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 documents levels and changes in child poverty rates in 13 OECD countries using data from the Luxembourg Income Study project, and focusing upon an analysis of the reasons for changes over the 1990s. The objective is to uncover the relative role of income transfers from the state in...

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...

The paper compares poverty in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and France. We answer whether it is justifiable to talk about a unified Nordic model in terms of poverty and poverty alleviation. We have (1) descriptive/analytical and (2) methodological goals. (1) We pool the four Nordic countries...

For a growing number of children in families headed by single mothers and in those headed by two adults with limited job skills, economic security now depends on mothers' earnings. The role that income transfers plays in reducing child poverty is well understood. Much less investigated is the...

All modern societies face the issue of how to best support its children when labor and capital markets fail to produce adequate levels of income for their parents. Public and private means of economic and social support are mixed in rich nations to provide for both a minimally adequate level of...

Unemployment has become one of the most serious social and economic problems in Europe. In 1997, every tenth member of the EU labour force was unemployed; nearly half of these were long-term unemployed. Nearly four out of ten Europeans of working age were unemployed or otherwise outside the...