A usual interpretation of the high performance of the German economy since 2006 is that the Hartz labour market reforms have boosted German competitiveness, resulting in higher exports, higher production and lower unemployment. We start from the diagnosis that this explanation is at odds with...

Conventional wisdom predicts that changes in the aggregate unemployment rate may significantly affect a country’s income distribution and, as a consequence, have a relevant impact on the evolution of the poverty rate. However, the relationship between labour macroeconomic indicators and...

of personal income distribution normalized to the total nominal GDP. Inflation is found to be a mechanism, which counters changes in the relative incomes induced by economic growth and population changes - both in number and age structure. A model is developed linking the measured inflation...

This paper aims at complementing the approach presented by Johnston et al. (2003) with tools from the literature on economic geography and income distribution in order to perform a thorough analysis of the spatial concentration of unemployment. Apart from using such empirical procedures in the...

This paper aims at evaluating the effect of the current economic crisis on household income and poverty in Spain and Italy. As data on 2009 income has not been released yet, we have carried out a microsimulation analysis using data drawn for the European Statistics on Income and Living...