This comprehensive survey of key welfare policy issues, in an age of globalization and ageing populations, draws on comparative OECD data and case studies from Scandinavia. Torben Andersen and Per Molander provide a forceful analysis of the main challenges to the traditional public sector welfare state and explore the principal policy options open to governments in advanced economies. They assess the advantages and disadvantages of alternative welfare regimes with less reliance on public sector involvement.

The price adjustment process is crucial to almost any macroeconomic issue. Current macroeconomic literature features widely different models ranking from instantaneous price adjustment to completely rigid prices. Professor Andersen provides a comprehensive analysis of reasons why prices may fail to adjust instantaneously to changes in market conditions. This unified treatment will allow the reader to understand the mechanisms at work without becoming lost in technical details. This volume covers both real and nominal price rigidities and integrates existing results from the literature with new results on causes for failures of price adjustment. The analysis of real price rigidities includes inventories, customer markets, search and collusive behaviour. Due to the focus on macroeconomic implications, the analysis of nominal price rigidities is extensive and includes menu costs, informational problems, asynchronized price setting as well as the interaction between price and wage setting. Professor Andersen's own theoretical work on imperfect information, a prime source of price and wage rigidity, is given prominence in the book. The volume is thus a combination of a valuable survey of the literature, and an original expression of future possible research avenues.

The need for pension reform is widely discussed against the backdrop of falling fertility rates and rising longevity. These developments challenge pension systems which in many countries already encounter problems with pension adequacy and financial sustainability. In the debate, reference is often made to Denmark as a model for pension system reform. This book offers the first coherent and in-depth description and analysis of the Danish pension system and its structure and performance. As is well-known to scholars and experts, there is a huge leap from considering general characterisations of pension systems in terms of various performance indicators to understand the structure of particular pension systems. This book aims to introduce these aspects to an international readership, explaining the structure and design of the pension system and its performance, benefit structure, regulation, critical reforms, and macroeconomic implications, as well as investment policies in pension funds in general.

Demographic change and increasingly international markets are putting severe pressure on developed welfare states in the OECD countries. The contributors to this book assess the magnitude of these challenges and discuss in depth, and in concrete terms, what policy options are open to meet them. Looking at public service production, social insurance, tax policy and debt policy, they examine the main costs and benefits associated with an extensive welfare state and ask whether the same objectives can be reached with a welfare regime that is less costly. They also discuss whether the organization of the welfare state is capable of meeting future challenges facing a changing society. This rigorous analysis draws on empirical material from OECD countries with a focus on the Scandinavian countries.