Roberto Artoni

The Duties of the Sovereign: A Brief Guide to the Literature

In this paper we address the following four questions: is it reasonably correct to assume that the government is benevolent and competent? Has state intervention through taxation and transfers negative effects on individual incentives? In a context of limited information, are political failures or market failures more relevant? Which macroeconomic model is more useful for policy analysis? We tackle the above issues by surveying and discussing the main contributions in the literature on the above topics and we draw some lessons on the appropriate role of public intervention in the economy.

Insurance, Redistribution and the Welfare State: Economic Theory and International Comparisons

In this chapter we reconsider the role of the welfare state in modern market economies. After defining the welfare state, and distinguishing between its insurance and redistributive functions (sections 4.2 and 4.3), we tackle the issue first by studying the relationship between the welfare state and economic theory, doing so by analysing how the economic literature has investigated the role and justifications for the welfare state. We address three specific themes: the economic environment in which the institutions of the welfare state are embedded; the impact that they have on savings; and the effects that they generally produce on incentives (section 4.4 and subsections).

The Italian Pension System in the European Context

The aims of this work are to discuss whether there is an anomaly in the Italian pension system and, if there is, to investigate its causes and its influence on the future prospects of the system and on the debate on reform issues. In order to address these questions, we first provide an institutional and quantitative description of the main features of the current Italian pension system, highlighting the main changes from the recent past; we compare it with other European pension schemes in order to identify whether there are common/specific features; we then refer to the last projections of pension expenditure elaborated by the RGS (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato: Department of General Accounts) to show where the system is going. We finally conclude, summarising the main implications of our analysis and comparing more explicitly the UK and the Italian system, to see what lessons we can draw for the Italian pension reform debate.