This paper examines the distribution of the iquest;social wageiquest; benefits in kind from welfare services, including the National Health Service, state education, social housing, and personal social services. The current Government has put a strong emphasis on improving public services and...

Economic transition lowered happiness on average, but did not affect all equally. This paper uses Hungarian survey data to study the impact of religion and economic transition on happiness. Religious involvement contributes positively to individualsiquest; self-reported well-being. Controlling...

In the past few years the informal sector in countries in transition has increasingly become the focus of research, public policy and the media. The term iquest;informal sectoriquest; has been used to describe an extremely wide spectrum of activities, which do not necessarily have much in...

The Lisbon summit of the European Council in March 2000 declared the number of people living in poverty and social exclusion in the European Union to be unacceptable, and called for steps to tackle the issue, beginning with the setting of targets for particular indicators. The targets suggested...

In this paper, we use the individual-level USR data for the whole population of 1993 leavers from the iquest;oldiquest; universities of the UK to investigate the determinants of graduate occupational earnings. Among other results, we find that there are significant differences in the...

The concept of social exclusion has been widely debated in Europe but its application to children has seen relatively little discussion. What could be meant by exclusion of children is the first main theme of the paper. Among other things, I consider the choice of reference group, the...

In this paper the author argues that social scientists need to do more to provide policy-relevant research. Rapid technological and economic change raise new issues about how policy should adjust that are not adequately addressed by older and narrower approaches. The author suggests two ways in...

Abstract: This paper is motivated by the lack of any obvious relationship between aggregate poverty and unemployment in Great Britain. We derive a framework based on individuals' risks of unemployment and poverty, and how these vary over the economic cycle. Analysing the British Household Panel...

This paper explores the links between school, family and area background influences during adolescence and later adult economic outcomes. The empirical analysis is based on data covering the period 1979 to 1996, drawn from the 1979 US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. For a sample of...

This paper reviews the achievements of the Labour Government's education policy between 1997 and 2001. Tony Blair claimed that his Government would make education a priority. The first part of the paper reviews the scale of education spending in relation to the economy at large and within the...