Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called...

The rapid rise of China on the global economic stage could have substantial and unequal employment and wage effects in advanced industrialised democracies given China's large volume of low-wage labour. Thus far, these effects have not been analysed in the comparative political economy...

Current studies addressing the rise in inequality confine themselves to country-level developments. This paper delineates trends in earnings inequality and employment at the sectoral level for eight LIS countries between 1985-2005. Earnings inequality mainly manifests itself within rather than...

This study offers will try to present some empirical evidence in an attempt to improve our understanding of welfare. After reviewing the empirical criteria used to measure welfare in comparative contexts and explaining our methodology (section 2), section 3 deals with major trends in some OECD...

This paper offers a supply-side explanation of the variation in long-run growth and inequality across countries. In the model education simultaneously affects growth and income inequality. More human capital may increase or decrease growth but also measured inequality. In contrast to some recent...

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...

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...

There is confusion in the literature concerning the relationship between income inequality and redistribution in a cross-country perspective. The reason for this is that different contributions in the literature are not referring to the same characteristic. This is shown by addressing...

We explore the shape of the elderly homeownership rate using a collection of microeconomic surveys of 17 OECD countries. In most, the survey is repeated over time. This allows us to construct an international dataset of repeated cross-sectional data, merging 59 national household surveys on...