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Brief résumé


MSc (Copenhagen and Berlin), PhD (Faculty of Economics and Politics, Cambridge, UK).


Christian Toft has worked at universities in Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the United States, Canada, and Estonia. During the last few years he has held visiting appointments at the European University Institute in Florence, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame University (USA), the University of Victoria (Canada), the University of Tallinn (Estonia), and the United Nations University – World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU–WIDER) in Helsinki (Finland). He has Danish nationality.

Christian Toft's main area of research concerns comparative public policy with special emphasis on policy choices in the area of social security and labor market policy. In a major project he is researching patterns of unemployment compensation and labor market policy reform in industrialized countries during the twentieth century. This involves investigation of the international development of policy strategies, including ILO and OECD strategies, recommendations and conventions, as well as a more detailed examination of policy choices and developments in a selection of countries with the main focus being on Germany, Great Britain, Denmark, Italy, and the United States. He is also writing a co-authored textbook on income inequality, poverty and redistribution.

Together with Professor Joseph Cordes from the School of Public Policy at the George Washington University in Washington DC, Christian Toft is currently completing an international research project on the reform of the welfare state in the European Union and the United States. The project is to be completed with the production of a volume edited by Cordes and Toft. The chapters are authored by an interdisciplinary team of leading American and European experts on welfare state reform and draw on approaches from both comparative politics and mainstream economics. All chapters except two provide US-European comparisons. We hope that the provision of this international and transatlantic perspective can form the basis for a new look at and the production of new insights into the common trends and issues as well as the significant differences in the developments and reforms of the welfare states and labour markets on the two continents. The volume is under contract with Oxford University Press to be completed late summer 2012. In addition to Cordes and Toft, contributors include Mike Artis, William Bernhard, Gary Burtless, Bea Cantillon, Sergio Destefanis, Raquel Fonseca, Elsa Fornero, Matthew Gabel, Steffen Ganghof, Janet Gornick, Willem Maas, Ted Marmor, Nick Parsons, Kieke Okma, Lars Osberg, Isabel Rodriguez-Tejedo, Herman Schwartz, Timothy M. Smeeding, C. Eugene Steuerle, Robert P. Stoker, Rick van der Ploeg, Ronald S. Warren, Peter Whiteford, Edward Whitehouse, and Holger Wolf.