E-book 9 Comment Crutzen

The pros and cons of decentralization Benoît Crutzen (Erasmus University Rotterdam, School of Economics) 21Three initial caveats In this discussion, I will focus on a subset of the arguments put forward by Cantillon et al. in their lead piece, not because I believe the other arguments are not important, but simply because tackling all of them would require too much space. Furthermore, my arguments will focus on the economic side of the problem. Finally, even though I concentrate here on the spending side of social security, I would like to mention that any reform of social security should be comprehensive and address not only the spending, but also the revenue side. Regardless of whether we focus on the revenue or the spending side of social security, a key question to address is: are we talking about the complete decentralization of both the goals and implementation of policy or of its implementation only? To be more explicit, which of the following two options are we thinking about: 1) the federal level sets the goals and rules of the game and the federated entities are put in charge of implementation (this is for example what the Marcourt-Vandenbroucke proposal advocated for the reform of labour market policies; see their lead piece in the second Re-Bel e-book); or 2) full decentralization of the system with the federated entities being in charge of the goals, rules of the game and implementation? If we want Belgium to remain a federation, ...