Documents Olivera, Javier 2 results

"This paper is prepared as a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution, Volume 2 (edited by A. B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Elsevier-North Holland, forthcoming). Like the other chapters in the volume (and its predecessor), the aim is to provide a comprehensive review of a particular area of research. The aim of this chapter is to highlight some key aspects of recent economic research on the welfare state and anti-poverty policy in rich countries, and explore their implications. We begin with the conceptualisation and measurement of poverty, before sketching out some core features and approaches to the welfare state and anti-poverty policies. We then focus on the central plank of the modern welfare state's efforts to address poverty, namely social protection, discussing in turn the inactive working-age population, child income support, in-work poverty, and retirement and old-age pensions. After that we discuss social spending on other than cash transfers: the labour market, education, training and activation, and finally intergenerational transmission, childhood and neighbourhoods. We also discuss the welfare state and anti-poverty policy in the context of the economic crisis which began in 2007-8, and the implications for strategies aimed at combining economic growth and employment with making serious inroads into poverty. We conclude with highlighting directions for future research."

"To shed light on the quality of the ageing experience in Europe and its heterogeneity, this study adapts and computes the Active Ageing Index—an index constructed at the country level to monitor ageing quality in Europe—at the individual level. This strategy allows the measuring of inequality in the experience of active ageing and is flexible enough to consider different value judgements in the overall assessment of the quality of life while ageing. The study examines the predictors of this inequality by using regressions with a Gini-recentred influence function. It finds that education plays a very significant role in reducing inequality, though its influence varies across countries. Furthermore, the study uncovers large variance in the quality of the ageing experience across Europe. For instance, more than 50% of the populations of Romania, Lithuania and Bulgaria show a level of active ageing quality lower than that of the bottom decile of the distribution in Sweden."