the effects on lifetime savings in the presence of social security. The framework is a model of intertemporal utility maximization by individuals with endogenous retirement age. Aggregate behavior is examined against two alternative hypotheses. First, payments to and benefits from social security are equal for each generation. Second, a system based on a 'pay-as-you-go' principle which allows for intergenerational transfers. Among the issues analyzed: the possibility of multiple equilibria; the effects on the optimum retirement age and on the optimum wealth-income ratio at retirement of changes in the 'replacement ratio' and the effects of changes in the population long-run growth rate on implied tax-rates. (Author)