Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System

Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System
Author: Anette Nyqvist
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137552409

Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System is a detailed study through Sweden's national pension system. With Sweden's recently reformed national pension system as the illustrative example, Nyqvist shows how new forms of governance effectively shift responsibility from state level to an individual level. She sheds light on how politicians, technocrats, and bureaucrats work to educate and foster the general public into responsible, hardworking, and financially literate citizens. This ethnographic example of how contemporary power works by way of new forms of governance, Reform and Responsibility in the Remaking of the Swedish National Pension System is an exploration into the art of governing of a large-scale governmental policy process

Assessing Chile's Pension System: Challenges and Reform Options

Assessing Chile's Pension System: Challenges and Reform Options
Author: Samuel Pienknagura
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2021-09-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 151359611X

Chile’s pension system came under close scrutiny in recent years. This paper takes stock of the adequacy of the system and highlights its challenges. Chile’s defined contribution system was quite influential when introduced, and was taken as an example by other countries. However, it is now delivering low replacement rates relative to OECD peers, as its parameters did not adapt over time to changing demographics and global returns, while informality persists in the labor market. In the absence of reforms, the system’s inability to deliver adequate outcomes for a large share of participants will continue to magnify, as demographic trends and low global interest rates will continue to reduce replacement rates. In addition, recent legislation allowing for pension savings withdrawals to counter the effects from the COVID-19 pandemic, is projected to further reduce replacement rates and increase fiscal costs. A substantial improvement in replacement rates is feasible, via a reform that raises contribution rates and the retirement age, coupled with policies that increases workers’ contribution density.

Ethnographies of Conferences and Trade Fairs

Ethnographies of Conferences and Trade Fairs
Author: Hege Høyer Leivestad
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2017-06-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319530976

This anthology is an attempt to make sense of conferences and trade fairs as phenomena in contemporary society. The authors describe how these large-scale professional gatherings have become key sites for making and negotiating both industries and individual professions. In fact, during the past few decades, conferences and trade fairs have become a significant global industry in their own right. The editors assert that large-scale professional gatherings are remarkable events that require deeper analysis and scholarly attention.

Policy Worlds

Policy Worlds
Author: Cris Shore
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857451170

There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.

Shaping Taxpayers

Shaping Taxpayers
Author: Lotta Björklund Larsen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2017-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785334115

How do you make taxpayers comply? This ethnography offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden’s most esteemed bureaucracies – the Swedish Tax Agency. In its aim to collect taxes and minimize tax faults, the Agency mediates the application of tax law to ensure compliance and maintain legitimacy in society. This volume follows one risk assessment project’s passage through the Agency, from its inception, through the research phase, in discussions with management to its final abandonment. With its fiscal anthropological approach, Shaping Taxpayers reveals how diverse knowledge claims – legal, economic, cultural – compete to shape taxpayer behaviour.

Configuring Value Conflicts in Markets

Configuring Value Conflicts in Markets
Author: Susanna Alexius
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2014-01-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 178254447X

Economic values shape markets, as does sustainability, safety, decency, public health and democracy. Based on micro-process studies in a dozen markets, this multi-disciplinary book presents a typology of strategic responses to value plurality in markets and helps to explain how such value work influences market reform. Value plurality may be reinforced and turned into open conflicts, but also played down in configurations that neutralize, align, balance, or hierarchize values. By highlighting the role of values in markets, this book clarifies why and how markets are organized.

We Have Never Been Middle Class

We Have Never Been Middle Class
Author: Hadas Weiss
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1788733916

Taking apart the ideology of the "middle class" Tidings of a shrinking middle class in one part of the world and its expansion in another absorb our attention, but seldom do we question the category itself. We Have Never Been Middle Class proposes that the middle class is an ideology. Tracing this ideology up to the age of financialization, it exposes the fallacy in the belief that we can all ascend or descend as a result of our aspirational and precautionary investments in property and education. Ethnographic accounts from Germany, Israel, the USA and elsewhere illustrate how this belief orients us, in our private lives as much as in our politics, toward accumulation-enhancing yet self-undermining goals. This original meshing of anthropology and critical theory elucidates capitalism by way of its archetypal actors.

Pension Reform

Pension Reform
Author: Robert Holzmann
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 692
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 082136166X

This book presents 25 state of the art papers on the conceptual foundations and issues surrounding Non-financial, or Notional, Defined Contribution (NDC), country implementation of NDC (Italy, Latvia, Poland, and Sweden) and case studies for countries where NDC is figured in the reform debate. This book is intended to be a handbook for academics and policy makers who want to become informed about what NDC is and to learn about the pros and cons of this attractive reform proposal.

Aging

Aging
Author: Harry R. Moody
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2020-07-16
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1544371683

Winner of the 2022 Textbook & Academic Authors Association′s The McGuffey Longevity Award Aging: Concepts and Controversies is structured to encourage a style of teaching and learning that goes beyond conveying facts and methods. This innovative text focuses on controversies and questions rather than on assimilating facts or creating a single "correct" view about aging or older people. Drawing on their extensive expertise, authors Harry R. Moody and Jennifer R. Sasser first provide an overview of aging in three domains: aging over the life course, health care, and socioeconomic trends. Each section then includes data and conceptual frameworks, helping students to make sense of the controversies and understand their origin, engage in critical thinking, and develop their own views. The Tenth Edition of this hallmark textbook includes amplified discussions focused on differences, diversity, structural inequalities, and inclusion, as well as contemporary issues, including climate change and immigration. Included with this title: The password-protected Instructor Resource Site (formally known as SAGE Edge) offers access to all text-specific resources, including a test bank and editable, chapter-specific PowerPoint® slides.

The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization

The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization
Author: Philip Mader
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2020-02-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351390368

Financialization has become the go-to term for scholars grappling with the growth of finance. This Handbook offers the first comprehensive survey of the scholarship on financialization, connecting finance with changes in politics, technology, culture, society and the economy. It takes stock of the diverse avenues of research that comprise financialization studies and the contributions they have made to understanding the changes in contemporary societies driven by the rise of finance. The chapters chart the field’s evolution from research describing and critiquing the manifestations of financialization towards scholarship that pinpoints the driving forces, mechanisms and boundaries of financialization. Written for researchers and students not only in economics but from across the social sciences and the humanities, this book offers a decidedly global and pluri-disciplinary view on financialization for those who are looking to understand the changing face of finance and its consequences.