In the social policy debate, fundamentally different ideas prevail about the interlinkages between such key variables as employment, low pay, social transfers and poverty. This paper presents basic empirical evidence on the validity of these ideas and the policy prescriptions that follow from...

In the EU there is growing concern about poverty among children, and among families with children. In most OECD countries, income poverty among children now exceeds that among the elderly, who traditionally were the demographic group most at risk of poverty (Jäntti and Danziger, 2000). However,...

Although employment growth is propagated as being crucial to reduce poverty across OECD countries, the actual impact of employment growth on poverty rates is still unclear. This study presents novel estimates of the impact of macro-level trends in female labour force participation on trends in...

There is a long-standing controversy over the question of whether targeting social transfers towards the bottom part of the income distribution actually enhances or weakens their redistributive impact. Korpi and Palme have influentially claimed that 'the more we target benefits at the poor, the...

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...

Based on identically specified human capital earnings functions of the Mincer-type, this paper reports estimates of the rates of return to human capital for full-time working male employees in twelve countries. The results are compared across countries and over time of the decade of the eighties.