Suchergebnisse

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that partly replace social security contributions. Quantitative results suggest that making add-on accounts mandatory has adverse welfare effects across income groups. Carve-out accounts generate welfare gains for high and middle income earners but welfare losses for low income earners. In the presence of rare stock market disasters, individual accounts with default portfolio allocation crowd out direct stockholding and substantially reduce welfare.

This volume explores how religious and spiritual actors engage for environmental protection and fight against climate change. Climate change and sustainability are increasingly prominent topics among religious and spiritual groups. Different faith traditions have developed "green" theologies, launched environmental protection projects and issued public statements on climate change. Against this background, academic scholarship has raised optimistic claims about the strong potentials of religions to address environmental challenges. Taking a critical stance with regard to these claims, the chapters in this volume show that religious environmentalism is an embattled terrain. Tensions are an inherent part of religious environmentalism. These do not necessarily manifest themselves in open clashes between different parties but in different actions, views, theologies, ambivalences, misunderstandings, and sometimes mistrust. Keeping below the surface, these tensions can create effective barriers for religious environmentalism. The chapters examine how tensions are manifested and dealt with through a range of empirical case studies in various world regions. Covering different religious and spiritual traditions, they reflect on intradenominational, interdenominational, interreligious, and religious-societal tensions. Thereby, this volume sheds new light on the problems that religions face when they seek to take an active role in today's societal challenges.

AbstractScholarship has suggested a "greening" of religions, supposing that faith communities increasingly become environmentally friendly and use their potentials to address environmental challenges. This contribution points to the problems of the supposed "greening" by indicating the ongoing disagreements in many religious traditions over environmental engagement. The disagreements show that religious environmentalism is an embattled terrain that involves actors with different interests, backgrounds, and understandings of their traditions. The authors illustrate that tensions are an inherent part of religious environmentalism, becoming manifest in different views and theologies, ambivalences, misunderstandings, and sometimes mistrust. They distinguish between four types of tensions: (1) intradenominational tensions, (2) interdenominational tensions, (3) interreligious tensions, and (4) religious-societal tensions. By drawing attention to the tensions of religious environmentalism, this contribution sheds light on the struggles and limitations that religious environmentalists face in their ambitions to address climate change and other environmental challenges.