Course 2024-2025 a.y.

To what extent should the government take care of individual risks by setting up public programs, such as pensions, health care, education, labor market and migration policies? What is the relation between welfare policies and populism?

These questions may have a normative answer, provided by public economics, and a positive one, offered by political economics. We will address them in the first part of the course.

In the second part of the course, students will be required to develop their own economic and political analysis of an issue, and to design a policy, which is both economically sound and politically feasible. The issues to be analyzed will include policy response to issues related to pension and retirement, long term care, education, labor market and globalization, and gender. These policies will be discussed in class.

• Identify the political incentives faced by the policymakers in taking their policy decisions.
• Explain how different demographic, economic and political features of a society contribute to shape these political incentives, and thereby the resulting welfare states.
• Recognize the institutional and cultural determinants of economic policy-making.

• Analyze the determinants of the existing public policies.
• Evaluate the programs of the welfare states and their weakness.
• Predict the dynamic evolution of the existing public policies as a function of the expected demographic, economic and political trends.
• Design welfare state policies that combine economic rationality and political feasibility.

• Lectures
• Guest speaker's talks (in class or in distance)
• Individual works / Assignments
• Collaborative Works / Assignments
• Interaction/Gamification

• In addition to face-to-face lectures and class discussions, the course also includes one or more guest speakers by journalists and current or past policy-makers aimed at obtaining an inside perspective on the process of design and implementation of public policies.
• Class activities are used to mimic the design and implementation of public policies. Students are assigned to different roles. For instance, in a discussion of pension reforms, a group of students play the role of the Finance Ministry, another of the Labor Ministry and another of the unions in the committee discussing the policy reform. Each group has as an assigment to draft a detailed policy proposal. Individual assignments are given to single students in each group, consisting of writing a short executive summary (or press release) of the proposal, of providing a short presentation to the committee discussing the policy reform, and of leading the discussion and negotiation in the committee. 

With the purpose of measuring the acquisition of the above-mentioned learning outcomes, the students’ assessment  includes a written exam.

• The exam consists of critical assessments of true/false statements and open questions. These exam’s tools aim at assessing students’ ability to solve and explain political economic models of the welfare state, to discuss whether statements are true or false, and to show critical thinking and political-economic reasoning to discuss policy scenarios in open questions.
• To assess their ability to design a policy, discuss its implication and negotiate with the opposing parties, the students’ assessment also includes group assignment and class participation, as well as individual assignment  - related to the group assignment - to better evaluate the individual ability and effort.
• Students can choose between two possible evaluation methods:

1. Take the partial written exam for the first part of the course (worth 60% of the final grade) and do individual assignments, group assignments and active class participation for the second part of the course (worth 40% of the final grade).
2. Take the final written exam that accounts for 60% of the final grade, while individual assignments, group assignments and active class participation accounts for 40% of the final grade.

With the purpose of measuring the acquisition of the above-mentioned learning outcomes, the students’ assessment  includes a written exam.

• The exam consists of critical assessments of true/false statements and open questions. These exam’s tools aim at assessing students’ ability to solve and explain political economic models of the welfare state, to discuss whether statements are true or false, and to show critical thinking and political-economic reasoning to discuss policy scenarios in open questions.
• Students have to take the final written exam that accounts for 100% of the final grade.