How to change the welfare state from a Taxation to a Savings based model
Roger Douglas & Robert MacCulloch
What the paper says
The future of public welfare states is in doubt as costs trend up due to population ageing. Yet there is little agreement about how to reform them. We show how tax cuts can be designed to establish mandatory savings accounts so that a (mostly) publicly funded and provided welfare system can be changed into one that relies largely on private funding and private suppliers. Greater competition in the provision of health-care services offers the potential for significant efficiency gains. The government retains sufficient revenues to act as ‘insurer of last resort’ for those individuals unable to meet welfare costs out of their savings accounts. To our knowledge, showing how both a tax and welfare reform can be jointly designed to enable the transition to this new type of system to occur in a potentially politically feasible way has not been done before.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.