Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of 'temporal autonomy': the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life....

The paper investigates the definition of equity-regarding poverty measures when there are different household types in the population. It derives the implications of a between-type regressive transfer principle for poverty measures, for the choice of poverty lines and for the measurement of...

The premise of the Children in North America Project lies in the kind of world we live in today, an increasingly interdependent, complex, and connected world. It is a small world where school children living in a desert state or a prairie province know all about a tsunami because of images of...

Most cross-country comparisons of living standards focus on real Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) adjusted Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person. These measures provide no variance in living standards within the nation, nor do they account for the amount of real incomes that families actually...

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...

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...

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.