Reducing poverty remains an important challenge, and the COVID-19-crisis may further reinforce social vulnerabilities. Although it has declined lately, relative poverty remains high in international comparison and is distributed unevenly across population groups with the elderly, people with...

With gross government debt of 219% of GDP in 2016, Japan’s fiscal situation is in uncharted territory and puts the economy at risk. In addition to raising productivity and growth, Japan needs a more detailed and credible fiscal consolidation path, including specific revenue increases and...

While public expenditure on health care and long‐term care (LTC) has been monitored for many years in European countries, far less attention has been paid to the financial consequences for older people of private out‐of‐pocket (OOP) expenditure necessary to access such care. Employing...

This paper contributes to an on-going conversation between development studies (DS) and social policy (SP) as academic fields, particularly in the UK. Drawing on Andrew Abbott’s analysis of the social sciences as an evolving system of knowledge lineages (KLs) it reflects first on the status of...

The economic crisis affecting Cyprus is likely to have considerable impact on the income distribution. Our analysis provides an early assessment of the short-run distributional effects of austerity measures. We distinguish between fiscal measures that affect wages, taxes and contribution rates...