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,...

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...

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...

In this paper, we examine the consequences of different welfare state strategies. We argue that four major strategies have appeared: 1) the primary caregiver/secondary earner strategy, focused on valuing the care in which women engage; 2) the primary earner/secondary caregiver strategy, focused...

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 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...

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...

Radical employment, household structure and stability transformations have created new tensions on the welfare state front, whose social programs were constructed in an era with a wholly different risk profile. Rowntree's poverty cycle clearly exemplifies the postwar picture of an exceptional...

Although the poverty rates among solo mothers vary a lot between countries there is one common feature: solo mothers perform worse in terms of financial resources compared to married or cohabiting mothers. Even in countries with low poverty rates in general, the differences in income between...