What Can the United States Learn from the Nordic Model?

Some policymakers in the United States and Europe argue that it is possible to enjoy economic growth and also have a large welfare state. These advocates for bigger government claim that the socalled Nordic Model offers the best of both worlds. This claim does not withstand scrutiny. Economic performance in Nordic nations is lagging, and excessive government is the most likely explanation. The public sector in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland consumes, on average, more than 48 percent of economic output. Total government outlays in the United States, by contrast, are less than 37 percent of gross domestic product. Revenue comparisons are even more striking. Tax receipts average more than 45 percent of GDP in Nordic nations, a full 20 percentage points higher than the aggregate tax burden in the United States. This bigger burden of government hurts Nordic competitiveness, both because government spending consumes resources that could be more efficiently allocated by market forces and because the accompanying high tax rates discourage productive behavior. A smaller state sector is one reason why the United States is more prosperous. Per capita GDP in the United States is more than 15 percent higher than it is in the Nordic nations. The gap is even larger when comparing disposable income, private consumption, and other measures that reflect living standards. Notwithstanding problems associated with a large welfare state, there is much to applaud in Nordic nations. They have open markets, low levels of regulation, strong property rights, stable currencies, and many other policies associated with growth and prosperity. Indeed, Nordic nations generally rank among the world's most market-oriented nations. Nordic nations also have implemented some pro-market reforms. Every Nordic nation has a lower corporate tax rate than the United States, for example, and most of them have low-rate flat tax systems for capital income. Iceland even has a flat tax for labor income. And both Iceland and Sweden have partially privatized their social security retirement systems. The Nordic nations offer valuable lessons for policymakers, but they do not fit the traditional stereotype. Conservative critics correctly condemn the large welfare states, but often overlook the positive results generated by laissez-faire policies in other areas. Liberals, meanwhile, exaggerate the economic performance of Nordic nations in an effort to justify welfare-state policies, while failing to acknowledge the role of freemarket policies in other areas

Union Wage Determination: Policy Implications and Outlook

macroeconomics, wage determination, inflation, unions

Public Jobs and Public Agendas: The Public Sector in an Era of Economic Stress

[Excerpt] The issues described in this volume\u27s chapters remained in flux as this book was being completed. The U.S. economy was in a recovery phase, albeit a recovery at a rather lackluster pace. Because of the lags in adjustment in state and local governments, the public sector was coping with prior circumstances even as the private sector resumed an economic expansion. At the international level, some European elections in the aftermath of the Great Recession have suggested that there is public frustration with austerity policies. The Great Recession occurred in an era of political polarization, which the sharp downturn exacerbated. As a result, resolving the issues related to public sector employment was complicated by an infusion of ideology. Working out the problems that remain unresolved is likely to be marked by continued partisan struggles in state and local affairs, and in similar conflicts around the world

Wage Pressures and Labor Shortages: The 1960s and 1980s

macroeconomics, labor shortage,wage

Beyond disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) : developing indicators to assess the impact of public health interventions on the lives of people with disabilities

This paper proposes two measures for assessing the impact of interventions on the lives of disabled people, the Activity Limitation Score (ALS) and the Participation restriction Score (PRS). These measures are closely linked to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and the social model of disability. The authors believe these measures can become important tools in monitoring the implementation of the recently ratified United Nations (UN) convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. The structure of this paper is as follows: after briefly describing the social model of disability and the ICF, the authors present a series of indicators for capturing the functional status of individuals. Then, using household survey data from Zambia, the authors explore the usefulness of this measure as it relates to economic development outcomes.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Disease Control&Prevention,Population Policies,Disability,Housing&Human Habitats

Recent Union Contract Concessions

macroeconomics, union concessions

Shifting Norms in Wage Determination

macroeconomics, wages, wage determination, norm shift, manufacturing, trucking, union labor

Megahertz Schlieren Imaging of Shock Structure and Sound Waves in Under-Expanded, Impinging Jets

The accompanying fluid dynamics videos visualize the temporal evolution of shock structures and sound waves in and around an under-expanded jet that is impinging on a rigid surface at varying pressure ratios. The recordings were obtained at frame rates of 500 kHz to 1 Mhz using a novel pulsed illumination source based on a high power light emitting diode (LED) which is operated in pulsed current mode synchronized to the camera frame rate.Comment: Contribution to "Gallery of Fluid Motion", 63rd Annual APS-DFD Meeting, Long Beach (CA

Improving Neural Parsing by Disentangling Model Combination and Reranking Effects

Recent work has proposed several generative neural models for constituency parsing that achieve state-of-the-art results. Since direct search in these generative models is difficult, they have primarily been used to rescore candidate outputs from base parsers in which decoding is more straightforward. We first present an algorithm for direct search in these generative models. We then demonstrate that the rescoring results are at least partly due to implicit model combination rather than reranking effects. Finally, we show that explicit model combination can improve performance even further, resulting in new state-of-the-art numbers on the PTB of 94.25 F1 when training only on gold data and 94.66 F1 when using external data.Comment: ACL 2017. The first two authors contributed equall