http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/260/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/10438/ 2007-07-02T00:00:00Z How does global aging affect the convergence in global economic development? Both the developing and developed world will be characterized for the coming decades by aging populations. Changes in the age distribution of a population are an important determinant of economic performance as they affect wealth accumulation and dependency burdens, yielding a demographic dividend of extra growth. During the twenty years from 1975 to 2005 Europe and the US have benefited from a strong demographic dividend. However, in the decades to come this effect will be reversed and the driving force behind the wealth of nations has to be sought elsewhere. Africa and, to some extent, India might benefit from the demographic dividend. However, this potential growth phase may well disappear if supporting conditions for growth are absent. Large-scale migration is not expected to be a sustainable solution to unbalanced global economic developments. Remittances, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Official Development Assistance (ODA) will remain necessary capital flows for the developing world in the near future. Remittances offer no structural solution to reduction of poverty as these funds flow to a selective group of families and are allocated generally to consumption rather than to investment purposes. Migration of a temporary nature in conjunction with offshore outsourcing of services and production may offer a solution for the dilemmas of population and development, which OECD donors face in offering development assistance and designing immigration policy. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/8170/ 2006-12-01T00:00:00Z The emergence of the housewife in the Netherlands over the period 1812-1922 was strongly influenced by the social norm that women should withdraw from the labour market on the eve of marriage. Adherence to this norm is most clearly reflected in the emergence of the housewife among the lower classes, especially at the close of the nineteenth century among wives of farmers. Women in urban municipalities, however, set the norm far earlier and differences across social classes were significantly larger in towns than in rural areas. Paradoxically, the rise of the housewife did not change work pressures for lower–class women. This paradox is resolved by noting that they substituted registered work for unregistered work, e.g., in house industries, working in the family firm or farm. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/8074/ 2006-10-09T00:00:00Z Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner. Counterfactuals suggest that full insurance coverage of the Chinese population will not radically change the health care decisions and may even enlarge the perverse effects of today’s health care system: insured persons are more likely to fall back on self-care when they are injured or ill than on the care of a local clinic. This effect is particularly strong in urban areas. In case of a severe injury hospital consultation is preferred to local clinic or self-care by most people, but still a substantial percentage (20 percent) resorts to self-care or ignores the illness. The high level of out-of-pocket expenses paid by both insured and uninsured patients lies at t! he root of this problem. Insurance does not offer real protection against unpredictable high health care expenditures and can lead people into a position of long-term poverty or serious liquidity problems. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7670/ 2006-04-03T00:00:00Z This study explored the psychological mechanisms that underlie the retirement planning and saving tendencies of Dutch and American workers. Participants were 988 Dutch and 429 Americans, 25-64 years of age. Analyses were designed to: (a) examine the extent to which structural variables were related to planning tendencies, and (b) develop culture-specific path analysis models to identify the mechanisms that underlie perceived financial preparedness for retirement. Findings revealed striking differences across the Netherlands and the United States not only among structural variables predictive of key psychological and retirement planning constructs, but also in the robustness of the path models. These findings suggest that policy analysts should take into account both individual and cultural differences in the psychological predispositions of workers when considering pension reforms that stress individual responsibility for planning and saving. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7600/ 2006-03-08T00:00:00Z Why do people leave high-income countries with extensive welfare states? This article will examine what underlies the emigration intentions of native-born inhabitants of one industrialized country in particular: the Netherlands. To understand emigration from high-income countries we focus not only on factors that refer to individual characteristics, but also on the perception of the quality of the public domain, which involves institutions (social security, educational system, law and order) as well as the 'public goods' these institutions produce: social protection, safety, environmental quality, education, etc. Based on data about the emigration intentions of the Dutch population collected during the years 2004-2005 we conclude that besides traditional characteristics of potential emigrants - young, single, male, having a network in the country of destination, higher educated, seeking new sensations - modern-day emigrants are motivated not so much by private circumstances but by a longing for a better public domain. In particular, emigrants are in search of a better quality of life as approximated by the presence of nature, space, silence, and a less populated country. To gauge the effect of the quality of the public domain, a counterfactual scenario is offered, which suggests that a perception of severe neglect of the public domain substantially increases the pressure to emigrate. Under this scenario, approximately 20 percent of the Dutch population would express an intention to emigrate. Compared with the level of emigration intentions measured today, this represents an increase by a factor of 5. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7424/ 2006-01-06T00:00:00Z This paper tries to establish who carries the burden in supporting reproductive health and AIDS programs worldwide. The 1994 International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo established goals for the expansion of assistance in matters of reproductive health and AIDS. This global effort has so far not sufficiently been supported by funds and this paper looks at what lies behind the level of funds and the sharing of financial burdens. Panel data on expenditures for population and AIDS activities funded by 21 donor countries for the years 1983-2002 are examined by means of dynamic panel data estimation. On an aggregated scale small donors 'exploit' the large donors: large donors give more resources than their 'fair share', i.e. their income weight in the group of donors. However, this picture is not true for the finance and support for multilateral organizations where every donor country pays its fair share. The exploitation hypothesis is true for the cases of bilateral aid and NGOs. The exploitation model gives however a partial view of what determines the sharing of burdens. To understand burden sharing across countries fully one needs to take account of the most dominant religions in a country, the pro-foreign aid stance of a government and the government size. Donor countries are not much affected in their funding behavior by the state of development of the least developed countries. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6707/ 2005-06-15T00:00:00Z The 1994 International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) established goals for the expansion of population assistance. This global effort has so far not sufficiently been supported by donor funds. Dynamic panel estimation methods are used to see what lies behind the sharing of burdens and level of donor contributions. Panel data on expenditures for population and AIDS activities have been collected for 21 donor countries for the years 1996-2002. Donor countries are willing to contribute to the ICPD agenda, but those contributions depend heavily on national interests and preferences and to a lesser extent on the development state of less developed countries. Political opportunism in the timing of funds is not strong. With respect to the sharing of the ICPD burden within the group of OECD/DAC countries one can say that on an aggregated scale the burden of population assistance programs is in line with the ability to pay of donor countries. Differences in funding are more connected to other factors such as the size of governments, the state of development of a country and the dominant religions in donor countries. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6591/ 2005-03-14T00:00:00Z What determines remittances – altruism or enlightened self-interest - and do remittances trigger additional migration? These two questions are examined empirically in Egypt, Turkey and Morocco for households with family members living abroad. Results show, first, that one cannot clearly pinpoint altruistic or motives of self-interest since each country tells a different story and within a country both motives can be defended as driving forces behind remittance behaviour. A general conclusion based on a multi-country study is that the family ties and the net earnings potential of emigrants have stronger effects on receipt of remittances than net earnings potential of households in the country of origin. Second, the receipt of remittances has a positive effect on emigration intentions of household members living in the country of origin. Therefore, receipt of remittances may contribute to new flows of migration, in particular in the case of Morocco. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6604/ 2005-01-04T00:00:00Z Science is a winner-take-all profession in which only few contributions get excessive attention and the large majority of papers remains receives scant or no attention. This so-called ‘waste’ together with all the competitive strategies of scientists seeking attention is part and parcel of any creative profession and not a worrisome fact as the price society pays for human ingenuity is extremely small: 0.0006 percent of world income goes into the publication of scientific research. The more worrisome features of competition in academic economics reveal themselves not through ordinary citation or publication statistics or competitive attention seeking strategies. The badly designed use of market principles in which citations and publications have become the sole measuring rod of scientific ‘productivity’ deserve more attention instead of the excessive focus of attention on uncitedness as such. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6613/ 2004-10-15T00:00:00Z Which signals are important in gaining attention in science? For a group of 1,371 scientific articles published in 17 demography journals in the years 1990-1992 we track their influence and discern which signals are important in receiving citations. Three types of signals are examined: the author’s reputation (as producer of the idea), the journal (as the broker of the idea), and the state of uncitedness (as an indication of the assessment by the scientific community of an idea). The empirical analysis points out that, first, the reputation of journals plays an overriding role in gaining attention in science. Second, in contrast to common wisdom, the state of uncitedness does not affect the future probability of being cited. And third, the reputation of a journal may help to get late recognition (so-called ‘sleeping beauties’) as well as generate so-called ‘flash-in-the-pans’: immediately noted articles but apparently not very influential in the long run. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6695/ 2003-12-16T00:00:00Z What drives stated preferences about the number of foreigners? Is it self-interest as stressed by the political economy of immigration? Does social interaction affect this preference or is the immigration preference completely in line with the preference for the aggregate population size? In this paper we distinguish each of these categories and show for the case of the Netherlands that each of these elements applies although the effect of population size preference and the self-interest are the most important elements. There is a clear divide across educational levels as the lower educated are more against immigration than the highly educated. Experience with foreigners arising from social contact matters in positively appreciating immigrants, especially if one meets (non-western) foreigners at work and school. Contact with foreigners while going out decreases the preference for immigrants. The ethnic composition of the neighbourhood in which one lives does not ex! ert a significant effect on the evaluation of the number of foreigners present. The biggest effect on immigration preferences is, however, the aggregate population size preference of respondents. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6710/ 2003-11-10T00:00:00Z A pluralist approach to economics is both necessary from an academic as well a policy point of view. From an academic viewpoint pluralism can be understood as the outcome of competition and specialization in the search for new ideas that can deal with imperfections of the real world. From a policy point of view a diversity of view is also desirable as it helps to spread the risk of large mistakes in policy choices. However, the present-day teaching practices and textbooks are by and large not well suited to deal with a pluralist approach. Possible routes of that can help to enrich teaching and curricula are: (1) teaching the art of economic policy; (2) stress teaching economics by learning from the past; (3) teach by becoming imperialist so that a conversation between discipline gets underway; (4) merge business and general economics as the dividing line between the two is nowadays quite thin; (5) practice Reality Economics; and (6) teach basic principles (especially in the bachelors stage) in a ‘Socratesian’ manner, i.e. let students learn economics by doing (e.g. by experimental economics or interviewing businessmen). http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/894/ 2003-09-16T00:00:00Z Dit rapport doet verslag van een in opdracht van het Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid door OCFEB verrichte studie. Het onderzoek is mede geïnspireerd door het zogenoemde ?proces van Lissabon?, dat erin moet resulteren dat de Europese Unie (EU) binnen tien jaar de meest concurrerende en dynamische kenniseconomie van de wereld is. Op basis van empirische feiten ontleend aan recente economische literatuur wordt in kaart gebracht hoe het proces van economische integratie in de EU zich heeft gemanifesteerd, welke verschillen er (nog) bestaan tussen de lidstaten en wat mogelijke belemmeringen van de economische dynamiek in Europa zijn. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/812/ 2003-09-02T00:00:00Z Early retirement from the labour force has become standard practice for most employees in the industrialised world. However, as a result of the rising costs of early retirement schemes, curbing the outflow of older workers from the labour force has become a central government policy objective. Early retirement reforms under which benefits are financed on a more actuarially neutral basis are currently being implemented in the Netherlands. At present it is not clear how older workers will react to these policy reforms. In this paper we examine the extent to which (Dutch) older workers are inclined to change their retirement intentions in response to new early retirement arrangements. On the basis of a labour market and a population survey we examine retirement intentions under alternative early retirement policies. The overall conclusion is that the retirement reform may lead to a substantial delay of the retirement date, but that in practice more forces than the financial incentives are at work. This is also reflected in the long-run early retirement trend. This trend presents demographers and economists with a puzzle because a break shows up in the time series but this break has set in before the actual early retirement reforms were put into practice. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6704/ 2003-07-09T00:00:00Z This paper evaluates the strength of social and economic forces that affect the pressure to emigrate 'out of Africa' for four distinctly different African countries (Morocco, Egypt, Senegal and Ghana). In general, great expectations about attaining a higher living standard and expected low job search costs abroad are strong forces that drive emigration intentions out of Africa, especially in Ghana and Senegal. Signs of positive selection with respect to the level of education of potential migrants are only present in Ghana and Egypt. The differences in intentions by age and sex are also quite noteworthy, although the influence of sex differs quite distinctly across countries. Return migrants are on average more set to emigrating judging from their stated intentions although there are signs of negative selection within the group of return migrants in Ghana and Egypt. The network effects of potential migrants turn out to be less important than one might expect from actual migration behaviour. Both ties within the household with household members who have international migration experience and ties with current migrants affect intentions only in Ghana and Egypt and it affects the intentions of women far stronger than that of men. The implication of these findings is that due to the slow growth prospects of these African countries the pressure to emigrate 'out of Africa' can be a long lasting phenomenon. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6702/ 2003-07-07T00:00:00Z How much does a nation spend on resources to 'grease the wheels of trade'? To examine this question the Dutch economy is used as an exemplary case as the Netherlands are known as a nation of traders. This image was derived in the seventeenth century from successes in long distance trade, shipping and financial innovations. Despite its historical background in trading the potential to 'truck and barter' has never been adequately measured. In this paper we present a first attempt in measuring and describing the Dutch transaction sector. Measurement by means of occupational data points out that approximately 25 percent of Dutch workers are employed in transaction jobs, and 29 percent if one includes transport and distribution tasks. From a historical perspective this may seem large, but we make the case that traditional sector categories underestimate the true trading character of an economy. Furthermore, we find that in enhancing transactions cities or agglomerations remain important, suggesting that face-to-face trade remains an important element of modern transactions. In contrast to the history of immigrants in the Netherlands, the main immigrant groups of today do not fulfill a brokerage function in bringing about trade between different cultures. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/1290/ 2002-01-01T00:00:00Z As so many other activities nowadays, modern science revolves around the competition for attention.Unlike in so many other attention games, in science those who seek attention are more or less the same people who are giving it. An important characteristic is the skewness of the distribution of scientific attention. We discuss the effect these characteristics have on scientific institutions. An important thesis of ours is that scientists converge in clusters of likeminded scientists. Given the character of scientific organization and communication we expect that the digitalization of scientific communication will not affect the basic scientific institutions as the principles upon which the Internet functions coincide more or less with the way science functions.However, violation of these principles can in principle disrupt science and fundamentally change its character.Diversity, the key element of scientific conversation,may be destroyed. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6875/ 2001-02-12T00:00:00Z Attention is the coordination device, which makes modern science work the way it does. A typical characteristic of attention in the scientific world is that those who seek attention are the same people who are giving it. Another important feature within groups is the skewed distribution of attention. We discuss the effect these characteristics have on scientific institutions. An important thesis is that scientists converge in clusters of likeminded scientists. Given the character of scientific organisation and communication we expect that the digitalisation of scientific communication will not affect the basic scientific institutions as the principles upon which the Internet and open source code projects function coincide more or less with the way science functions. The channelling of attention will remain an important issue as the flood of information in the age of electronic publishing will only increase. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7692/ 2000-03-08T00:00:00Z In this paper we examine, by means of a citation analysis, which factors influence the impact of articles published in demography journals between 1990 and 1992. Several quantifiable characteristics of the articles (characteristics with respect to authors, visibility, content and journals) are strongly related to their subsequent impact in the social sciences. Articles are most frequently cited when they deal with empirical, ahistorical research focusing on populations in the developed world, when they are prominently placed in a journal issue, when they are written in English and when they appear in core demography journals. Furthermore, although eminent scholars are likely to be cited on the basis of their reputation, the effect of reputation appears to be small in demography. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12288/ 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z In this paper advisors are selected by two ministers with conflicting interests in order to (1) acquire information, and (2) obtain political legitimacy concerning a project. In the end, parliament decides whether or not the project, of which the consequences are uncertain, is implemented. In principle a minister wants to appoint an advisor whose preferences are similar. However, since the advisor needs to convince the decisive player in the model, the minister may appoint an advisor whose preferences are closer to those of the agents to be persuaded. We also show when polarised advice occurs (the advisors have different preferences) and when consensual advice occurs (they have the same preferences). http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12296/ 1999-01-01T00:00:00Z This article analyzes a model of the policy decision process in ministerial governments. A spending minister and a finance minister are involved in making a decision concerning a public project. The two ministers have partially conflicting preferences. Policy decisions are made in two stages. In the first stage the spending minister consults a technical expert to obtain information about the technical consequences of the project. If the technical consequences are favourable, in the second stage the finance minister consults a financial expert to obtain information about the financial consequences. The finance minister can veto a proposal for undertaking the project. This article illustrates the consequences of specialization for information transmission. A drawback of specialization is that projects are evaluated on the basis of their individual consequences rather than on the basis of their total consequences. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7786/ 1997-12-01T00:00:00Z In this paper the reading behaviour of economists is examined to see whether particular types of knowledge - basic and applied - imply different investment patterns. As it turns out, the reading intensity of advanced theoretical and empirical literature declines with three to four percent per year of experience, although researchers and economists with a mathematical background start with a higher initial stock of knowledge of this type of literature. Business and government economists concentrate on applied literature and news magazines; a type of literature which is not frequently read by mathematical economists. However, the mathematical economists catch up with their non-mathematical colleagues in 12 to 15 years time. Furthermore, the introduction of graduate schools in Dutch academia has not brought about a fundamental change in reading habits. The biggest factor in explaining the divergence in reading behaviour among economists remains the mathematical, c.q. econometrics background in undergraduate training. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7787/ 1997-11-03T00:00:00Z Nobel laureates in economics make their most important and creative contributions between the ages of 29 and 38. The average creative age of Nobel economists is slightly below that of laureates in physics, and considerably younger than that of laureates in chemistry and medicine/physiology. The University of Chicago and the US in general has so far turned out to be best breeding ground for original economists. Furthermore, most fundamental work has been written alone and this finding contrasts strongly with the dominant trend in economics where multi-authored papers have become the rule in publishing. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12303/ 1996-01-01T00:00:00Z ands. The time series analysis, covering the period 1953–1993, allows for different types of government spending. In general, spending is inspired by ideological and opportunistic motives: all government expenditure categories show an upward drift during election times and the partisan motives behind government spending are clearly revealed: left-wing cabinets attach greater importance to social security and health care than right-wing cabinets and right-wing cabinets value expenditure on infrastructure and defense more than left-wing parties. Constructive comments by Frans van Winden, Wilko Letterie, Peter Cornelisse, Arie Ros, André de Moor, Harry ter Rele and an anonymous referee are gratefully acknowledged.