This paper examines how far Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have achieved gender equality in earnings. These Nordic countries are contrasted with Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s, and include some comparisons to the situation in the 1980s. While all these...

Children do not control their socio-economic situation; they benefit or suffer from their parents' situation. In north European countries major social transfer schemes, depending on the presence of dependent children, answer to multiple objectives (birth rate support, reduced inequality in the...

Comparative poverty research flourishes, especially since comparable income data are easily available through the Luxembourg Income Study. However, a number of methodological pitfalls in comparative poverty research are often overlooked. There is a vast amount of literature on sensitivity of...

Although highly-developed welfare states in the industrialized world spend a large share of their income on social security, poverty and social exclusion have not been eradicated. The persistence of income poverty in industrialized welfare states casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of...

Few works more than Esping-Andersen's 'Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism' have drawn researchers' attention on institutional features that characterize the diverse typologies of welfare regimes; yet the impact of the different institutional settings on income distribution has mostly been taken...

Comparative research of poverty, income inequality and the effectiveness of income transfer systems has flourished during the last two decades, largely owing to the contribution of the Luxembourg Income Study project. So far, however, the majority of comparative analyses have been based on a...

Canada was very late in establishing a comprehensive retirement security system - lagging roughly thirty five years after the US built its Social Security system and about eighty years after Bismark first established a state funded pension system in Germany. As a consequence, the reduction in...

This paper examines the relationship between regional or 'contextual' poverty, income inequality and unemployment and individual political participation in the mid-1990s for the following Western European countries: Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. This...

The economics profession has made considerable progress in understanding the increase in wage inequality in the U.S. and the UK over the past several decades, but currently lacks a consensus on why inequality did not increase, or increased much less, in (continental) Europe over the same time...

This study compares the receipt rates of unemployment compensation of American young men (aged 18-25) with those from Canada and the United Kingdom. The results indicate that American young men are far less likely to receive compensation for their unemployment than are youth from the other two...