Joachim Thøgersen

Stimulating economic growth in the least developed countries: direct cash transfers for the retired via mobile phones

The result of current aid policies is that only a small percentage of foreign aid reaches the poorest of the poor in the least developed countries. Current trends of urbanisation and self-reliance place elderly people in an increasingly difficult situation. This paper aims to stimulate debate by introducing an alternative mechanism for foreign aid. With the help of an economic model, we demonstrate how direct cash transfers to elderly people can spur economic growth. Targeting all elderly people above a certain age minimises selection costs and removes perverse incentives. The use of new mobile phone technologies reduces transaction costs and makes our proposed modality feasible including in the least developed countries with low functioning governments.

Unemployment, Public Pensions, and Capital Accumulation: Assessing Growth Effects of Alternative Funding Strategies

The paper develops an overlapping-generations model that interacts with a labor market characterized by equilibrium unemployment. This structure implies that young individuals can be in two different states, employed or unemployed. Hence, the social security system contains both old-age benefits and unemployment insurance. Including these features, the model seeks to assess growth effects of three different pension systems: one unfunded and two funded, where the distinction is made between actuarial and nonactuarial funding strategies. It is shown that both funded systems generate higher growth than an unfunded system. Moreover, the actuarial system fosters higher growth than the nonactuarial.