Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century

ISBN-13: 9780521529167 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 377 str.

Peter H. Lindert

Opis

Peter Lindert inquires as to whether social policies that redistribute income impose constraints on economic growth. Although taxes and transfers have been debated for centuries, only recently have we been able to obtain a clear view of the evolution of social spending. Lindert argues that, contrary to the intuition of many economists and the ideology of many politicians, social spending has contributed to, rather than inhibited, economic growth. Peter Lindert is a prize-winning researcher and teacher at the University of California-Davis where he serves as President of the Economic History Association and as Co-Editor of its journal. His textbooks in international economics have been translated into at least eight other languages, and he has previously taught at the University of Essex, Harvard University, Moscow State University, and University of Wisconsin.

Recenzje

'These volumes are the output of a remarkably ambitious project by a senioe economic historian. … these volumes deserve to be very widely read. They provide a tremendous historical context for present policy debates and are full of usefully provocative claimes while also providing a wealth of detail on the evolution of social spending.' Journal of Economic Inequality

Spis treści

Part I. Overview: 1. Patterns and puzzles; 2. Findings; Part II. The Rise of Social Spending: 3. Poor relief before 1880; 4. Interpreting the patterns of early poor relief; 5. The rise of mass public schooling before 1914; 6. Public schooling in the twentieth century: what happened to American leadership?; 7. Explaining the rise of social transfers since 1880; Part III. Prospects for Social Transfers: 8. The public pension crisis; 9. Social transfers in the second and third worlds; Part IV. What Effects on Economic Growth?: 10. Keys to the free-lunch puzzle; 11. On the well-known demise of the Swedish Welfare State; 12. How the keys were made: democracy and cost control.