The Lisbon summit of the European Council in March 2000 declared the number ofpeople living in poverty and social exclusion in the European Union to beunacceptable, and called for steps to tackle the issue, beginning with the setting oftargets for particular indicators. The targets suggested...

The concept of social exclusion has been widely debated in Europe butits application to children has seen relatively little discussion. What couldbe meant by exclusion of children is the first main theme of the paper.Among other things, I consider the choice of reference group, thegeographical...

[...]This paper, and its companion, Definition of equality and framework formeasurement: Final Recommendations of the Equalities Review SteeringGroup on Measurement (CASEpaper 120) were prepared as backgroundpapers to assist in the development of the measurement framework for theEqualities...

[...]This paper, and its companion, Developing a Capability List: FinalRecommendations of the Equalities Review Steering Group on Measurement(CASEpaper 121), were prepared as background papers to assist in thedevelopment of the measurement framework for the Equalities Review. Itdiscusses the...

The Equalities Review is an independent panel set up by the UK government in2005 to investigate the persistence of social inequalities and to makerecommendations for the development of a unified Commission for Equalityand Human Rights. This paper was originally written for the Review....

We describe Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach to welfare evaluationin the language of standard welfare economics, and assess to what extentit provides a genuine alternative for individual welfare measurement andpolicy evaluation. We review the nascent empirical literature on the...

Policymakers have been puzzled to observe that food stamp households appear more likely tobe food insecure than observationally similar eligible nonparticipating households. We reexamine this issueallowing for nonclassical reporting errors in food stamp participation and food insecurity....

There is an ambiguity in Amartya Sen's capability approach as to what constitutes an in-dividual's resources, conversion factors and valuable functionings. What we here call the\circularity problem" points to the fact that all three concepts seem to be mutually en-dogenous and interrelated. All...

Subjective well-being is a complex phenomenon coevolving with events in important do-mains of life. Panel vector autoregressions are a suitable tool to analyze the underlyingstructure of changes in happiness and its coevolution with changes in income, health, wor-ries, marital status and...

Obesity has become a major health issue. Research in economics has providedimportant insights as to how technological progress reduced the relative price of food andcontributed to the increase in obesity. However, the increased availability of food might wellhave overstrained will power and led...