Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in the classical sense, rejecting any sub-field labelling of his interests and...

As unemployment rises across the European Union (EU) it is important to understand the extent to which the incomes of the new unemployed are protected by tax-benefit systems and to assess the cost pressures on the social protection systems of this increase in unemployment. This paper uses the EU...

The authors use the European Union-wide tax-benefit model, EUROMOD, to establish baseline rates of relative poverty in 1998 for each of the Member States and then explore their sensitivity to (a) an increase in unemployment, (b) real income growth and (c) an increase in earnings inequality. They...

While policies to eliminate poverty remain the responsibility of member states, the European Union may have a role to play in setting minimum standards. This paper explores the implications of a European Minimum Pension. A prototype Europe-wide tax benefit microsimulation model is used to...

As unemployment rises across the European Union (EU), it is important to understand the extent to which the incomes of the new unemployed are protected by tax–benefit systems and to assess the cost pressures on the social protection systems of this increase in unemployment. This chapter uses...

This paper considers the effects on current pensioner incomes of reforms designed to improve the long-term sustainability of public pension systems in the European Union. We use EUROMOD to simulate a set of common illustrative reforms for four countries selected on the basis of their diverse...