Liberalism, Democracy, and Socialism

Quantitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations: VIII. Distribution of Income by Size

We examine the heterogeneous and dynamic impact of China's New Rural Pension Scheme on intergenerational wealth dependence using a nationally representative longitudinal household survey covering the period 2011-13.We adopt an instrumental quantile regressiondiscontinuity design to address the endogeneity of partial compliance of the pension scheme and the observed individual heterogeneity.Overall, we find that the pension scheme smooths wealth dependence between generations in the short term, but strengthens the persistence of assets among the wealthiest households in the medium term.The mechanisms underlying these distributional effects are intergenerational transfers, time reallocation, and filial adjustments of the wealth portfolio.Complementary policy interventions, particularly for the poor across generations, would be needed to neutralize the distributional impact of the pension in terms of intergenerational wealth persistence.

Increasing socioeconomic disparities, including in life expectancy, have important implications for the U.S. Social Security program. This study examined inter- and intracohort trends in Social Security retirement benefits, paying special attention to how lifetime benefit trajectories by socioeconomic circumstance shift across cohorts encompassing current and future retirees. Using a dynamic microsimulation model based on representative survey data linked to administrative records, we developed a set of cohort-specific projections that estimate monthly and lifetime Social Security retirement benefits for retirees spanning the early baby boom (1945-1954) to Generation X (1965-1974) cohorts. We found a widening socioeconomic gap in projected monthly and lifetime benefits for men and women, especially on a lifetime basis. This divergence is associated with stagnation of benefit levels among lower socioeconomic status groups coupled with upward shifts among higher strata groups. Distributional changes are linked with increasing differential mortality, but other factors also likely play a role such as rising education premiums, growing earnings inequality, and changes in women's work and relationship histories. Widening mortality differentials can lead to distributional changes in the U.S. Social Security program. Microsimulation methodology lends insights into how the socioeconomic gap in monthly and lifetime benefit distributions may change among future older Americans in the context of differential mortality and other demographic changes. Moving forward in time, these complex patterns could offset some of the progressivity built into the system.

How rich should the 1% be? And, most importantly, when does the distance in economic resources between the richest citizens and ‘us’, the average citizenry, become a concern for justice? This volume explores how excessive economic inequality gives the best-off considerably more political influence than average citizens, thereby violating political equality. It argues that the gap between the best-off and the worst-off should not be reduced because it is good, but rather as an inescapable instrument to protect citizens from the risk of material domination. For this reason, it defends the ‘principle of proportionality’: economic inequality should not exceed a certain range or proportion to enable both the best-off and the worst-off to be co-authors of the legal, political, and socioeconomic rules that govern the ‘social’ relations in which they are involved. Further, the book discusses material domination and explains how money influences politics and what are the remedies for this phenomenon; how social justice should face and harmonise power, poverty, efficiency, individual merit, and economic liberties; and, most importantly, how to determine income and wealth limit ratios in a liberal democracy. A thoughtful investigation on the interdependencies of money and justice and their influence our socio-political systems, this volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of political theory, political philosophy, economics and development, economics theory and philosophy, and social policy.

Objective: Social insurance policies have played a crucial role as a cornerstone in the social security system, contributing positively to social stability and the realization of goals for a prosperous, strong, fair, democratic, and civilized society. The current legal framework on social insurance in Vietnam stipulates provisions to ensure the rights of workers in all cases, including regulations regarding one-time social insurance cases. Although the significance of receiving one-time social insurance aligns with the legal provisions for each case, the lack of understanding among workers regarding the significance of social insurance policies or their deliberate acceptance of one-time social insurance can have unpredictable consequences for society, the social insurance system, and the workers themselves... The study builds on the situation of receiving social insurance in Vietnam and makes a case study of consequences for once workers receive social insurance suggesting solutions to mitigate the situation. Method: The study is based on a method to collect secondary data on the status of social insurance once received in Vietnam through data channels. This data is presented and analyzed by the descriptive statistical method (mainly in the form of tables and charts) that will see the situation for receiving social insurance once in Vietnam over time. In order to conduct the research, the method applied in this article is a qualitative method including: The systematic approach to the research materials, legal regulations related to the research; The integrated analysis method is used to analyze and synthesize the situation of receiving social insurance once in Vietnam; The objective methodology is used by the author to argue, the views of the individual, along with the combination of perspectives of other studies of nature to make a broad consensus about a particular problem. Results: The results of the study show that although social insurance policies were established to protect workers from income risk, they can lead a stable future life. Rules on one-off social insurance regimes can help resolve many special cases of workers. However, research shows that the number of people who choose to receive social insurance in Vietnam in the period of 2014-2023 has increased greatly. The increase of the number of people who receive social insurance once means the increase in the number of people leaving the system, making it difficult to achieve the goal of universal social insurance coverage in the spirit of resolution No. 28-NQ/TW of the XII Central Committee. Actual data suggest that on average 1 new person is entering social insurance, there is 1 old person leaving the system. The number of people withdrawn the following year was always higher than the previous year with an average annual increase of about 10%. The proportion of workers that have returned from social insurance benefits to continue their low participation in social insurance. In the period of 2016-2022, the country had more than 4.8 million workers requesting and resolving social insurance once. After receiving social insurance coverage once, approximately 1.3 million people returned to continue the social insurance penetration. Thus, the proportion of workers who have been remarried to social insurance benefits is 26%, and the remaining 74% of those who have received social insurance benefits once, corresponding to about 3.5 million who do not return to social insurance contributions, meaning that they are not guaranteed short-term benefits in the process of continuing labor such as sickness, maternity, occupational accidents, unemployment and long-term retirement. Conclusion: Receiving one-time social insurance benefits of workers will have some consequences for the social insurance system, for Society and Workers in the current context of Vietnam population aging trends lead to the number of people who do not have a monthly pension in Vietnam accounting for a large proportion of approximately 10 million people, this shows that the lack of sustainability of the Social Security system in general creates pressure for the community and the workers themselves will not be protected from the immediate benefits and long-term social insurance system.

It has now become fairly commonplace to maintain that there is a ‘functional fit’ between capitalist social relations and representative (or liberal or bourgeois) democracy. This has been argued by conservatives such as Friedman, who claim that capitalist economic organisation promotes political as well as economic freedom;1 by radicals, such as Macpherson, who maintains both that liberal-democracy is found only in countries with capitalist enterprises and that, with a few exceptions, all countries with such enterprises develop liberal-democratic institutions;2 and by Marxists such as Lenin, who argue that a democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism.3 Yet there are obviously a number of difficulties in these arguments. On the one hand, if we consider all these societies in which the CMP has been dominant, then probably only a minority have in fact been organised in a representative democratic manner. Political democracy, by which I mean universal adult suffrage, a representative parliament to some extent controlling the executive and judiciary, and institutionalised freedoms of election, speech, association, and so on is a twentieth-century phenomenon mainly of Western European and North American capitalism. It did not occur in nineteenth-century capitalism, nor has it developed in large numbers of peripheral capitalist societies.

The scope of this study is to show the progressive legal and social effectiveness of the monthly pecuniary benefit set forth in article 203, V, of the Constitution of 1988 and in Law 8,742/1993, as one of the public policies to fight social-economic extreme poverty in Brazil. We shall depart from the analysis of data concerning Brazilian reality, in order to prove the statement that this is a country with significant economic potential, but rather unequal regarding the distribution of wealth, with relevant numbers of poverty and extreme poverty. Brazilian historic legal framework brings several obligations to the public administration concerning social rights, guarantees, and duties, but the constitutional system of 1988 was the one that provided for a monthly pecuniary stipend as a systematic social protection benefit to fight extreme poverty and socio-economic inequalities. Under this scenario, Law 8,742/1993 has significant legal effectiveness, shown by relevant figures. There is still a long way to go, with several problems to be solved, but the legal effectiveness of this social protection benefit has been an important measure to efficiently fight extreme poverty in Brazil.

Most developed nations provide generous coverage of care services, using either a tax financed healthcare system or social health insurance. Such systems pursue efficiency and equity in care provision. Efficiency means that expenditures are minimized for a given level of care services. Equity means that individuals with equal needs have equal access to the benefit package. In order to limit expenditures, social health insurance systems explicitly limit their benefit package. Moreover, most such systems have introduced cost sharing so that beneficiaries bear some cost when using care services. These limits on coverage create room for private insurance that complements or supplements social health insurance. Everywhere, social health insurance coexists along with voluntarily purchased supplementary private insurance. While the latter generally covers a small portion of health expenditures, it can interfere with the functioning of social health insurance. Supplementary health insurance can be detrimental to efficiency through several mechanisms. It limits competition in managed competition settings. It favors excessive care consumption through coverage of cost sharing and of services that are complementary to those included in social insurance benefits. It can also hinder achievement of the equity goals inherent to social insurance. Supplementary insurance creates inequality in access to services included in the social benefits package. Individuals with high incomes are more likely to buy supplementary insurance, and the additional care consumption resulting from better coverage creates additional costs that are borne by social health insurance. In addition, there are other anti-redistributive mechanisms from high to low risks. Social health insurance should be designed, not as an isolated institution, but with an awareness of the existence—and the possible expansion—of supplementary health insurance.

In recent years a heated debate has been taking place (and is still going on) whether the development of social (security) policies influences the general economic growth in a positive or negative way. Whereas Korpi (1985) finds a positive relationship and Rothschild (1982, 580) concludes, “that there are at the present no signs that Welfare State activities have by themselves net harmful effects on economic efficiency or economic growth”, Bernholz (1982, 584) asks, “can modern Western democracies survive with an expanding system of social welfare?” In his latest study (1985) Bernholz is quite sceptical in his answer, where he is in line with most other studies. They all reach more or less the same conclusion that, due to the rapid increase of social expenditures after the Second World War, welfare state activities have at least reached an absolute maxium or have even passed their limits so that the negative consequences (e.g. like rising disincentives to work, a low savings rate, increasing shadow activities), outbalance the benefits1. That social expenditures have increased quite drastically over the last 25 years in most Western democracies (see Table 1) should impress any observer. But to conclude from these developments that one should simply reduce state activities and the negative consequences will diminish may be quite misleading2. Before suggestions are proposed, e.g. to cut drastically social expenditures, it should be considered that “social policy has become an essential element in the political economy of all modern industrial states” (Rothschild 1982, 579). Therefore, first a positive analysis of the political institutions should be made in which social policies take place and which set the frame where the most important actors (voters/taxpayers, government, interest groups) operate3. When we know how voters/taxpayers and important interest groups will react to government policy proposals, we are able to evaluate how successful changes in social policies can be achieved.

Individual and social rights to property have been discussed by celebrated thinkers from the time of the Greeks. Restricting myself to Catholic thought,11 focus on Leo XIIFs declaration in Rerum Novarum (RN) that every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own, meaning that individuals have from their nature as human beings the right to appropriate the benefits of property. Adding the qualification of so using them to assist others, papal and episcopal teachings have repeated this doctrine to the present, though with differing emphasis on individual and social benefit. Yet, this natural right to private property has remained controversial among Catholics, partly for the argument itself and partly for what it may imply respecting distribution of wealth and control over the means of production, particularly in countries where Catholic teaching2 has social importance. This article aims (a) to clarify the natural right to property, including the passage from principle to applications, and (b) to comment on the private and social benefit aspects, with particular reference to the state and concentrations of wealth and means of production. My central point is that, after allowing for development of doctrine (Newman, 1845), Leo's declaration remains valid for modern society and that private property must be one foundation of any modern economy corresponding with human nature.

This paper examines the effect of economic interdependence, intergovernmental organizations, political freedom, and spatial relationship on foreign diplomatic presence in the U.S. from 1980 to 2000. Spatial perspective is largely missing in the mainstream international theories. Spatial relationship has three measures: spatial proximity measured as distance, spatial dependency measured as neighborhood effect, and spatial heterogeneity measured as regional effect. We found that the effect of economic interdependence is directional. The U.S. sensitivity to foreign trade rather than foreign sensitivity to trade with the U.S. explains much of the variation in the foreign diplomatic presence in the U.S. Spatial effect is mainly manifested as spatial dependency; the effects of geographic proximity and geographic regions on foreign diplomatic presence are, however, mild. Spatial dependency in the variation of foreign diplomatic presence in the U.S. could not be well explained by the liberal perspective without using the spatial model.

DUALIST POPULAR CONSTITUTIONALISM A Reply to Michelman

A Century of Progress Adrian Karatnycky (bio) In a year when freedom did not make dramatic further strides in the world, it is important to remember that—despite fits and starts—human liberty has been on an upward trajectory throughout the twentieth century. When viewed from the perspective of the century as a whole, democracy has made important and dramatic progress. A look at the political maps of the world in 1900, 1950, and 2000 reveals monumental shifts in the number and nature of sovereign polities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were 55 sovereign polities, 55 entities that were governed by colonial and imperial systems, and 20 protectorates under the sway or protection of foreign powers. No polity enjoyed competitive multiparty politics with universal suffrage, essential characteristics of an electoral democracy. A mere 12.4 percent of mankind lived under a form of government that could be deemed somewhat democratic, although suffrage was generally limited to males. In the United States, women could not vote, and the voting rights of racial minorities and the poor were restricted. Twenty-four other countries with some form of democratic government maintained similarly restrictive democratic practices, denying voting rights to women, racial minorities, and those without property. By contrast, 55.8 percent of the world’s population lived under some form of monarchy (with 36.6 percent of the global population under absolute monarchic rule), and an additional 30.2 percent lived under colonial and imperial domination. By 1950, the number of sovereign polities had risen to 80. With [End Page 187] colonialism on the decline, the number of entities still under colonial and imperial rule had fallen to 43, while 31 entities remained protectorates, many of them former colonies making the transition to independence. In the aftermath of World War II, there was also a significant expansion in the number of democratically elected governments. In 1950, 22 democratic states accounted for 31 percent of the world’s population. Countries with restrictive democratic practices (that is, countries with systems in which a single party exercised long-term political dominance and the role of opposition parties was limited [for example, the Philippines and Cuba in 1950] and countries in which women or ethnic minorities were excluded from the electoral process [for example, Colombia and Switzerland in 1950]) accounted for a further 11.9 percent of the world population. The middle of the twentieth century also witnessed the spread of totalitarian communism as an alternative form of government, under which a third of the world’s population then lived. By the end of the twentieth century, sovereignty and electoral democracy both registered dramatic gains. The number of sovereign states more than doubled, from 80 in 1950 to 192 in 1999 (which includes the international protectorates of East Timor and Bosnia-Herzegovina). The end of the century has also seen the virtual elimination of colonial and imperial rule. Today, 58.2 percent of the world’s population lives under democratically elected leadership, while another 5 percent resides in states with restricted democratic practices (such as Malaysia, where the ruling party enjoys overwhelming electoral advantages and systematically works to suppress political space for opposition parties, and Mexico, whose parliament was elected in a democratic process but whose presidential election of 1994 was conducted in a less than free and fair fashion). In sum, electoral democracies constitute 120 of the 192 internationally recognized independent polities. Indeed the idea of national sovereignty has generally been accompanied by the idea of personal sovereignty within a democratically accountable state. The trend toward democratically elected government has been accompanied by a trend toward broader political freedom and enhanced civil liberties. The adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights helped spark a growing global awareness of human freedom. Central to the spread of this awareness has been the ongoing revolution in communications technology, which has decentralized state control of information and allowed for its cheaper and more rapid dissemination. Freedom House’s end-of-century survey of Freedom in the World finds that 85 of the world’s 192 countries (44 percent) are Free, meaning that these countries maintain a high degree of political and economic freedom and...

The role and place of the ethical approach in Russia’s social and economic policy are shown; ethical aspects of economic policy are considered; basic ethical principles which should be taken into account in the process of development of social and economic policy are offered. Ethical requirements to such basic directions of state economic policy as fiscal and price policy, labor policy, social policy, institutional policy, etc. are described.

Many believe that global capital markets will generate lower returns in the future versus the past. We examine how persistently lower real returns will reshape work, retirement, saving, and investment behavior of older persons using a calibrated dynamic life cycle model. In a low return regime, workers build up less wealth in their tax-qualified 401(k) accounts versus the past, claim social security benefits later, and work more. Moreover, the better-educated are more sensitive to real interest rate changes, while the least-educated alter their behavior less. Interestingly, the distribution of wealth is more uniform in periods of persistent low expected returns.