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The objective of this Element is to provide an analysis of social protection from an economic perspective. It relies on tools and methods widely used in public and insurance economics and comprises four main section besides the introduction. The first section is devoted to the design of social protection programs and their political sustainability. The second section assesses the efficiency and performance of social protection programs, and of the welfare state as a whole. In the third section, the relative merits of social and private insurance are analyzed as well as the design of optimum insurance contract with emphasis on health and pensions. The last section focuses on the implications of asymmetric information that may lead governments to adopt policies that would otherwise be rejected in a perfect information setting.

Our societies are witnessing a steady increase in longevity. This demographic evolution is accompanied by some convergence across countries, but at the same time substantial longevity inequalities persist within nations across income classes. This Element aims to survey some crucial implications of changing longevity on the design of optimal public policy. For that purpose, it first focuses on some difficulties raised by risky and varying lifetime for the representation of individual and social preferences. Then, it explore some central implications of changing longevity for optimal policy making, regarding prevention against premature death, pension policies, education, health care and long-term care. The author distinguishes between the case when longevity is partially the responsibility of individuals and the case when longevity is plainly exogenous.

Cet article défend l'idée que le rôle de l'État providence n'a sans doute jamais été aussi important qu'aujourd'hui, mais que cela implique qu'il se renouvelle pour relever le défi des fractures sociales. La source majeure de ces fractures tient sans nul doute à ce que l'on nomme la panne de l'ascenseur social. L'État providence, trop préoccupé de l'inégalité des revenus et de la pauvreté, a négligé la mobilité sociale. Il devrait réorienter ses priorités et adopter une politique plus active. Cela demande de sécuriser la situation des pauvres, mais aussi celle des classes moyennes qui subissent de plein fouet les chocs qu'entraine l'économie de marché mondialisée. Cela exige surtout de donner aux uns et aux autres des perspectives en remettant en marche l'ascenseur social.

Cet article défend l'idée que le rôle de l'État-providence n'a sans doute jamais été aussi important qu'aujourd'hui, mais que cela implique qu'il se renouvelle pour relever le défi des fractures sociales. La source majeure de ces fractures tient sans nul doute à ce que l'on nomme «la panne de l'ascenseur social». L'État-providence, trop préoccupé de l'inégalité des revenus et de la pauvreté, a négligé la mobilité sociale. Il devrait réorienter ses priorités et adopter une politique plus active. Cela demande de sécuriser la situation des pauvres, mais aussi celle des classes moyennes qui subissent de plein fouet les chocs qu'entraîne l'économie de marché mondialisée. Cela exige surtout de donner aux uns et aux autres des perspectives en remettant en marche l'ascenseur social.

Cet article défend l'idée que le rôle de l'État providence n'a sans doute jamais été aussi important qu'aujourd'hui, mais que cela implique qu'il se renouvelle pour relever le défi des fractures sociales. La source majeure de ces fractures tient sans nul doute à ce que l'on nomme la panne de l'ascenseur social. L'État providence, trop préoccupé de l'inégalité des revenus et de la pauvreté, a négligé la mobilité sociale. Il devrait réorienter ses priorités et adopter une politique plus active. Cela demande de sécuriser la situation des pauvres, mais aussi celle des classes moyennes qui subissent de plein fouet les chocs qu'entraine l'économie de marché mondialisée. Cela exige surtout de donner aux uns et aux autres des perspectives en remettant en marche l'ascenseur social.

ABSTRACT**:  One is used to hearing harsh statements about inefficient public services. It is not surprising to see public sector performance questioned. What is surprising is that what is meant by performance, and how it is measured, does not seem to matter much to either the critics or the advocates of the public sector. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a definition, and a way to measure the performance of the public sector or rather of its main components. Our approach is explicitly rooted in the principles of welfare and production economics. We will proceed in four stages. First of all we present what we call the 'performance approach' to the public sector. This concept rests on the principal‐agent relation that links a principal, i.e., the State, and an agent, i.e., the person in charge of the public sector unit, and on the definition of performance as the extent to which the agent fulfils the objectives assigned by the principal. The performance is then measured by using the notion of productive efficiency and the 'best practice' frontier technique. In the second stage we move to the issue of measuring the performance of some canonical components of the public sector (education, health care and railways transport), assuming that there is no constraint as to data availability. The idea is to disentangle the usual confusion between conceptual and data problems. In the third stage, we move to real world data problems. The question is then given the available data, whether it makes sense to assess and measure the performance of such public sector activities. The final stage is devoted to explaining performance or rather lack thereof. This exercise has clear implications for public policy. Finally we argue that when the scope is not components but the entirety of the public sector, one should restrict the performance analysis to outcomes and not relate them to inputs.

Ce court article présente et discute une dizaine d'affirmations fréquentes qui concernent la décision de partir à la retraite et les politiques visant à encourager le taux d'activité des travailleurs âgés. Nous montrons que ces affirmations sont erronées ou à tout le moins discutables.

The European population is living longer but retiring earlier. More and more individuals are spending an increasing fraction of their life-time relying on retirement benefits. At the same time, social security programs face mounting financial difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to explain why people are retiring so young and why it is so difficult to reverse a trend that could turn out to be fatal to social security systems that have worked so well up to now.To define the second-best retirement age as well as to explain why reasonable reforms are difficult, if not impossible, we use the tools of optimal income tax theory and of political economy.

The European population is living longer but retiring earlier. More and more individuals are spending an increasing fraction of their life-time relying on retirement benefits. At the same time, social security programs face mounting financial difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to explain why people are retiring so young and why it is so difficult to reverse a trend that could turn out to be fatal to social security systems that have worked so well up to now.To define the second-best retirement age as well as to explain why reasonable reforms are difficult, if not impossible, we use the tools of optimal income tax theory and of political economy.

The European population is living longer but retiring earlier. More and more individuals are spending an increasing fraction of their life-time relying on retirement benefits. At the same time, social security programs face mounting financial difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to explain why people are retiring so young and why it is so difficult to reverse a trend that could turn out to be fatal to social security systems that have worked so well up to now.To define the second-best retirement age as well as to explain why reasonable reforms are difficult, if not impossible, we use the tools of optimal income tax theory and of political economy.

The European population is living longer but retiring earlier. More and more individuals are spending an increasing fraction of their life-time relying on retirement benefits. At the same time, social security programs face mounting financial difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to explain why people are retiring so young and why it is so difficult to reverse a trend that could turn out to be fatal to social security systems that have worked so well up to now.To define the second-best retirement age as well as to explain why reasonable reforms are difficult, if not impossible, we use the tools of optimal income tax theory and of political economy.