Official statistics on those at low incomes have recently been at the centre of heated debate about trends in poverty in Britain. The Government has argued, on the basis of recently published figures, that the position of those on low incomes has improved substantially in real terms and that...

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...

This paper reassesses the validity of a poverty measure combining relative income and non-monetary deprivation indicators, first developed and applied to Irish data for 1987, in the light of experience since then and current debates. A crucial issue is whether the measure has failed to capture...

In this paper we evaluate trends in levels of economic vulnerability in Ireland during the period 1994-2001. We also document changes in the consequences of such vulnerability for social exclusion and in the social demographic factors with which it is associated. Over time there was a sharp...

This paper analyses the extent of equity of health service delivery across the income distribution in Ireland – that is the extent to which there is equal treatment for equal need irrespective of income. We find that almost all services, apart from dental and optician services, are used more...

Conventional methods of analysis of poverty assume resources are shared so that each individual in a household or family has the same standard of living. Nonmonetary indicators of living standards and deprivation are increasingly being used in measuring household poverty. This paper argues that...

In this paper we attempt to contribute to the growing literature on the mismatch observed when comparing income and deprivation measures of poverty through an analysis of the first two waves of the European Community Household Panel Study. We do so by developing for each country measures of...

This paper examines the determinants of general practitioner (GP) utilisation patterns in Ireland over the period 1987-2001. Using three different micro-data sets, the influence of socio-economic factors as well as health status variables on the demand for GP visits is analysed. A particular...