The Danish Welfare Commission: main assumptions and overall proposals

The paper deals with the main report of the Danish Welfare Commission and the one-hundred-and-nine proposals on the structure of the future Danish welfare state that the com-mission has put forward. Following upon a brief review of the discussion on the work of the Danish Welfare Commission, the paper focuses on the Danish Rational Economic Agents Model (DREAM) that have informed the commission’s analyses and proposals and concludes that inspired by the general equilibrium DREAM model the Welfare Commission is mainly interested in how to increase the supply of labour, restrain the demand on public services, and install economic incentives for the behaviour of private households. The paper then digs into the proposals of the commission that are broadly grouped into five policy target areas con-cerning (1) the ageing of the population, (2) the incentives for labour market participation, (3) competitiveness in the global economy, (4) behavioural regulation of the use of public bene-fits and services, and (5) management within tight budgets of an increasing demand on health and care. Finally, the concluding section sums up the discussion and elaborates on the debate on the Welfare Commission’s work in terms of the use of long term prognoses and the use of the DREAM model.