There is a widespread impression among the Indian intelligentsia, foreign scholars, and residents of developed/rich countries that India’s economic growth has not reduced poverty, that globalisation has worsened poverty and/or income distribution, and that there are hundreds of millions of...

Development of the social dimension of Europe was advanced by the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, and this paper considers the future direction of social policy. The first step towards a social agenda could take the form of benchmarking, based on national competencies in this field, with Member...

We compare the distributional effects of austerity measures that have been introduced in 6 EU countries in the period of large government budget deficits following the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn. We explore the effects of policy changes presented as austerity...

This paper analyses the incidence of chronic and transitory poverty in Pakistan in both urban and rural settings. The findings are that rural poverty is severer and also chronic as compared to transitory poverty in urban centres. The main factor behind this phenomenon is the homogeneity of the...

This study analyses the trends in polarisation in Pakistan, in its rural and urban segments and its provinces, at the micro level during the period 1992-93 to 2001-02. Estimations are made by using the Bossert-Schworm measure (2006). The study finds fluctuating trends. In general, polarisation...

Over the past 20 years, microsimulation models have come to play an important role in policy analysis, identifying gainers and losers, and characterising the effect on incentives. A natural development of national models is a Europe-wide tax benefit model. The present paper reports results from...

Due to the worsening of economic crisis across European countries, the problem of poverty and the ways to tackle it returned at the centre of political and scientific debate. The level of poverty increased after the crisis, especially in Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece....

We provide evidence of the relative cost-effectiveness of different types of policy instrument in reducing poverty or limiting its increase, comparing within and between seven diverse EU countries. We do that by measuring the implications of increasing/reducing the instrument size within its...

In this paper, the concept of vulnerability of the poor’s welfare and its practical measures are scrutinised in order to derive implications for targeting poverty reduction policies toward vulnerable households. As illustration, various measures of vulnerability proposed in the literature are...