Documents Hick, Rod 3 results

" This paper examines the impact of the Great Recession on material poverty and multiple deprivation in Europe. Applying as its conceptual framework Poverty as Capability Deprivation (Hick 2014), which is one specification of Amartya Sen's capability approach, and employing the Alkire-Foster adjusted headcount measure, the paper draws on data from the EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions to present a multidimensional poverty analysis of 24 EU Member States at four time points: 2005, 2008, 2011 and 2013. The analysis shows that the pre-crisis period was associated with substantial reductions in multidimensional poverty in Europe, with the largest reductions occurring in the poorest Member States. However, the Southern European countries largely failed to benefit from these pre-crisis poverty reductions and, when the crisis hit, experienced the largest increases in multidimensional poverty in Europe. These patterns reflect a changing geography of poverty within the European Union, increasingly concentrated away from the East, and towards the South."

"This paper provides an overview of the initial crisis responses to the coronavirus pandemic and asks whether and how both the nature of the COVID‐19 crisis and the national responses to this differ from those witnessed during the Great Recession. We argue that the speed and scale of the crisis are indeed distinctive, but that claims of symmetry—a crisis affecting all equally—are misplaced. We suggest that stimulus packages have, in broad terms, reflected the scale of the threat and that the wage subsidies and employment supports that were introduced or adjusted are novel in scope and scale, with innovative developments. There has been a greater emphasis on housing than was apparent in responses to the Great Recession and, while a focus on taxation in response packages has been a focus in both crises, its form differs, with a greater reliance on deferrals rather than tax reductions in the stimulus plans announced to date. Our account stresses the agility of crisis responses and this agility must be regarded as welcome, mitigating a great deal of social harm during the initial phase of the pandemic. Whether these short‐run responses create pressures for wider‐ranging change is much debated, but highly uncertain."

"The working poor were long thought of as people toiling away in lousy, under-protected and underpaid jobs in places like fast-food joints, supermarkets, hotels and bars. The perfidious consequence of that perception was that in-work poverty was seen as a non-issue in countries with extensive labour protections, especially in countries with minimum wages at significant levels. The idea that the working poor were only to be found in the so-called "liberal" economies lacking strongly organized labour and proper regulatory correction has turned out to be completely wrong. In-work poverty exists in all rich economies. But what, exactly, do we mean by in-work poverty? How is it related to labour market trends and also to policies? And how might governments look to successfully tackle the problem of working poverty? In this paper, a draft chapter forthcoming in Clegg, D. and Durazzi, N. (eds), Research Handbook of Labour Market Policy in Rich Democracies, with Edward Elgar we provide some answers to these important questions."