This essay starts, after a short introduction on the importance and dimensions of "inclusive growth", with a brief empirical sketch on to what extent Europe has already succeeded with respect to this ambitious goal. The result is quite sobering and gives rise to the question: why is it so? The...

The Canadian labour market is currently emerging from a holding pattern with unusually high numbers in temporary (or "recall") unemployment, those "employed but absent from work" for unspecified reasons, or not in the labour force while waiting to be recalled. Two encouraging signs are evident....

The Canadian labour market is currently emerging from a holding pattern with unusually high numbers in temporary (or "recall") unemployment, those "employed but absent from work" for unspecified reasons, or not in the labour force while waiting to be recalled. Two encouraging signs are evident....

German Socio-Economic Panel data is used to show that the decrease in life satisfaction caused by an increase in the probability of losing work is higher when self-employed than when paid employed. Further estimations reveal that becoming unemployed reduces self-employed workers' satisfaction...

This data set provides data on unemployment benefit schemes in 34 welfare states. The data set updates, extends and modifies Scruggs’ dataset (2005). The current data set includes all 27 member states of the European Union (EU) and 7 non-EU OECD countries for the period 1971-2009. The codebook...

Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial to estimating poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but South Africa lacks such data. We present new pandemic poverty estimates, simulating incomes in prepandemic household...

The government is rightly concerned with employment generation to make growth inclusive. The use of the open unemployment rate to measure its success, however, is misplaced. In a developing country with a large informal sector and in the absence of unemployment insurance, open unemployment is...

Modern welfare policies are increasingly based on notions of reciprocity. Citizens on welfare benefits have to do something in return, e.g. volunteer work. Notwithstanding general public support, social philosophers have been critical on 'mandatory' activities in community programmes. So far,...