This paper will try to elucidate to what degree disposable income distribution in some OECD countries has been affected by the labor market changes described using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). Three questions require a detailed analysis. Firstly, how has income distribution...

Pension reforms have been on the political agenda of governments and of international organisations as the OECD and the World Bank for some time. However, the strengthening of private elements in pension systems is often believed to intensify existing inequalities in the distribution of pensions...

In an age when there is considerable focus on the needs and rights of children, it is perhaps a little surprising that parental income still mostly determines the standard of living that children enjoy. This has important implications, not just in terms of overall levels of welfare for children,...

The cohort sustainability of welfare regimes is of central importance to most long-term analyses of welfare state reforms (see for example: Esping-Andersen et al., 2002). A complement to these analyses shows that changes in intra versus inter cohort inequalities are major outcomes or...

It is widely held that people who work have no difficulty in avoiding poverty and guaranteeing their family a decent standard of living. This idea has proved false, as many authors have shown that the ranks of the poor are filled with active people, sometimes even working full time. But,...

Income and expenditure surveys typically provide data on the household level, and household types may differ in needs. In order to make the standard measures of inequality and welfare applicable to such a heterogeneous population, researchers transform it into an artificial quasi-homogeneous...

Class differences in attitudes towards redistribution are compared across European countries. Two main competing hypotheses are tested, using scatterplots and multi-level modelling. The first is that class differences in attitudes are affected mainly by real class stratification, so that class...

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 -...

This paper applies generalized Lorenz analysis to income distributions of ten countries using advanced statistical procedures to construct confidence bands around estimates and to generate truncated generalized Lorenz curves to construct a poverty ordering of the countries.

In order to understand inequality in rapidly changing Europe, innovations in data collection and research methods will be essential. Related issues are illustrated through discussion of several different aspects of inequality using the LIS database.