By way of introduction This report provides the fi rm foundation for anchoring the research that will be performed by the GINI project. It subsequently considers the fi elds covered by each of the main work packages: ● inequalities of income, wealth and education, ● social impacts, ●...

Welfare states are said to have evolved over the course of the past twenty years towards a ‘social investment’ model of welfare, characterised by a focus on equality of opportunity and upward social mobility combined with greater emphasis on individual responsibility. More or less...

Introduction In the decade leading to the present crisis – despite years of growing employment and increasing average incomes – Europe did not succeed in making any substantial progress in combating relative income poverty, particularly among the working age population. Certainly, Europeans...

This paper provides a description of activation efforts directed towards minimum income recipients. Information on activation strategies aimed at this population group has remained relatively limited, partly because social assistance claimants have only quite recently become a target group of...

The paper looks at the link between inequality and voter turnout, and derives three hypothesis from previous literature. It is shown that inequality associates negatively with turnout at the national elections (hypothesis 1). Although this is not a very strong effect, but it is net of several...

Previous research suggests that where inequality is high, participation is low. Two arguments are generally put forward to explain this finding: First, inequality depresses participation because people have diverging statuses and therefore fewer opportunities to share common goals. Second,...

The international surveys of pupil achievement – PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS – have been widely used to compare socioeconomic gradients in children’s cognitive abilities across countries. Socioeconomic status is typically measured drawing on children’s reports of family or home...

This paper studies the relationship between income inequality, a macro-level characteristic, and solidarity of Europeans. To this aim, solidarity is defined as the ‘willingness to contribute to the welfare of other people’. We rely on a theoretical idea according to which feelings of...

We show how classic source-decomposition and subgroup-decomposition meth ods can be reconciled with regression methodology used in the recent liter ature. We also highlight some pitfalls that arise from uncritical use of the regression approach. The LIS database is used to compare the approaches...

Impact exerted by income inequality on happiness and etatist (interventionist) versus liberal (pro free- market) economic attitudes are analyzed. Income inequality in different countries reduces happiness, understood as public satisfaction with material standard of living and with life as a...