In this paper we describe and explain country differences in the effect of gender on the risk to become poor, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study on 22 industrialized countries. Although in most countries women are more likely to become poor than men, this is not the case for all...

This paper assesses women's poverty in 26 diverse LIS countries - five Anglophone countries, six Continental European countries, four Nordic countries, two Eastern European countries, three Southern European countries, and six Latin American countries. Our analyses are organized around four...

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, and insufficient social spending. Vulnerable groups such as...

The starting point in the paper is the relative concept of poverty. We will study how our picture of poverty will change if we accept a very relative concept of poverty. The first problem we encountered was the selection of the benchmark. A couple of alternative ways to conduct relativizations...

This brief chapter introduces researchers to the possibilities for subnational research using the harmonized data sets made available via the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) (www.lisproject.org). We first offer a brief overview of the LIS and discuss specific challenges for subnational research...

In the social policy debate, fundamentally different ideas prevail about the interlinkages between such key variables as employment, low pay, social transfers and poverty. This paper presents basic empirical evidence on the validity of these ideas and the policy prescriptions that follow from...

Greater social cohesion is an explicit goal of the European Union. Progress is monitored considering the performance in each member country on the basis of national indicators; EU-wide estimates of inequality and poverty play no role. Yet this is a basic information to evaluate the progress of...

The impact of aging has become a global concern due to the increasing number of older people in many industrialized countries. Today there are more older women than any other time in history. Living longer may become a burden rather than a blessing if lived out in poverty. This study...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes according to features related to centralisation is...

This study investigates the relationship between the welfare state and poverty with multiple measures of the welfare state and poverty in an unbalanced panel of 18 Western nations from 1967 to 1997. While addressing the limitations of past research, the analysis shows that social security...