Problems of the systems for protecting the elderly have become pressing on a world wide scale albeit for different reasons. In many industrialized countries with mature systems the share of GDP that is redistributed via the mandatory pension system is criticized as being too high. High...

Using year-by-year measures of income distribution provided by the LIS dataset for eight continental Europe countries, this paper considers the recent literature on income inequality and growth to test the following propositions: does inequality converge during the process of economic growth?...

Low pay is conventionally measured in terms of the gross earnings of the individual, related to benchmarks derived from the distribution of earnings such as half or two-thirds of the median. Poverty status, on the other hand, is usually assessed on the basis of the disposable income of the...

In this paper we propose an aggregate measure of income inequality for all founding countries of the European monetary union. Applying the methodology of the Theil index we are able to derive a measure for Euroland as a whole by exploiting information of two data sets, the European Community...

This study explores income changes in nine European countries. First, in order to rank the distributions of income, we apply dominance criteria. Then, we extend this standard approach and examine the differences between Lorenz and Generalized Lorenz curves by means of nonparametric methods. We...

This paper examines the effects of demographic structure on the evolution of inequality in Italy from 1977 to 1995, and on its inequality ranking relative to 11 of the other 14 European Union countries in the mid-1990s. The composition of Italian households was substantially different in 1995...

This paper presents stylized facts about the effect of children on household disposable income and its components (the 'income package') in nine OECD countries, employing data from the Luxembourg Income Study database. We find that cross-national differences in the impact of children on...

We analyze the impact of the state on the incidence of poverty in the working-age population of 14 advanced capitalist democracies between 1970 and 1997 using an unbalanced panel design. We utilize poverty measures based on micro-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study in conjunction with...

In this paper I assess the extent to which welfare states reduce poverty among single mothers and all mothers. I focus on two different typologies of welfare states. One identifies the gendered assumptions underlying social policies, while the other focuses on how welfare states and labor...

EU-TE trade is increasingly characterized by intra-industry trade. For some countries (Czech Republic), the share of intra-industry trade in total trade with the EU approaches 60 percent. The decomposition of intra-industry trade into horizontal and vertical shares reveals overwhelming vertical...