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National governments often delegate tasks and burdens to lower levels in a comprehensive system of administration. Local and regional governance thereby become an important factor in policy implementation. This paper focuses on the incentive problem that follows from the delegation of competences to collect taxes to the local level in a multi-level geo-administrative system. The paper uses the Danish administrative system to illustrate the actual outcomes from such incentive problems. It focuses on goal attainment in the presence of decentralised financing and offers policy recommendations with respect to policy design within decentralised financing systems. Setting up elaborate administrative systems will introduce agency problems in terms of financing that lead to inefficiencies in both local and national governance. Resumen Los gobiernos nacionales delegan a menudo tareas y responsabilidades a los niveles inferiores dentro de un sistema administrativo completo. La gobernanza local y regional se convierte de ese modo un factor importante en la implementación de políticas. Este artículo se centra en el problema de incentivos causado por la delegación las competencias de recaudación de impuestos a nivel local en un sistema geoadministrativo de nivel múltiple. El artículo utiliza el sistema administrativo danés para ilustrar los resultados reales de tales problemas de incentivos. Se centra en el logro de un objetivo en presencia de una financiación descentralizada y ofrece recomendaciones de políticas con respecto al diseño de políticas dentro de sistemas de financiamiento descentralizado. El establecer sistemas administrativos complicados introducirá problemas de agencias en términos de financiación que llevará a una falta de eficiencia en la gobernanza local y nacional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Denmark and the Netherlands are usually considered to belong to two different families of welfare states: the Scandinavian and the Continental model respectively. Yet, in both states active labour market policies, or activation, have increased during the 1990s and are currently prominent. Both in Denmark and in the Netherlands activation has been viewed as an important reason for the low unemployment rates which both states have experienced since the early to mid-1990s, hence explaining the so-called Dutch and Danish jobs miracles. The paper examines critically the activation measures taken in both countries and their alleged positive effect upon (un)employment. It further examines their effect on rights and obligations from a citizenship perspective. The paper concludes that in both cases the positive development of labour market performance cannot primarily be attributed to activation measures. Furthermore, activation has reduced the entitlements and increased the obligations affiliated with social citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the Danish strategic environmental assessment (SEA), the government initiated a procedure for undertaking environmental assessment of the budget in 1998. Although SEA is an important instrument for linking environmental concern and policy-making, appropriate analytical tools are not defined. In the context of this paper, the budget assessment methodology is evaluated and suggestions for improvements are provided with respect to increasing the policy relevance of the assessment. The budget assessment methodology has developed significantly over the years, from a brief progress report on a few environmental issues to a comprehensive evaluation of key environmental issues. An indicator-based assessment model is suggested, which specifies a unified framework for analysis of the effectiveness of environmental measures in addition to signalling environmental threats requiring improved responses. Although the indicator-based assessment model aims at evaluating the budget activities, the model may have wider application. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine whether the rational expectations/constant liquidity premium-theory can explain the Danish term structure of interest rates during the 1980s. Three types of tests will be conducted: a single-equation regression test, a volatility-test, and tests based on a cointegrated VAR-model. All these tests remain valid even if interest rates individually follow non-stationary stochastic processes. In contrast to most other empirical studies of the term structure, the evidence generally supports the rational expectations/ constant liquidity premium-theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid‐2000s, the flexicurity concept was developed into a key EU policy concept. It drew its inspiration from the Danish and Dutch practices to combine labor market flexibility and security. However, the crisis' focus on bringing down national deficits and debts left little room to advance the concept. Lately, more emphasis has been placed on the need to take into consideration the social aspect of economic policy‐making. Current EU level documents see flexicurity as a guidance for structural reforms. However, the European flexicurity initiatives seem never to have had much impact in Denmark and the Netherlands. There are few accounts of the recent adjustment to the flexicurity models, be it at the EU or at national levels. Therefore, this article assesses the fate of flexicurity by scrutinizing its (adjusted) use as a political concept as well as a socio‐economic model. Although the Danish flexicurity model resembles the European flexicurity concept to a large extent, recent reforms have, overall, weakened rather than strengthened the flexicurity model. The Dutch flexicurity model has a narrower focus on normalizing atypical work, while recent reforms support this narrow flexicurity model. Meanwhile, the EU level concept has been changing every year, encompassing a growing number of issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study workplace peer effects in fertility decisions using a game theory model of strategic interactions among coworkers that allows for multiple equilibria. Using register-based data on fertile-aged women working in medium-sized establishments in Denmark, we uncover negative average peer effects. Allowing for heterogeneous effects by worker type, we find that positive effects dominate across worker types defined by age or education. Negative effects dominate within age groups and among low-education types. Policy simulations show that these estimated effects make the distribution of where women work an important consideration, beyond simply if they work, in predicting population fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

External borrowing constituted an important part of sovereign finances in early modern Europe. As payments could not be enforced through third parties, sovereigns had to convince lenders of their commitment to service their loans. Although the literature has dealt with this problem extensively, little is known about what supported lending in early modern Europe. This article therefore asks whether and how commitment mechanisms identified in the sovereign borrowing literature made external borrowing safer in early modern Europe. It attempts to answer this question by analysing the loans that a small and peripheral state ( Denmark) issued in Europe's foremost international investment hub (eighteenth-century Holland). Primary sources demonstrate that Denmark inspired confidence in investors and serviced its loans well; a new dataset with securities prices reveals yields to maturity in accordance with this. Economic spillovers (domestic economic damage) and reputation (loss of access to external loans) are identified as the mechanisms that kept the Danish sovereigns committed to honouring their debts. The Danish case shows, however, that these commitment mechanisms could only be adopted after the growth and integration of northern Europe's economies. This suggests that commitment mechanisms are not as universally applicable as the literature often seems to claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improved fiscal management is a frequent justification for promoting boundary consolidations. However, whether or not this is actually the case is rarely placed under rigorous empirical scrutiny. Hence, this article investigates if fiscal outcomes are improved when municipalities are merged. The basic argument is that the conceptualisation of fiscal management in political science is often too narrow as it focuses on the budget and pays hardly any attention to balances in the final accounts and debts - elements of management which are central to policy making. On this background, the causal relationship between municipal mergers and fiscal outcomes is analysed. Measured on the balance between revenues and expenses, liquid assets and debts, municipal mergers improve the fiscal outcomes of the municipalities in a five-year perspective, although the pre-reform effects tend to be negative. For liquidity and debt, however, the improvement only entails re-establishing the levels prior to the reform. The testing ground is the recent mergers of Danish municipalities, which, it is argued, constitute a quasi-experiment. This forms the basis of a Difference-in-Difference design, allowing the alleviation of endogeneity problems and enabling causal inference. The analysis is based on administrative data from the Danish municipalities in the period 2003-11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that new economic ideas have exerted an independent causal effect on policy change in three major areas in the Danish welfare state: unemployment insurance, early retirement, and taxation. Thereby the Danish case bears resemblance to the paradigmatic shift from Keynesianism to monetarism in the United Kingdom. However, in the Danish case this paradigmatic shift did not coincide with a political shift to a right-wing government. This makes it possible to disentangle the intimate relationship between ideas and interests. It is argued that the Danish case provides one of the clearest examples of the independent causal effects of economic ideas because the Social Democrats pursued policies that compromised with the party's historically rooted positions and with the preferences of their electorate. Ideas and solutions did not come in one fixed package, however. But the new paradigm established some basic premises that were not up for discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I attempt to explain the different roles of Swedish and Danish citizens when they encounter the welfare state. The case chosen is primary education, the area with the greatest variation. My thesis is that the differences are primarily explained by the different institutional legacies in the two countries, rather than the often-suggested alternatives, i.e., the different strength of the labor movements and the importance of Grundtvigian ideas in Denmark. I argue that in the first decades of the 20th century, Sweden and Denmark established two very different systems of school administration. Once established, these have shown a high, though by no means total, stability and the development has been path dependent. Due to the different institutional legacies, the same political ideas have often resulted in different decisions and measures in the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How has Denmark been able to adjust its economic and industrial policies in an era of major changes in the international economy? The article gives a survey of the last 10 years, especially more recent years. Before 1986 wage policy and public-expenditure policy were dominant. Since then they have been supplemented by a new structural policy to increase the level of technology, to improve education and research and to change the composition of Danish exports as far as products and markets are concerned. The adjustment of policies has taken place in a stable multi-centred political system. The process has been characterized by institutionalized campaigning, moulding of interests and mobilization of compromises and mutual understanding. The capacity for flexible adjustment seems to originate from the stability of the political system. Likewise, uncertainty and instability seem to weaken the capacity for political flexibility. During the last two years the transformation of the elite consensus into state programmes and administrative decision-making has been hampered and the whole structural policy approach has been challenged by a neoliberal alternative. This is mainly due to an extraordinary parliamentary stalemate in a situation of extreme minority parliamentarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between voters' support for the government and thirteen items tapping their evaluation of the economic situation is analyzed. One data set is collected under Conservative rule and another under Social Democratic rule. The answers are first aggregated into three factors. Two are egotropic: the economic situation of the family, and its unemployment situation. One is sociotropic: worry about the economic development in the country. The impact of the first is strongly significant, and greater than found in comparable studies. The impact of the second is mostly significant, while the impact of the third is the least reliable. We have thus found a clear case of pocketbook voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]