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, ●...

Both overall income inequality and inequality in the distribution of earnings rose sharply during the 1980s and 1990s in a number of industrialised countries, notably the UK and the USA. This makes it particularly important to know how the distribution of income in Ireland has been changing over...

In this paper we address a set of interrelated issues. These comprise the relative merits of unidimensional versus multidimensional approaches to poverty and social exclusion, increasing concerns about reliance on nationally based income poverty measures in the context of EU-enlargement and the...

In this paper we apply self organising maps (SOM) to a detailed set of material deprivation indicators from the Irish component of European Union Community Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). The first stage of our analysis involves the identification and description of sixteen...

In this paper we take advantage of the recent availability of EU-SILC data to contribute to the recent debate relating to the Europeanisation of reference groups. Our analysis addresses both weak and strong versions of the thesis. The former proposes that common standards of what is an...

The life cycle concept has come to have considerable prominence in Irish social policy debate. However, this has occurred without any systematic effort to link its usage to the broader literature relating to a concept. Nor has there been any detailed consideration of how we should set about...