Summary
The purpose of this paper is to provide an explanation for the growth of one of the most important components of social security income transfers: disability benefits to people who withdraw from the labour market as a consequence of becoming disabled. We use a disability model and apply this to branches of industry for the Netherlands (1968-1979). The main conclusion is that the growth of disability incidence rates can to a large degree be explained by worsening of the economic situation. In addition to this a change in another variable, namely perception of health, plays a role in the explanation of the growth fo disability transfers.
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Additional information
A draft of this paper was presented at the symposium ‘Some Economic Aspects of Disability,’ Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, October 1981. Both authors are affiliated with the Department of Economics of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam. They wish to thank especially Professor Jan Tinbergen; Professor Bernard van Praag, Mr. Philip de Jong and Mr. Peter Kooiman for their interest in the subject and their valuable comments on a earlier draft of this paper. The authors are grateful to Saam de Mooy for his computational assistance.
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van den Bosch, F.A.J., Petersen, C. An explanation of the growth of social security disability transfers. De Economist 131, 65–79 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01676418
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01676418