Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called...

Current studies addressing the rise in inequality confine themselves to country-level developments. This paper delineates trends in earnings inequality and employment at the sectoral level for eight LIS countries between 1985-2005. Earnings inequality mainly manifests itself within rather than...

The rapid rise of China on the global economic stage could have substantial and unequal employment and wage effects in advanced industrialised democracies given China's large volume of low-wage labour. Thus far, these effects have not been analysed in the comparative political economy...

Many studies have focused on how demographic dynamics, such as changes in marriage patterns and the increasing share of households headed by a single adult, may contribute to rising earnings inequality. Here we instead ask how demographic differences between countries may underpin differences in...

Low and variable farm income has been a main rationale for heavy government intervention in agricultural markets and income transfers to farmers whether in Europe in response to disruptive agricultural imports and low world prices at the end of the 19th century or in the US in response to the...

At a time when policy-makers in many developed countries continue to justify farm support on the basis of relatively low and unstable incomes, this chapter shows that incomes of farm households are not particularly lower on average compared to those of non-farm households in most of the ten...

This study set out to understand the poverty risks of single parents in the context of the rise of the dual-earner household. Data from the LIS database were used to analyze individuals and households from 18 OECD countries in the period 1984 to 2010. There were to main findings. The first is...

Previous research has identified a distinctive East Asian model of income protection for disadvantaged children. In the wealthier East Asian societies, relative poverty rates are similar or lower than those in many Western European societies, but income transfers are low and market incomes...

Redistribution is one of the principal mechanisms through which countries secure low income inequality. Maintaining moderately high wage levels at the low end of the distribution may be increasingly difficult and perhaps even counterproductive from an egalitarian perspective. If so,...

This paper considers groups who are most likely to be vulnerable to new social risks and tests the effects of social policies on their poverty levels. Specifically, the paper conducts multi-level regression analyses across 18 OECD countries near the year 2004, analyzing the effects of social...