Inequality And Poverty Across Generations In The European Union

This SDN studies the evolution of inequality across age groups leading up to and since the global financial crisis, as well as implications for fiscal and labor policies. Europe’s population is aging, child and youth poverty are rising, and income support systems are often better equipped to address old-age poverty than the challenges faced by poor children and/or unemployed youth today.

European integration is focused on improving economic performance and increasing income levels in nations across the European Union. Political leaders and the media often use income trends to measure this progress, with inequality moving more and more to the forefront of these conversations. In this book, contributing authors focus on the economies within the EU, its member countries, and other European countries closely associated with the EU. The book includes an overview of economic and social trends, using long-term processes of European integration as a way to frame the discussions. Georg Fischer, Robert Strauss, and their contributors focus on explaining how policy makers and the media focus on national trends to measure progress among the nations in Europe. They make a specific point to look at the EU as an economic and political entity whose parts are closely interlinked rather than as a conglomerate of individual countries. The contributors consider the commonalities and differences between various institutions and policies, explaining how a decision in one country might impact another. Europe's Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality offers a novel approach to the analysis of social and economic trends, and the resulting book identifies major policy challenges applicable in the EU and beyond.

Europe has become a dominant frame for the generation, regulation and perception of social inequalities. This trend was solidified by the current economic crisis, which is characterized by increasing inequalities between central and peripheral countries and groups. By analysing the double polarization between winners and losers of the crisis, the segmentation of labour markets and the perceived quality of life in Europe, this book contributes to a better understanding of patterns and dynamics of inequality in an integrated Europe.

This edited collection analyses social inequality in the European Union, within and between countries. The work critically explores both vertical inequality, existing between those with high incomes and low incomes, and horizontal inequality, existing between groups according to nationality, age, ethnicity, and gender. Reducing Inequalities has been written by leading academics in the field who describe the current social situation in the European Union, focussing on inequality from a multidimensional perspective that includes income, poverty, social exclusion, education. The authors argue that social issues such as these have become national prerogatives for countries within the European Union. In response they ask: How does the European Union engage with inequality today? What principles of social solidarity ought to be applied between states and citizens of the European Union? What should be the role of European Union and its institutions regarding the challenge of reducing inequality? This book will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand inequality as a multidimensional concept, rather than solely as an economic phenomenon, across different geographical and historical contexts.

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND license. The perpetuation of poverty across generations damages lives. It weakens social cohesion and the economy and undermines environmental sustainability. This book examines why poverty is carried on from one generation to the next and what needs to be done to eradicate it. This book draws on a wide variety of sources and academic disciplines (social sciences, economics, law, community development, neuroscience and developmental psychology) along with the lived experience of people in poverty. Challenging the myths and prejudices about poverty that hinder progress, it calls for a comprehensive approach based on ensuring real equality of opportunity for all. It stresses the need to intervene early to combat child poverty and break the vicious cycles that perpetuate poverty and disadvantage.

The poverty rate is one of the most visible ways in which nations measure the economic well-being of their low-income citizens. To gauge whether a person is poor, European states often focus on a person's relative position in the income distribution to measure poverty while the United States looks at a fixed-income threshold that represents a lower relative standing in the overall distribution to gauge. In Europe, low income is perceived as only one aspect of being socially excluded, so that examining other relative dimensions of family and individual welfare is important. This broad emphasis on relative measures of well-being that extend into non-pecuniary aspects of people's lives does not always imply that more people would ultimately be counted as poor. This is particularly true if one must be considered poor in multiple dimensions to be considered poor, in sharp contrast to the American emphasis on income as the sole dimension. With contributions from the world's foremost authorities on income and social measurement, the book provides detailed discussions of specific issues from a European perspective followed by commentary from American observers. The volume considers (1) current standards of poverty measurement in the European Union and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, (2) challenges in extending those measures to account for the value of the provision of in-kind and cash benefits from the government, (3) the interaction of poverty measures with social assistance, (4) non-income but monetary measures of poverty, and (5) multi-dimensional measures of poverty. The result is a definitive reference for poverty researchers and policymakers seeking to disengage politics from measurement.

In this this timely study of the different approaches of America and Europe to the problems of domestic inequality and poverty, the authors describe just how different the two continents are in the level of State engagement in the redistribution of income. They discuss various possible economic and sociological explanations for the difference, including different attitudes to the poor, notions of social responsibility, and attitudes to race.

Using new EU-wide data, this report shows very different patterns of poverty across Europe, depending on the benchmark used. The findings have important implications for the spatial distribution of poverty within and between countries (including the UK) and for the development of anti-poverty policy across the EU.