Secular economic challenges and public support for policy interventions

Abstract

Globalization and technological change are arguably the most prominent sources of structural labour market changes in advanced industrialized economies. Policy experts and economists frequently debate many possibilities for policy responses to these structural changes, discussing a wide array of political initiatives that vary in terms of generosity, level of governance, different kinds of income maintenance together with or instead of different types of more activating education, and with or without extra protectionist interventions. Public opinions towards a given policy response have been widely researched, both regarding technological change and globalization, to disentangle this wide array of policy options. However, much less understood or researched is how public support compares across policy responses or mixes of policy responses. The paper summarized the findings of a large-scale survey experiment that provides answer to such question. The analysis are based on two randomised survey experiments fielded in the second half of 2020 among 20,000 respondents and carried out in eight industrialised democracies (Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America).