Engineering

This paper provides a descriptive examination of trends in spatial inequality within the US, Canada and the UK and twelve European countries. It first draws on recent literature in American political economy which suggests that the transition to the knowledge economy has promoted three forms of growing spatial inequality: in the productive capacities and incomes of regions and in local patterns of population sorting into dynamic urban areas. It then asks whether the transition to knowledge-intensive production implies more spatial inequality in Europe. It finds that regional inequality has fallen less – or grown more – in terms of both productive capacity and income in the Anglo economies, but that urban areas in high-knowledge regions are becoming more distinct in both Europe and North America. It further shows that labor and educational institution are associated with different forms of regional inequality but not urban sorting.

This paper addresses patterns, trends, and “pockets” of old-age poverty in Western Europe and North America since 2000, with a focus on five of the more financially resilient countries: Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States. Despite major public pension retrenchment initiatives in several of these countries, increases in both the breadth and depth of old-age poverty have been limited in most of these countries. Increases in old-age poverty that did occur were largely “collateral damage” from across-the board cutbacks in pension replacement rates and eligibility that were not adequately compensated for by increases in means-tested or minimum pensions. Poor retirees have only rarely been targeted directly for retrenchment in these countries. The most consistent pattern in the case studies is the role of policy drift--the production of different old-age poverty outcomes as the social and fiscal context within which government programs operate change, but policies do not. It is the limited positive power of poor retirees (their inability to get policy changes enacted that favor them) rather than their negative power (inability to block changes that hurt them) that has been more important as a driver of increased old-age poverty where it has occurred.

To evaluate the success of paternity leave as a progressive, equal-access policy instrument, it is essential to assess it against the backdrop of preexisting labor market inequalities that condition its use. We investigate the recent and rapid expansion of paternity leave entitlements in Spain where leave was extended from four to 16 weeks over the course of just three years. Analyses of an original survey administered to cohorts of fathers with leave entitlements of varying lengths show that average take-up surges but does so unevenly. As uptake rates soar among fathers in stable employment, fathers in temporary jobs, the self-employed, and those at the bottom and top of the income distribution maintain lower levels of usage. These results align with the ‘Matthew Effect' of social policy, whereby reforms disproportionately benefit well-positioned socioeconomic groups, and imply bleak prospects for the reform’s capacity to generate social change across social strata. The results thus tell a cautionary tale of the rapid expansion of paternity leave in a segmented labor market where work culture and gender norms are slower to adjust. With the enforcement of the 2019 EU Work-Life Balance Directive, other European Member States are looking to extend paternity leave swiftly, thus increasing the relevance of these results for policy considerations.

Poverty has spread in Europe over the last decade, becoming a central issue in the political debate. Alongside objective measures of poverty, assessing the level of subjective poverty, especially among young adults, is important because of the consequences that feeling poor can have on household fertility decisions, consumption, and investment in human capital. Objective and subjective poverty do not fully overlap, and the sense of insecurity can lead to a feeling of not being able to make ends meet. For renters and mortgaged homeowners, housing costs can be a significant burden, and the risk of not being able to pay the rent or mortgage installments can affect young adults’ wellbeing and feeling of poverty. Our study investigates the relationship between tenure status and subjective poverty for households of young independent adults aged 18-34 living in 24 European countries, assessing whether rent regulation plays a role in influencing this association. Using micro-level data from EU-SILC and macro-level data on rent regulation, we estimate multilevel linear regression models with a three-level random effects specification: young household respondents (Level 1) are nested in country waves (Level 2), which in turn are nested within countries (Level 3). Controlling for income level and housing costs, we found that being a tenant or a mortgaged homeowner increases the probability of economic hardship compared to being an outright homeowner. By offering affordable options, rental housing policies can also reduce subjective poverty among young people who are not direct beneficiaries of these policies.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to declines in market income and increases in unemployment across much of the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), and had the potential to increase poverty rates. However, the US and EU Member States adopted vastly different strategies for mitigating the economic consequences of the crisis. Using EU-SILC data and the U.S. Current Population Survey, this study compares the poverty-reduction performance of the EU and US from before the pandemic to during the pandemic. We find that unemployment and market poverty rates increased in many countries, disproportionately more in the US than in the EU, but welfare states largely compensated for those losses. Post-tax/transfer poverty rates for the average EU country did not change from 2019 to 2020, and poverty decreased substantially in the US. The US experienced the largest pre-tax/transfer increase in poverty rates, yet also the largest post-tax/transfers declines in poverty rates from 2019 to 2020. This suggests an improvement from historically poor poverty-reduction performances and underscores a policy approach focused on income support, contrasting with the EU’s emphasis on short-time work schemes. Among all countries, changes in pre-tax/transfer poverty rates were not positively correlated with changes in post-tax/transfer poverty. Overall, welfare states generally increased their performance enough to prevent what could have been large increases in post-tax/transfer poverty during the first year of the pandemic, with the US increasing its poverty-reduction performance more than any EU country.

We re-analyse four major explanations of redistribution including the Meltzer-Richard model, power resources theory, Iversen-Soskice’s political institutions explanation, and Lupu and Ponstusson’s skewness theory. For each of these, we reconsider the causal chain and test their assumptions using a comprehensive, original dataset on working-age income-inequality consisting of 589 country-years for affluent democracies in the period 1963–2019. We find that partisan governments are directly related to redistribution and have a strong effect on the generosity of social policy. Lupu and Pontusson’s skew measure has no effect on redistribution in models with controls but does have a positive effect on generosity of social policy. Finally, we find that the mean-to-median income ratio has a consistent, negative, and highly significant effect on redistribution, directly refuting the very premise of the Meltzer-Richard model.

Changes in household structures and employment patterns alter the balance between households with an above- versus a below-average poverty risk while also affecting relative income poverty thresholds. Examining 11 countries for which suitable microdata is available from LIS back to the mid-1980s shows that patterns of change in household composition and employment exhibited some common features but also very substantial variation. The share of single adult households rose in most countries, couples with no or only one person in paid work fell in most, while couple households with two earners increased in a majority but not in Denmark, Norway and the USA and only modestly in Hungary and the UK. A counterfactual exercise assessed the impact of these changes in composition on relative income poverty rates by reweighting the 2019 samples to impose the composition structure observed in 1986. In the absence of these composition changes the relative poverty rate in 2019 would have been a good deal higher in Germany, Greece, and Italy, and especially in Israel and Spain. Composition changes had only a modest impact in the UK and made very little difference in Denmark, Hungary, and the USA, while working to increase the relative poverty rate in Czechia and Norway. This reflected the varying scale and nature of the composition changes seen across these countries. Their impact included driving up the relative poverty threshold (except in the USA), and if this effect is discounted the composition shift over the period would have had a greater poverty reduction impact in most countries, especially in Israel, Italy and most powerfully in Spain.

This paper studies the role of government partisanship in the transformation of two uniquely old care policy areas: the care of people with chronic and severe mental illness, and of children who cannot be cared for by their parents. While nineteenth-century ‘insane asylums’ and ‘orphanages’ have widely been understood as institutions of social control, they also served a social care function, which during the era of deinstitutionalisation was replaced by alternative forms of care. Studying mental health and child welfare policy decisions in 12 advanced capitalist countries between 1950 and 2015, I show that the types of care policies that replaced large, custodial institutions varied with government partisanship. I argue that partisan policy choices reflected parties’ core policy preferences shaped by trade-offs between their redistributive goals and individualist or familial ideals, and the lasting ideological effects of very old societal cleavages. The study contributes to theoretical debates in comparative politics about the role of partisanship in social policy making and the dimensionality of party competition over time.

The article engages with the comparative literature on the highly debated globalization-welfare nexus by conducting an extended meta-analysis on the relationship between openness and social spending. By means of a series of meta-regressions, we investigate methodological and substantive elements responsible for the heterogeneity of the empirical findings, and the support for the opposite compensation and efficiency hypotheses. Amongst others, our findings suggest that the conceptualization and measurement of the independent and dependent variable systematically affect the results obtained by researchers, whereas the period and the geographical scope do not have the leverage that is sometimes claimed in the literature.

This article examines the capability of various welfare states to mitigate youth vulnerability, operationalized as a low NEET rate. It aims to complement existing empirical knowledge with a novel set of indicators and Europe-wide configurational comparison of youth welfare regimes. A QCA-based analysis of 26 European countries revealed two routes with different sets of compensatory and social investment policies that lead to the effective mitigation of the NEET rate. The study confirmed that generous social benefits for young unemployed people are a crucial element in every ‘route’ to keep the NEET rate low. Beyond this compensatory measure, successful policy configurations revealed the growing convergence of skills regimes in the pursuit of inclusive education policy design. We also found evidence that in mitigating youth vulnerabilities, housing support to young adults can compensate for active labour market policy measures. These findings have implications for policymakers who must take a holistic approach in devising policies and being mindful of the interplay between different policies. The study also provides insights into contemporary dynamics of the youth welfare regimes by making associations with growth regimes and housing regimes.

This article examines the role individuals’ basic values about responsibility, uncertainty and child rights, have on willingness to accept state intervention in a family in a potential child protection situation. A key area within social sciences is how and when it is justified for governments to restrict individual freedom, for example allow authorities to intervene in the private sphere to protect a child from potential harm. In this article data from representative samples of the populations in six countries – Norway, Finland, England, Poland, Romania, and Czechia (total n = 6031) are analysed. Two main explanations are tested, first if individuals’ basic values explain willingness to restrict freedom, and second, if institutional context explains country differences. The results show that individuals who favour parental responsibility, accept uncertainty, and who have high ambitions on child rights, also favour interventions in the family to protect a child. However, sociodemographic variables nuance these findings. Institutional context sheds light on country differences. Our analysis show that people overall are positive to child protection interventions, and our findings accord with results within welfare state- and child protectionsystem research and provide increased knowledge about the relationship and connection between people’s value base and support for welfare policies.

This article conceptualizes the community’s role in the provision of welfare by introducing the concept of a community welfare regime that varies globally across time and space. Four global community welfare regime ideal types, effective formal, effective informal, ineffective formal, and ineffective informal, are identified based on the dual dimensions of effectiveness and formality community welfare provision. Using this conceptualization, the article presents a typology that stipulates the interplay between the four theorized types of the community welfare regime and various global welfare regimes (Gough et al., 2004). The conceptualization of the community welfare regime holds the potential for conducting meaningful comparisons between different community welfare regimes within individual countries and across multiple welfare geographies. These comparative analyses can provide policymakers with valuable insights about the (in)effectiveness of community welfare provision, allowing them to develop policies that are firmly grounded in successful practices adopted by communities to effectively support vulnerable members of society and foster improved overall welfare outcomes, and can also serve as an avenue for Global South–North learning.

The idea of a Universal Inheritance (UI) has been recently gaining weight amongst scholars concerned over increasing wealth inequality. A UI consists of a one-off public payment of an agreed sum to each citizen of young adulthood. In this article, we provide the results of novel simulations to assess the cost and the distributive impact of such policy by testing different parameters for both the benefit amount and its financing. The simulations run on a top-tail adjusted version of the Household Financial Consumption Survey covering four countries: Finland, Germany, Ireland, and Italy. We find that, under some parameters, a UI would significantly reduce inequality and could be realistically financed by taxing the top 1%.

Financial transfers to families with children form a core element of welfare state provision. Variation in the design, generosity and implementation of this provision is significant, reflecting underlying perspectives towards children and families and the state’s role in supporting them. Daly developed a new typology of social policy for children, differentiating between ‘childhood-oriented’, ‘child-oriented’ and ‘family-oriented’ policies. In this article, we propose an extension to this typology with financial transfers in mind. We divide the family-oriented category into two distinct types of policy – ‘needs-oriented’ and ‘adult-behaviour-oriented’, with the latter encapsulating support that is child-contingent but conditional on the behaviour of adults in the household. We argue that this new distinction is needed to make sense of recent significant changes to social security support for children in the UK, in particular the two-child limit and the benefit cap. We go on to analyse child benefits across Europe through the lens of this extended framework. Significantly, we find the UK’s approach to be unusual but not exceptional, with other examples of children being rendered invisible or semi-visible within social security systems. Across diverse national contexts, support for children is being withdrawn (or is simply absent) because of the behaviours and circumstances of the adults in their household.

This article critically reviews existing concepts and measurements of how states regulate reproductive processes such as contraceptive use, abortion and pregnancy, and introduces a new conceptually-grounded international policy database on reproduction policies. With regulating reproduction, states get involved in whether, when and how people enter or avert, carry out or end pregnancy and procreation; and who is supported in their reproductive pathways in the first place. Building on comparative welfare state scholarship, we suggest that state regulation of reproduction is best understood multi-dimensionally, distinguishing regulatory levels, regulatory types, permissiveness, in-kind generosity, and in-cash generosity. Not least due to a lack of data, previous research has mostly been limited to case studies or to individual policy fields, such as abortion policy. This review summarizes the state of comparative perspectives in this policy domain, and presents the International Reproduction Policy Database (IRPD), which proposes a novel and comprehensive way to measure and compare reproduction policies. IRPD covers the regulative structure, permissiveness, and generosity of state-provided reproduction policies in 33 middle- and high-income countries from 1980 to 2020, across five policy fields: sex education, contraception, abortion, medically assisted reproduction and pregnancy care. The review closes with an empirical example from the new database and gives an outlook on its research potentials.