REVIEWS ~ BESPRECHUNGEN ~ COMPTES RENDUS agriculture and textiles. The adjustment cost in their own domestic economies are likely to be minimal with widespread benefits to the world economy. Jaleel Ahmad, Prof. Dr. Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8 Canada Boeri Tito, Axel Borsch-Supan, Agar Brugiavini, Richard Disney, Arie Ka- pteyn and Franco Peracchi (eds.) (2001). Pensions: More Information, Less Ideology — Assessing the Long-term Sustainability of European Pension Sys- tems: Data Requirements, Analysis and Evaluations. Boston, Dordrecht, Lon- don: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 196 pp. € 99.00. ISBN 0-7923-75-319. ‘The title of this volume is very promising: More information, less ideology! However, as stated in the introduction, ‘the simple truth emerging from the studies in this vol- ume is that we still know too little’ (p. 2). There is, however, an interesting step made in characterising ‘the sources of this uncertainty”. That is what makes the studies gath- ered in this volume a worthwhile reading. In the first paper Anderson, Tuljapurkar and Li use stochastic models for the demo- graphic and economic components of fiscal systems, because only this methodology allows the projection of ‘probability distributions for the dynamics of the system’ (p. 10). Although one interesting uncertainty, namely the ‘behavioural uncertainty’ of future workers and retirees (p. 10), is not treated, it is taken up in the second paper by Boeri, Brugiavini and Maignan, who discuss reasons and consequences of early retire- ments, And again, the authors state: “One important message, if not the main message of our analysis, is that even the basic stylized facts are hard to describe and quantify because of lack of data’ (p. 29). How important this is, however, for the future costs of the fiscal systems is shown here: up to 13% of GDP are already counted as foregone output costs of early retirement (the OECD average is 6,3%, however, “EU countries tend to be above average’, p. 47). And old-age provisions play a very important role ~ besides labour market institutions — in stimulating (or discouraging) early retirements. Given these uncertainti s difficult to evaluate such studies as undertaken by the OECD and the BU, here reported by H. Oxley and Buti/Costello, and this not only because such simulations ‘conflate policy and projection’ (Disney, p. 97). As Disney shows in his chapter on ‘How should we measure pension liabilities in EU countries?”, the question of appropriate data (about e.g. labour force participation rates and growth of earnings over time) is overwhelming. However, itis a different question whether we 412REVIEWS — BESPRECHUNGEN ~ COMPTES RENDUS should follow him in the accounting procedure. Here, | really have — as eg, Bohn (1992) and Hauser (2001) — quite another opinion with respect to the ‘pension liabil- ities’ in'a PAYG system. First, the ‘political risk” in PAYG system is quite high, con- trary to his opinion. Second, against the ‘implicit debt’ given to future generations the ‘private wealth’ which is also given to future generations must be counterbalanced. Furthermore, it is not that the ‘public sector is in effect borrowing from the private sector by levying pension contributions ... and ‘repaying’ the contributions later in the form of public pensions’ (p. 105). If it is anything similar to this, then it is *repay- ing’ a debt to the older generation (or buying some ‘paper’ from the older generation, where these papers then can be sold to the next young generation when this generation is old). And even when ‘the UK government now has an ‘annual pension statement” providing details of an individual's ongoing accrued rights... derived from the social security programme” (p. 108) it says ~ as individual statements of private life insurers nothing more than what you can expect to be paid as a (weekly) pension, given the rights as they are now! It says nothing about the future obligations of the government and is therefore not a debt! Bérsch-Supan in his analysis about ‘What we know and what we do not know about the willingness to provide self-financed old-age insurance’ discusses the issues and questions of a transition from a state-financed retirement income maintenance system to a self-financed old-age insurance system. And, although he confesses in the intro- duction that ‘with respect to the results to be expected we know shamefully little about all these important questions’ (p. 114), his optimism seems not dejected, In an interesting paper, Nazroo and Marmot extend the discussion to health and so- cial services problems. Besides the increases in life expectancy and the changes in age-related mortality, they discuss the variation across Europe (and how these differ- ences increase with age!) and the relationship between morbidity and disability, meas ured in the changes of disability-free life expectancy. They are also interested in the determinants of, and inequalities in health, stressing the complex relationship between economic position and health. This leads them into a discussion of the third age ap- proach (or successful aging) and stressing that ‘not all sections of the population are equally benefiting from improvements in health’ (p. 149). And as almost all of the au- thors of the volume, they emphasize at the end the need of more data, in particular of “longitudinal studies that allow cross-national comparisons’ (p. 150, but see also p. 133, p. 110, p. 51 and p. 6). The last paper of this volume by Nicoletti and Peracchi provides short information about the first three waves of the European Community Household Pane! (ECHP), a standardised annual longitudinal survey. While this seems to be a powerful instrument for the use of answering questions posed in this volume, the authors. point to the prob- Jems and limitations (as also pointed out in the Appeal to the President of the Euro- pean Commission, reproduced as an Annex to this volume). All in all, this volume takes stock of what questions can be answered given the available information, however, it is an open question whether more information means also less ideology. 413REVIEWS — BESPRECHUNGEN ~ COMPTES RENDUS: REFERENCES Bohn, H. (1992). Budget Deficits and Government Accounting. In: Meltzer, A., Plosser, C. (eds), Cornegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 36, 1-84 Hauiser, R. (2001). Alterssicherangsreform und Vermégensverteilung, Zeitschrift fiir Sozialreform 47/No. 5, Sept/Okt), 481-505. Roland Eisen Goethe University Frankfurt, Chair of Economic and Labour Market Policy. Mertonstrasse 17-21 D-60054 Frankfurt am Main (Germany) Cencini, Alvaro (2001). Monetary Macroeconomics. A New Approach. Lon- don/New York: Routledge. 224 pp. £65.00. ISBN 0-415-19569-1, This book aims to shed new light on several major topics of macroeconomic analysis such as production, value, prices, profits, interest, and capital accumulation. Cencini is a prominent member of the so-called Dijon-Fribourg school, which Bernard Schmitt founded in the early 1950s. One of the basic tenets of this school is that money is a flow while bank deposits are stocks. In this framework, the nature of money is appraised by analysing banks’ double-entry bookkeeping. The integration of money into the real economy occurs in the factor market, that is, through production: it is the payment of wages that allows the association of money — a numerical form — and out- put — its real content. The payment of wages is an emission inasmuch as money and the corresponding output are one and the same object, i.e. money income defining an exchange-value that exists in the form of a bank deposit. This deposit results from the association of money with current output, and is destroyed as soon as an equivalent output is sold on the market for produced goods. In the meantime, it may circulate in financial transactions that depositors are not necessarily aware of, and which are the result of banks’ financial intermediation. According to this school of thought, capital accumulation may lead to inflation and unemployment because, at present, the banks” bookkeeping structure does not yet differentiate between redistributed and invested profits. Cencini’s book explains and expands on this framework, following an order of increasing difficulty that leads the reader into a bracing journey. The book consists of seven chapters, with an introduction where the author clearly explains the research programme of the Dijon-Fribourg school, and a brief conclusion in which he discusses the concept of quantum time in connection with modern phys- ics. In the first chapter, Cencini addresses the problem of value and prices from a bank- money point of view. Having rejected on logical grounds the idea that money is acom- 414