Childcare services are increasingly regarded as a major policy lever to mitigate social inequalities. Such services are believed to be effective in reducing poverty and increasing employment rates by allowing both parents to engage in paid employment, as well as to benefit the cognitive and...

The poverty risk rate increased in Finland from 7 to 14 per cent between 1993 and 2010. We have estimated the counterfactual poverty rates for the year 2010 in order to evaluate the impact of changes in tax and benefit systems on the increase of the poverty risk rate. Household disposable...

Part-time employment in Europe has continued to grow faster than overall employment during the Great Recession and its aftermath. But as part-time work becomes more prevalent, so does involuntary part-time – at least in most countries. In this paper we focus on Greece and the UK, two European...

The general and universal right to education has been well established for some time. But despite international agreement, the commitment to education for all is not necessarily linked to obligatory mainstream education for all children with disabilities. The mature European countries have a...

Although societies, as a reaction to the social model of disability, try to integrate and empower people with impairments and disadvantaged families through inclusive policies, these population groups continue to experience integration difficulties. Besides negative changes in health, a weak...

Evidence shows that social recognition works as a motive for many of people’s behavior. Within sociology, a longstanding tradition has shown that this recognition motive produces social and symbolic boundaries, encompassing consumption patterns and different lifestyles, and that the need for...

This article introduces the idea of a childcare time benefit that reconciles three ambitions: to reach a high level of labour market participation, to revalue parental childcare time and to enhance the freedom to choose in the reconciliation of work and family life. The proposed benefit is based...

In the last decades, measures to reconcile work and family life arose in response to new societal needs stemming from the generalization of dual earnership. However, dual earnership has not been adopted evenly across various social groups in European societies. Consequently, concerns about the...

This paper extends existing theories on parental time investment in children to a three generational setting and discusses identifiable restrictions of alternative explanations for grandparental help with childcare. It shows on data of 10 European countries (taken from the 2004 SHAREsurvey) that...

It is an established fact that the level of one’s income affects one’s health. More divisive, however, is the question whether people’s health is also affected by inequalities in income. The latter would imply that not only how much income we have matters for health, but also how much more...