Synopsis
The aging of America's population makes it imperative that we reform Social Security, but so far we have failed. To instruct this seemingly endless quest, International Perspectives on Social Security Reform looks at public pension revision in six countries that, like the United States, are members of the OECD and have a long tradition of social security threatened by population aging. Canada, Sweden, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy have much to teach the United States about what works well―and what works badly. A substantive analysis of each country's reforms is augmented in commentary by distinguished economists, who offer their own opinions. Ideas examined include private accounts, notional accounts, incentives to delay retirement, and automatic systems of pension adjustment.
With contributions from Réal Bouchard; Stuart Butler; James C. Capretta; Agneta Kruse and Edward Palmer; Estelle James; Lawrence H. Thompson; Tetsuo Kabe; Jagadeesh Gokhale; Richard Jackson; Michael Mersmann; Maya MacGuineas; Neil Howe; Alex Beer; John Turner; Stanford G. Ross; Alicia Puente Cackley, Tom Moscovitch, and Benjamin Pfeiffer; Paul N. Van de Water; and Dalmer D. Hoskins.
About the Author
Rudolph G. Penner is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and holds the Arjay and Frances Miller chair in public policy. Previously, he was a managing director of the Barents Group, a KPMG company. He was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1983 to 1987. From 1977 to 1983, he was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Previous posts in government include assistant director for Economic Policy at the Office of Management and Budget, deputy assistant secretary for Economic Affairs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. Before 1975, Penner was a professor of economics at the University of Rochester.
He was elected president of the American Tax Policy Institute in 2005 and is past president of the National Economists Club. In 1989, he received the Abramson Prize for the best article published in 1988-1989 in Business Economics and more recently received a prize for the best article published in 2002 in Public Budgeting and Finance. In 2004, he chaired the Commission on Metro Financing for the Washington Metropolitan Area Council of Governments and others and is currently chairing the Committee on the Future of the Fuel Tax for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences.
He is the author of numerous books, pamphlets and articles on tax and spending policy and has authored columns for various newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. His most recent book, co-authored with Isabel Sawhill and Timothy Taylor, is Updating America's Social Contract (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).
Penner's undergraduate degree is from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. in economics is from the Johns Hopkins University.
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