The challenges arising from low employment rates, an ageing population, changing family structures and social exclusion have pushed ‘quality of life’ issues to the front of the EU social policy agenda. The Foundation has launched an initiative to improve the monitoring and reporting of living...

The recent enlargement of the European Union has changed the context within which poverty and social exclusion in the Member States is understood and has highlighted the need for an expanded approach to these problems. Enlargement has widened the gap in living standards between the richest and...

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...

The EU-SILC 2005 wave includes a special module on inter-generational transmission of poverty. In addition to the standard data relating to income and material deprivation, the information relating to parental background and childhood circumstances was collected for all household members or...

Welfare states are said to have evolved over the course of the past twenty years towards a ‘social investment’ model of welfare, characterised by a focus on equality of opportunity and upward social mobility combined with greater emphasis on individual responsibility. More or less...

In light of widespread agreement that poverty and social exclusion should be understood as multidimensional phenomenon, in this paper we explore the practical implications of such an understanding in relation to widely employed indicators of such phenomena in Ireland. One persistent critique of...