In this paper, using Ireland, where debt issues are of particular salience as a test case, we seek to understand the extent to which the measures currently employed as national indicators of poverty and social exclusion succeed in capturing over-indebtedness and, more broadly, severity of debt...

A large literature has emerged around the strong association between income inequality and average life expectancy and a range of health outcomes including mental well being. Three possible explanations for the association have been offered: that the association is a statistical artefact; the...

In this paper we address the question of the relative importance of within and between country differences in income and material deprivation in the European Union in the context of recent suggestions that insufficient attention has been paid to cross-national differences. In particular, we...

Monitoring the evolution of poverty and assessing progress towards achieving the stated targets is of central importance to the National Anti Poverty Strategy (NAPS). Last year, the ESRI carried out a study for the NAPS Inter-Departmental Policy Committee (Callan et al. 1999) based on results...

At risk of poverty indicators based on relative income measures suggest within the enlarged EU that societies located at quite different points on a continuum of affluence have similar levels of poverty. Substantial differences in levels of income between societies do not in themselves...

In this paper we consider the consequences for measurement of material deprivation, consistent poverty and economic vulnerability of the shift from the ECHP data set to the EU-SILC instrument. Despite the restricted number of deprivation items available in EU-SILC, we show that there is a...

In this paper we use the first full wave of the Irish component of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey to evaluate conflicting interpretations of levels and patterns of material deprivation in Ireland after the Celtic Tiger. Radical critics of Irish economic policies have...