Redistribution is one of the principal mechanisms through which countries secure low income inequality. Maintaining moderately high wage levels at the low end of the distribution may be increasingly difficult and perhaps even counterproductive from an egalitarian perspective. If so,...

This paper considers groups who are most likely to be vulnerable to new social risks and tests the effects of social policies on their poverty levels. Specifically, the paper conducts multi-level regression analyses across 18 OECD countries near the year 2004, analyzing the effects of social...

The present study examines the hypotheses that progressive welfare-state policies are likely to increase women's labor force participation, but at the same time to increase both occupational segregation and earning gaps between economically active men and women. Using data from 20 industrialized...

Despite its centrality to contemporary inequality, working poverty is often popularly discussed but rarely studied by sociologists. Using the Luxembourg Income Study, we analyze whether an individual is working poor across 18 affluent democracies circa 2000. We demonstrate that working poverty...

Although many have expressed concern over whether generous welfare policies discourage the employment of single mothers, scholars have rarely exploited cross-national variability in the generosity of social policies to assess this question. This is the case even though much previous scholarship...

This is a chapter from a report of a comparative study of child support policy in fourteen countries (Skinner, C., Bradshaw, J. and Davidson, J. (2007) Child support policy: an international perspective, Department for Work and Pensions Research Report 405, Leeds: Corporate Document Services....

This paper documents levels and changes in child poverty rates in 13 OECD countries using data from the Luxembourg Income Study project, and focusing upon an analysis of the reasons for changes over the 1990s. The objective is to uncover the relative role of income transfers from the state in...

While all nations value low poverty, high levels of economic self-reliance, and equality of opportunity for younger persons, they differ dramatically in the extent to which they reach these goals. Most nations have remarkable similarities in the sources of social concern within each nation -...

The purpose of the paper is to find out what kind of impact different structural factors have on the one hand, poverty and, on the other hand, income transfers. These structural factors have been operationalised as changes in economy, employment and demography. The countries under comparison...

The purpose of this paper is twofold, partly exploratory; to determine the degree to which Rowntree's poverty cycles are still apparent among the most advanced industrial nations, and partly analytical; to examine how successful different sociopolitical strategies have been in eliminating...