IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/elsaab/23-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Should We Extend the Role of Private Social Expenditure?

Author

Listed:
  • Mark Pearson
  • John P. Martin

Abstract

Some people make great claims about the advantages to be gained from greater reliance on the private sector for the provision of social protection. Many of the claims for great macroeconomic advantages do not stand up to scrutiny. However, there is some reason to hope that private provision might promote microeconomic efficiency and services which are more responsive to consumer preferences than those provided by a single monopoly public sector provider. Drawing on examples from recent OECD country experiences with private health insurance, care for children and the elderly, and private pension provision, three main conclusions can be drawn. First, opening provision to a diversity of providers has often promoted more choice and innovation. Second, however, efficiency gains have often been limited. This is due to a number of inter-related reasons: (a) Individualisation of packages of services is expensive. (b) In order to ensure adequate coverage of the ... Certains font grand cas de l’intérêt qu’il y aurait au plan macroéconomique à faire davantage appel au secteur privé pour assurer la protection sociale. Les arguments présentés dans ce sens ne tiennent souvent pas la route ; cependant, on peut penser que le recours au secteur privé permettrait peut-être une meilleure efficience microéconomique et une réponse plus adaptée aux choix des consommateurs que ce que peut offrir un prestataire public en situation de monopole. A partir de quelques expériences récentes de pays de l’OCDE en matière d’offre privée pour l’assurance maladie, la garde des enfants, les soins aux personnes âgées et la retraite, trois conclusions se dégagent. Premièrement, la diversification des prestataires a souvent permis un plus grand choix et plus d’innovation. Deuxièmement, cependant, les gains d’efficience ont souvent été limités, et ceci pour un certain nombre de raisons difficiles à dissocier : (a) l’individualisation du panier de prestations est ...

Suggested Citation

  • Mark Pearson & John P. Martin, 2005. "Should We Extend the Role of Private Social Expenditure?," OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 23, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:elsaab:23-en
    DOI: 10.1787/866271756736
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1787/866271756736
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1787/866271756736?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Blank, Rebecca M, 2000. "When Can Public Policy Makers Rely on Private Markets? The Effective Provision of Social Services," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 110(462), pages 34-49, March.
    2. Roman Arjona & Maxime Ladaique & Mark Pearson, 2001. "Growth, Inequality and Social Protection," OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Occasional Papers 51, OECD Publishing.
    3. Andrea Bassanini & Stefano Scarpetta, 2003. "The Driving Forces of Economic Growth: Panel Data Evidence for the OECD Countries," OECD Economic Studies, OECD Publishing, vol. 2001(2), pages 9-56.
    4. Jens Lundsgaard, 2003. "Competition and Efficiency in Publicly Funded Services," OECD Economic Studies, OECD Publishing, vol. 2002(2), pages 79-128.
    5. Pablo Antolín & Alain de Serres & Christine de la Maisonneuve, 2004. "Long-Term Budgetary Implications of Tax-Favoured Retirement Plans," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 393, OECD Publishing.
    6. Willem Adema, 2001. "Net Social Expenditure: 2nd Edition," OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Occasional Papers 52, OECD Publishing.
    7. A. B. Atkinson, 1999. "The Economic Consequences of Rolling Back the Welfare State," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262011719, April.
    8. Willem Adema & Marcel Einerhand, 1998. "The Growing Role of Private Social Benefits," OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Occasional Papers 32, OECD Publishing.
    9. Michael Leahy & Sebastian Schich & Gert Wehinger & Florian Pelgrin & Thorsteinn Thorgeirsson, 2001. "Contributions of Financial Systems to Growth in OECD Countries," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 280, OECD Publishing.
    10. Jane Hall & Richard De Abreu Lourenco & Rosalie Viney, 1999. "Carrots and sticks—the fall and fall of private health insurance in Australia," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 8(8), pages 653-660, December.
    11. Greß, Stefan & Okma, Kieke G. H. & Wasem, Jürgen, 2002. "Private health insurance in social health insurance countries: Market outcomes and policy implications," Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Diskussionspapiere 01/2002, University of Greifswald, Faculty of Law and Economics.
    12. Francesca Colombo, 2001. "Towards More Choice in Social Protection?: Individual Choice of Insurer in Basic Mandatory Health Insurance in Switzerland," OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Occasional Papers 53, OECD Publishing.
    13. Thai-Thanh Dang & Pablo Antolín & Howard Oxley, 2001. "Fiscal Implications of Ageing: Projections of Age-Related Spending," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 305, OECD Publishing.
    14. Andrea Bassanini & Stefano Scarpetta & Philip Hemmings, 2001. "Economic Growth: The Role of Policies and Institutions: Panel Data. Evidence from OECD Countries," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 283, OECD Publishing.
    15. Jens Lundsgaard, 2002. "Competition and Efficiency in Publicly Funded Services," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 331, OECD Publishing.
    16. David W. Kalisch & Tetsuya Aman & Libbie A. Buchele, 1998. "Social and Health Policies in OECD Countries: A Survey of Current Programmes and Recent Developments," OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Occasional Papers 33, OECD Publishing.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lindbeck, Assar, 2006. "The Welfare State -- Background, Achievements, Problems," Working Paper Series 662, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    2. Schmid, Günther, 2006. "Sharing risk: on social risk management and the governance of labour market transitions," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Labor Market Policy and Employment SP I 2006-101, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    3. Nikolaos Grigorakis & Christos Floros & Haritini Tsangari & Evangelos Tsoukatos, 2017. "Combined social and private health insurance versus catastrophic out of pocket payments for private hospital care in Greece," International Journal of Health Economics and Management, Springer, vol. 17(3), pages 261-287, September.
    4. Beraldo, Sergio & Montolio, Daniel & Turati, Gilberto, 2009. "Healthy, educated and wealthy: A primer on the impact of public and private welfare expenditures on economic growth," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 38(6), pages 946-956, December.
    5. Grigorakis, Nikolaos & Floros, Christos & Tsangari, Haritini & Tsoukatos, Evangelos, 2016. "Out of pocket payments and social health insurance for private hospital care: Evidence from Greece," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 120(8), pages 948-959.
    6. Martin Heipertz & Melanie Ward-Warmedinger, 2008. "Economic and Social Models in Europe and the Importance of Reform," Financial Theory and Practice, Institute of Public Finance, vol. 32(3), pages 255-287.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Roman Arjona & Maxime Ladaique & Mark Pearson, 2003. "Social Protection and Growth," OECD Economic Studies, OECD Publishing, vol. 2002(2), pages 7-45.
    2. Andrea Bassanini & Stefano Scarpetta, 2003. "The Driving Forces of Economic Growth: Panel Data Evidence for the OECD Countries," OECD Economic Studies, OECD Publishing, vol. 2001(2), pages 9-56.
    3. Herwig Immervoll & David Barber, 2005. "Can Parents Afford to Work?: Childcare Costs, Tax-Benefit Policies and Work Incentives," OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 31, OECD Publishing.
    4. Roman Arjona & Maxime Ladaique, 2003. "Mark Pearson Growth, Inequality and Social Protection," Canadian Public Policy, University of Toronto Press, vol. 29(s1), pages 119-140, January.
    5. Alberto BUCCI, 2004. "Economic growth in an enlarged Europe: the human capital and R&D dimensions," Departmental Working Papers 2004-22, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    6. Marc Atkins & Christian Peitz, 2023. "The world's largest free trade agreement RCEP and its financial markets - A perspective on volatility and risk," Working Papers Dissertations 113, Paderborn University, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics.
    7. Juan F. Jimeno, "undated". "El sistema de pensiones contributivas en España: Cuestiones básicas y perspectivas en el medio plazo," Working Papers 2000-15, FEDEA.
    8. Kaushik, Surendra K. & Kaushik, Shorav & Kaushik, Shobha, 2006. "How higher education in rural India helps human rights and entrepreneurship," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 29-34, February.
    9. Karimu, Amin & Brännlund, Runar & Lundgren, Tommy & Söderholm, Patrik, 2017. "Energy intensity and convergence in Swedish industry: A combined econometric and decomposition analysis," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 347-356.
    10. Castro, Vítor, 2010. "The duration of economic expansions and recessions: More than duration dependence," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 347-365, March.
    11. Zaijun Li & Jianquan Cheng & Qiyan Wu, 2016. "Analyzing regional economic development patterns in a fast developing province of China through geographically weighted principal component analysis," Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, Springer, vol. 9(3), pages 233-245, October.
    12. Tarun Bose & Jannatul Bristy, 2017. "Are Countries Participating into Regional Integration Performing Better in Growth and Liberalization Than Non-Participators? A Study on European Countries," International Journal of Business and Management, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 12(2), pages 171-171, January.
    13. repec:zbw:bofitp:2002_014 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Yazgan Şekip & Yalçinkaya Ömer, 2018. "The Effects of Research and Development (R&D) Investments on Sustainable Economic Growth: Evidence from OECD Countries (1996-2015)," Review of Economic Perspectives, Sciendo, vol. 18(1), pages 3-23, March.
    15. Facchini, François & Melki, Mickaël, 2013. "Efficient government size: France in the 20th century," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 1-14.
    16. Joseph Pasky Ngameni & Ludovic Feulefack Kemmanang & Sylvain Bertelet Ngassam, 2022. "Growth Gap between China and Africa: Do Digital Technologies Matter?," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 13(1), pages 24-43, March.
    17. Athanasios Athanasenas & Xanthippi Chapsa & Athanasios Michailidis, 2015. "Investigating Social Protection Convergence in the EU-15: A Panel Data Analysis," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(2), pages 79-96.
    18. Facchini, François & Melki, Mickaël, 2013. "Efficient government size: France in the 20th century," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 1-14.
    19. Alber, Jens, 2009. "What the European and American welfare states have in common and where they differ: Facts and fiction in comparisons of the European social model and the United States," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Inequality and Social Integration SP I 2009-203, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    20. Man-Keung Tang, 2007. "Private-Sector Financial Liabilities in Advanced Economies: Is More Better?," IMF Working Papers 2007/118, International Monetary Fund.
    21. Nguyen, Canh Phuc & Doytch, Nadia, 2022. "The impact of ICT patents on economic growth: An international evidence," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(5).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • H42 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Publicly Provided Private Goods
    • H51 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Health
    • H53 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs
    • L33 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Comparison of Public and Private Enterprise and Nonprofit Institutions; Privatization; Contracting Out

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:elsaab:23-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eloecfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.