The aging of populations and hampering economic growth increase pressure on public finances in many advanced capitalist societies. Consequently, governments have adopted pension reforms in order to relieve pressure on public finances. These reforms have contributed to a relative shift from...

Polarization is an interesting additional social indicator for analyzing income inequality and poverty across countries, as it captures the phenomenon of ‘clustering around extreme poles'. Rising income polarization can be harmful since it is closely linked to poverty, social exclusion, social...

This paper assesses the impact on household incomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and governments’ policy responses in April 2020 in four large and severely hit European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK. We provide comparative evidence on the level of relative and absolute welfare...

This paper estimates the aggregate effects of government income transfers shocks for a sample of EU countries. I construct a new measure of transfers shocks based on a dataset by public finance experts of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). The identification strategy consists of a...

We stress that the demographic changes that Europe will face in the coming decades will have profound consequences not only for the sustainability but also for the adequacy of social security schemes, including pensions. Our paper aims at assessing the consequences of the Ageing Working Group...

Social exclusion is a multidimensional concept that captures several forms of disadvantages, which combine to function as barriers towards the full participation of people in society. It can affect people differently according to their position in the life course. In this chapter, we construct...