This paper analyses major pension system regulation in four European countries: Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. It is focused on the government's and social partner's efforts to provide old-age security benefits, and how these regulatory approaches have shaped the current...

This paper is an empirical overview of inequalities of pension outcomes in six European countries, which are shaped by a variety of institutional pensions schemes. The study contrasts pension system regulation in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom; and analyses their...

This paper addresses the question of the institutional flexibility of three major European welfare states. Using Data from the second and fifth wave of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we measure first how effectively the German, British and Italian welfare state have responded changes in...

Social vulnerability due to insufficient income and earnings may come from many sources, both demographic and economic, in a globalizing world. This paper examines the problems of population aging, low wages, growing inequality, low work hours and insufficient social spending in Spain...

In most OECD countries the gap between rich and poor has widened over the past decades. This paper analyzes whether and to what extent taxes and social transfers have contributed to this trend. Has the redistributive power of different social programs changed over time? The paper contributes to...

This paper offers a new way of assessing government cash transfers using a social welfare function framework. It demonstrates how one can use social welfare functions to measure the efficiency of such program s without requir ing the specif ication of a poverty line or particular poverty...

The paper documents child poverty levels and trends using both relative ('deep') and absolute ('extreme') measures in two clusters: Anglo–Saxon high-income countries and upper middleincome countries. We also investigate the influence of different components of household income and other...