IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/nzecpp/v59y2025i3p205-212.html

How to change the welfare state from a Taxation to a Savings based model

Author

Listed:
  • Roger Douglas
  • Robert MacCulloch

Abstract

The future of public welfare states is in doubt as costs trend up due to population ageing. Yet there is little agreement about how to reform them. We show how tax cuts can be designed to establish mandatory savings accounts so that a (mostly) publicly funded and provided welfare system can be changed into one that relies largely on private funding and private suppliers. Greater competition in the provision of health-care services offers the potential for significant efficiency gains. The government retains sufficient revenues to act as ‘insurer of last resort’ for those individuals unable to meet welfare costs out of their savings accounts. To our knowledge, showing how both a tax and welfare reform can be jointly designed to enable the transition to this new type of system to occur in a potentially politically feasible way has not been done before.

Suggested Citation

  • Roger Douglas & Robert MacCulloch, 2025. "How to change the welfare state from a Taxation to a Savings based model," New Zealand Economic Papers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 59(3), pages 205-212, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:nzecpp:v:59:y:2025:i:3:p:205-212
    DOI: 10.1080/00779954.2025.2496872
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00779954.2025.2496872
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00779954.2025.2496872?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
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    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:taf:nzecpp:v:59:y:2025:i:3:p:205-212. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: http://www.tandfonline.com/RNZP20 .

    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.