Over the last two decades, the number of individuals entitled to work incapacity (WI) benefits increased strongly in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. The caseload has consequently increased but this has happened at a very different pace and to a very different degree. In order to...

This paper contributes to a discussion on the extent to which the focus of social spending has been shifted from ‘old’ to ‘new’ social risks. In order to clarify Cantillon’s claim that the transition to a social investment state has influenced poverty trends (Cantillon, 2011),...

Despite the employment gains in many EU countries in the decade prior to the crisis of 2008, the integration of disabled individuals in the labor market has often proved a difficult task. As already shown in other studies, the consequences of this reach further than the individual level with the...

Recently there has been a growing interest in the empirical association between income inequality and social mobility. Little is known on the normative nexus between both notions, however. In this paper, we axiomatically characterize a family of multiperiod social evaluation functions that...

Individual well-being depends not only on income but also on other dimensions of life, such as health, the quality of social relations and of the environment, employment, and job satisfaction. In this paper we survey the economic literature on how to construct such overall measures of...

We discuss and compare fi…ve measures of individual well-being, namely income, an objective composite well-being index, a measure of subjective well-being, equivalent income, and a well-being measure based on the von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities of the individuals. After examining the...

This paper considers the measurement of poverty in the European Union (EU). Starting from a definition of poverty that is suitable for the European context, a flexible measurement framework is proposed based on the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke class of poverty measures. Three key issues need to be...

There is a widespread consensus that well-being is a multidimensional notion. To quantify multidimensional well-being, information on the relative weights of the different dimensions is essential. There is, however, considerable disagreement in the literature on the most appropriate weighting...

We discuss and compare five measures of individual well-being, namely income, an objective composite well-being index, a measure of subjective well-being, equivalent income, and a well-being measure based on the von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities of the individuals. After examining the...