For over a decade, all three-year-olds in England have been entitled to a free part-time early education place. One aim of this policy is to close developmental gaps between higher-income and low-income children. However, the success of the initiative depends on children accessing the places....

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...

This paper compares child poverty dynamics cross-nationally using panel data from seven nations: the USA, Britain, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Hungary and Russia. As well as using standard relative poverty definitions the paper examines flows into and out of the poorest fifth of the children?s...

Over the last four decades, academic and wider public interest in inequality and poverty has grown substantially. In this paper we address the question: what have been the major new directions in the analysis of inequality and poverty over the last thirty to forty years? We draw attention to...

The analysis of targeting of cash benefits is typically silent on whether any success is due to encouraging claims from the poor or to the decisions of administrators on the claims they receive. By contrast, the paper models the probabilities of households? knowledge of a new social assistance...

The paper considers child poverty in rich English-speaking countries – the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland. Do all these countries really stand out from other OECD countries for their levels of child poverty, as is sometimes assumed? And what policies have they adopted...

In many industrialised countries, teenagers have a significant spending power, and they are important customers for specialised industries. The income of teenagers still in full time education comes from two major sources: parental pocket money, and earnings from part time jobs. Little is known...

The impact of the administration of unemployment benefits on time spent unemployed is a neglected issue in discussion of incentive effects in Central and Eastern Europe. We use Labour Force Survey data, administrative registers and inspection of benefit office practices to show that there is...

Over the last four decades, academic and wider public interest in inequality and poverty has grown substantially. In this paper we address the question: what have been the major new directions in the analysis of inequality and poverty over the last thirty to forty years? We draw attention to...

We provide new evidence about the degree of social segregation in England?s secondary schools, employing a cross-national perspective. Analysis is based on data for 27 rich industrialised countries from the 2000 and 2003 rounds of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA), using a...