Working-age Americans work longer hours than adults in other industrialized countries. At the same time, the United States. has one of the least equal income distributions of any rich country. This paper provides a cross-national analysis of the impact of the exceptional U.S. income distribution...

We use Luxembourg Income Study data to compare the progressivity of the tax structure in the U.S. and Europe. While our study supports the arguments of other scholars that the US has more progressive taxes than the continental or social democratic countries, we also present the following...

This paper aims at examining the impact of different transfers on the income distribution in European countries. Therefore an empirical analysis using generalized Lorenz curve comparisons is carried out. The obtained results are investigated by relating them to a classification of European...

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...

In the EU there is growing concern about poverty among children, and among families with children. In most OECD countries, income poverty among children now exceeds that among the elderly, who traditionally were the demographic group most at risk of poverty (Jäntti and Danziger, 2000). However,...

The objective of this paper is to distinguish between different types of working poverty, on the basis of the mechanisms that produce it. Whereas the poverty literature identifies a myriad of risk factors and of categories of disadvantaged workers, we focus on three immediate causes of working...

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...

Low pay is conventionally measured in terms of the gross earnings of the individual, related to benchmarks derived from the distribution of earnings such as half or two-thirds of the median. Poverty status, on the other hand, is usually assessed on the basis of the disposable income of the...