Books

Chapter “Pluralist View on Inequality from Luxemburg Income Study (LIS)” by Daniele Checchi, Piotr R. Paradowski

The authors start by reviewing the history of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), originating from an interdisciplinary project involving economists, sociologists, and political scientists, centered on the cross-country perspective in inequality analysis. They then conduct a meta-analysis of the papers produced by scholars who have taken advantage of the data availability, showing how the theme of income/wealth inequality has been differently addressed in the research conducted thank to free availability of LIS data. The analysis is based on 268 LIS/LWS working papers produced since 2013 by LIS data users. Inequality analysis, an elusive and multidimensional concept, cannot become prerogative of a specific discipline or school of thought, favoring a pluralist approach to the topic. As a consequence, we present how four academic communities (economists, sociologists, social policy, and political scientists) adopt different methodological perspectives in terms of unit of analysis (the individual, the household, or the community), heterogeneity (by gender, age, race, education), outcomes (income, wealth, consumption, education, employment, and work hours, fertility), institutional framework (household, firm, local labor markets, nations) and methodological approach (poverty, inequality, income shares).

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In Survey Data Harmonization in the Social Sciences, a team of distinguished social science researchers delivers a comprehensive collection of ex-ante and ex-post harmonization concepts and methodologies in the context of specific longitudinal and cross-national survey projects. The book examines how ex-ante and ex-post harmonization work individually and in relation to one another, offering practical guidance on harmonization decisions in the preparation of new surveys.

Contributions from experts in sociology, political science, demography, economics, health, and medicine are included, all of which give voice to discipline-specific and interdisciplinary views on methodological challenges inherent in harmonization. The authors offer perspectives from Europe and the United States, as well as Africa, the latter of which provides perspectives rarely features in survey research methodology handbooks.

Readers will also find:

• A thorough introduction to approaches and concepts for survey data harmonization, as well as the effects of data harmonization on the overall survey research process
• Comprehensive explorations of ex-ante harmonization of survey instruments and non-survey data
• Practical discussions of ex-post harmonization of national social surveys, including explorations of survey data recycling and the harmonization of panel surveys
• In-depth examinations of the use of harmonized data in statistical analysis, as well as standardization, harmonization, and comparability

Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. For these reasons, it underpins intense public and academic debates and has become a dominant policy concern within many countries and in all multilateral agencies. It is at the core of the 17 goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

This book contributes to this important discussion by presenting assessments of the measurement and analysis of global inequality by leading inequality scholars, aligning these to comprehensive reviews of inequality trends in five of the world’s largest developing countries — Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa. Each is a persistently high or newly high inequality context and, with the changing global inequality situation as context, country chapters investigate the main factors shaping their different inequality dynamics.

The book takes lessons from these contexts back into the global analysis of inequality and social mobility and the policies needed to address inequality.

The book is freely available on full open following this link.

Arguably, Tony Atkinson laid the foundation of the modern measurement and analysis of inequality. First and foremost, he did so in theory, with innumerable papers since his path-breaking article in the Journal of Economic Theory (Atkinson, 1970). But he constantly sought to apply his conceptual insights to empirical research, with a relentless attention to the characteristics, fitness-for-purpose and limitations of the data used. It is then no surprise that Tony was acquainted with LIS since its very inception in 1983.

The LIS leadership decided to honour Tony by dedicating the 2nd LIS/LWS Users Conference to him. The conference was held in the Belval Campus of the University of Luxembourg on 3-4 May 2018.

This Conference proceedings contain brief articles summarising the main results of thirteen papers presented at the conference.

PDF version is available here

Kindle version is available here

E-book version is available here

The articles included in this special issue of the Journal of Income Distribution are a selection of papers originally presented at the first LIS-LWS Users Conference, hosted by LIS, the cross-national data center in Luxembourg. The conference took place at the University of Luxembourg in Belval, Luxembourg, on April 27- 28, 2017. The submitted papers underwent a process of blind review, and this collection of five articles is the final outcome. Taken as a whole, these articles constitute an interesting overview of the ways in which the research community uses the LIS-LWS Databases, which provide researchers access to microdata on income and wealth, respectively.

Notre civilisation de classe moyenne est à la croisée des chemins. Alors qu’elle définissait le projet des démocraties modernes, elle fait face à des défis majeurs. La recristallisation en masse des inégalités, la mobilité descendante, l’écrasement du pouvoir d’achat des salaires relativement aux prix des biens immobiliers, la paupérisation de cohortes entières de jeunes surdiplômés et la globalisation porteuse d’une montée aux extrêmes de la concurrence forment ensemble une spirale de déclassement aux effets potentiellement dévastateurs.

Les inégalités de classes et la fracture des générations se renforcent mutuellement : à raison de la dynamique de repatrimonialisation, les écarts au sein des nouvelles générations sont appelés à se radicaliser. Ce sont autant de phénomènes dissimulés sous le voile du déni, qui risquent de réduire à néant l’ambition de laisser à nos enfants un monde meilleur.

À partir de données et de comparaisons internationales inédites, Louis Chauvel récuse ici les illusions qui aggravent nos maux. Car les dénégations qu’on oppose aux difficultés réelles des classes moyennes et populaires, des jeunes et de pans entiers de la société ne font qu’aiguiser les frustrations et un ressentiment général dont la traduction politique s’exacerbe.

One of the world’s leading economists of inequality, Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.

Global Inequality takes us back hundreds of years, and as far around the world as data allow, to show that inequality moves in cycles, fueled by war and disease, technological disruption, access to education, and redistribution. The recent surge of inequality in the West has been driven by the revolution in technology, just as the Industrial Revolution drove inequality 150 years ago. But even as inequality has soared within nations, it has fallen dramatically among nations, as middle-class incomes in China and India have drawn closer to the stagnating incomes of the middle classes in the developed world. A more open migration policy would reduce global inequality even further.

Both American and Chinese inequality seems well entrenched and self-reproducing, though it is difficult to predict if current trends will be derailed by emerging plutocracy, populism, or war. For those who want to understand how we got where we are, where we may be heading, and what policies might help reverse that course, Milanovic’s compelling explanation is the ideal place to start.

Tony Atkinson has long been at the forefront of research on inequality, and brings his theoretical and practical experience to bear on its diverse problems. He presents a comprehensive set of policies that could bring about a genuine shift in the distribution of income in developed countries. The problem, Atkinson shows, is not simply that the rich are getting richer. We are also failing to tackle poverty, and the economy is rapidly changing to leave the majority of people behind. To reduce inequality, we have to go beyond placing new taxes on the wealthy to fund existing programs. Atkinson thus recommends ambitious new policies in five areas: technology, employment, social security, the sharing of capital, and taxation. He defends these against the common arguments and excuses for inaction: that intervention will shrink the economy, that globalization makes action impossible, and that new policies cannot be afforded.

More than just a program for change, Atkinson’s book is a voice of hope and informed optimism about the possibilities for political action.

Understanding Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences, produced by FORS, the Swiss Foundation for Research in Social Sciences, features a collection of chapters that demonstrate how research infrastructures – including LIS – are leading to profound changes in the social sciences. In addition to the chapter on LIS, the book includes descriptions of the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF), the European Social Survey (ESS), the European Values Study (EVS), and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The book can be purchased online or by using this form.

This publication presents, for the first time, an internationally agreed set of guidelines for producing micro statistics on household wealth. These guidelines fill an important gap in the existing international guidance on measuring the various dimensions of people’s economic well-being. This introductory chapter describes the purpose of the guidelines, how they were developed, and their relationship with other international standards. The chapter concludes with a broad overview of the structure and content of the document.

This publication presents an internationally agreed framework to support the joint analysis of micro-level statistics on household income, consumption and wealth. Its aim is to extend the existing international frameworks for measuring household income and consumption at the micro level to include wealth, and describes income, consumption and wealth as three separate but interrelated dimensions of people’s economic well-being. The framework, prepared by an international expert group working under the auspices of the OECD, is intended to assist national statistical offices and other data producers to develop data sets at the household level that are suitable for integrated analysis, and for facilitating comparisons between countries. The Framework is widely applicable, with relevance to countries that are at different stages of statistical development, that have different statistical infrastructures, and that operate in different economic and social environments.

Japan was the first Asian country to become a mature industrial society, and throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, was viewed as an ‘all-middle-class society’. However since the 1990s there have been growing doubts as to the real degree of social equality in Japan, particularly in the context of dramatic demographic shifts as the population ages whilst fertility levels continue to fall.

This book compares Japan with America, Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Sweden and Taiwan in order to determine whether inequality really is a social problem in Japan. With a focus on impact demographic shifts, Sawako Shirahase examines female labour market participation, income inequality among households with children, the state of the family, generational change, single person households and income distribution among the aged, and asks whether increasing inequality and is uniquely Japanese, or if it is a social problem common across all of the societies included in this study. Crucially, this book shows that Japan is distinctive not in terms of the degree of inequality in the society, but rather, in how acutely inequality is perceived. Further, the data shows that Japan differs from the other countries examined in terms of the gender gap in both the labour market and the family, and in inequality among single-person households – single men and women, including lifelong bachelors and spinsters – and also among single parent households, who pay a heavy price for having deviated from the expected pattern of life in Japan.

Drawing on extensive empirical data, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in Japanese culture and society, Japanese studies and social policy more generally.

This state-of-the-art volume presents comparative, empirical research on a topic that has long preoccupied scholars, politicians, and everyday citizens: economic inequality. While income and wealth inequality across all populations is the primary focus, the contributions to this book pay special attention to the middle class, a segment often not addressed in inequality literature. The research also casts important light on how economic inequality affects and is affected by gender disparities, labour markets, institutions, and politics.

Written by leading scholars in the field of economic inequality, all 17 chapters draw on microdata from the databases of LIS, an esteemed cross-national data center based in Luxembourg. Using LIS data to structure a comparative approach, the contributors paint a complex portrait of inequality across affluent countries at the beginning of the 21st century. The volume also trail-blazes new research into inequality in countries newly entering the LIS databases, including Japan, Iceland, India, and South Africa.

This book by Udaya R Waglé situates ethnic heterogeneity in the larger discussion of the welfare state and its redistributive outcomes, poverty and inequality, in high income countries. By using comprehensive, longitudinal data covering up to 2010, Waglé makes a major milestone in comparative welfare state research both conceptually and methodologically. Conceptually, this book elevates the relevance of growing ethnic heterogeneity in thinking about how politics and economics of the welfare state operate, collectively impacting the magnitudes of poverty and inequality. Methodologically, the analysis conducted in this book provides broader empirical tests for the many propositions and discourses found in the literature based largely on anecdotal evidence, case studies, and unjustifiably limited quantitative data. A thorough and insightful analysis presented in this book helps students, researchers, and policymakers better understand the ethnic heterogeneity connections of the welfare state and redistribution, together with a comparative perspective of the changing faces of ethnic heterogeneity, welfare state policies, and poverty and inequality in high income countries.

Welfare States and Immigrant Rights deals with the impact of welfare states on  immigrants’ social rights, economic well-being and social inclusion, and it offers the first systematic comparison of immigrants’ social rights across welfare states. To study immigrants’ social rights the author develops an analytical framework that focuses on the interplay between 1) the type of welfare state regime, 2) forms of entry, or entry categories, and 3) the incorporation regime regulating the inclusion or exclusion of immigrants. The book maps out the development of immigrants’ social rights from the early postwar period until around 2010 in six countries representing different welfare state regimes: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, and Denmark, and it examines the politics of social rights extension and contraction and changes in the incorporation regime that impinge on immigrant rights.

Canberra Group Handbook on Household Income Statistics, Second Edition (2011), provides a consolidated reference for those involved in producing, disseminating or analyzing income distribution statistics. It reflects the current international standards, recommendations and best practice in household income measurement. It also contains updated and expanded information about country practices in this field of statistics and provides guidance on best practices for quality assurance and dissemination of these statistics.

The first book to study women’s poverty over the life course, this wide-ranging collection focuses on the economic condition of single mothers and single elderly women–while also considering partnered women and immigrants–in eight wealthy but diverse countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Poverty is not simply the result of an individual’s characteristics, behaviors or abilities. Rather, as David Brady demonstrates, poverty is the result of politics. In Rich Democracies, Poor People, Brady investigates why poverty is so entrenched in some affluent democracies whereas it is a solvable problem in others. Drawing on over thirty years of data from eighteen countries, Brady argues that cross-national and historical variations in poverty are principally driven by differences in the generosity of the welfare state. An explicit challenge to mainstream views of poverty as an inescapable outcome of individual failings or a society’s labor markets and demography, this book offers institutionalized power relations theory as an alternative explanation. The power of coalitions for egalitarianism, Leftist political groups and parties, and the social policies they are able to institutionalize shape the amount of poverty in society. Where poverty is low, equality has been institutionalized. Where poverty is widespread, exemplified by the U.S., there has been a failure to institutionalize equality. A comprehensive and state-of-the-art study, Rich Democracies, Poor People places the inherently political choices over resources and the political organization of states, markets, and societies at the center of the study of poverty and social inequality.

Gender inequality in the workplace persists, even in nations with some of the most progressive laws and generous family support policies. Yet the dimensions on which inequality is measured—levels of women’s employment, number of hours worked, sex segregation by occupations and wages—tell very different stories across industrialized nations. By examining federally guaranteed parental leave, publicly provided child care, and part-time work, and looking across multiple dimensions of inequality, Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook document the links between specific policies and aggregate outcomes. They disentangle the complex factors, from institutional policies to personal choices that influence economic inequality.

This landmark study on inequality and poverty, which covers all 30 OECD countries, includes chapters on the main features and drivers of inequality, characteristics of poverty, and additional dimensions of inequality — such as intergenerational mobility, the impact of publicly-provided services, and the distribution of household wealth. The report draws heavily on the LIS data and, even more so, on the LWS data.

A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly important to people trying to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. This trend highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of finance alone; how much time we have matters just as much as how much money. The authors of this book have developed a novel way to measure ‘discretionary time’: time which is free to spend as one pleases. Exploring data from the US, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden and Finland, they show that temporal autonomy varies substantially across different countries and under different living conditions. By calibrating how much control people have over their time, and how much they could have under alternative welfare, gender or household arrangements, this book offers a new perspective for comparative cross-national enquiries into the temporal aspects of human welfare.

Economic and social shifts have led to rising income inequality in the world’s affluent countries. This is worrisome for reasons of fairness and because inequality has adverse effects on other socioeconomic goods. Redistribution can help, but government revenues are threatened by globalization and population aging. A way out of this impasse is for countries to increase their employment rate. Increasing employment enlarges the tax base, allowing tax revenues to rise without an increase in tax rates; it also reduces welfare state costs by decreasing the amount of government benefits going to individuals and households. The question is: Can egalitarian institutions and policies be coupled with employment growth? For two decades conventional wisdom has held that the answer is no.

A new kind of historic transformation is underway in twenty-first-century Europe. Twentieth-century Europeans were no strangers to social, economic and political change, but their major challenges focused mainly on the intra-European construction of stable, prosperous, capitalist democracies. Today, by contrast, one of the major challenges is flows across borders – and particularly in-flows of non-European people. Immigration and minority integration consistently occupy the headlines. The issues which rival immigration – unemployment, crime, terrorism – are often presented by politicians as its negative secondary effects. Immigration is also intimately connected to the profound challenges of demographic change, economic growth and welfare-state reform. Both academic observers and the European public are increasingly convinced that Europe’s future will largely turn on how is admits and integrates non-Europeans. This book is a comprehensive stock-taking of the contemporary situation and its policy implications.

High rates of divorce, single-parenthood, and nonmarital cohabitation are forcing Americans to reexamine their definition of family. This evolving social reality requires public policy to evolve as well. The Future of the Family brings together the top scholars of family policy—headlined by editors Lee Rainwater, Tim Smeeding, and, in his last published work, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—to take stock of the state of the family in the United States today and address the ways in which public policy affects the family and vice versa.

Parents around the world grapple with the common challenge of balancing work and child care. Despite common problems, the industrialized nations have developed dramatically different social and labor market policies—policies that vary widely in the level of support they provide for parents and the extent to which they encourage an equal division of labor between parents as they balance work and care. In Families That Work, Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers take a close look at the work-family policies in the United States and abroad and call for a new and expanded role for the U.S. government in order to bring this country up to the standards taken for granted in many other Western nations.

In Poor Kids in a Rich Country, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding ask what it means to be poor in a prosperous nation – especially for any country’s most vulnerable citizens, its children. In comparing the situation of American children in low-income families with their counterparts in 14 other countries—including Western Europe, Australia, and Canada—they provide a powerful perspective on the dynamics of child poverty in the United States.

Child poverty and the well-being of children is an important policy issue throughout the industrialised world. Some 47 million children in ‘rich’ countries live in families so poor that their health and well-being are at risk. The main themes addressed are: the extent and trend of child poverty in industrialised nations; outcomes for children – for example, the relationship between childhood experiences and children’s health; country studies and emerging issues; child and family policies. All the contributions underline the urgent need for a comprehensive policy to reduce child poverty rates and to improve the well-being of children. Findings are clearly presented and key focus points identified for policy makers to consider.