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The gender pay gap is a persistent and pervasive problem. This study systematically reviews the literature on two determinants of the wage gap that have attracted attention more recently: the contribution of personality traits and social norms. Based on 39 studies identified, we discuss how personality traits and social norms are operationalized and how much of the gender wage gap they explain. We find that both are important in understanding the gap and that they are closely related, most notably, as preferences are reflections of personality traits and social norms. However, there is no clear consensus on the constructs, what they precisely capture and how to measure them. Thus, there is a great deal of heterogeneity in the results, with the contribution of personality traits and social norms to the pay gap ranging from a few to more than 20%. The literature is not conclusive on whether these factors rather explain the gap or are a source of discrimination. Key limitations of this literature emanate from concerns about the potential endogeneity of personality traits and social norms, and that studies have largely ignored that we can adapt our personality, preferences, and attitudes in adult life.

This paper investigates the effects of social assistance on subjective well-being looking at the case of Kyrgyzstan. For this purpose, we exploit recent changes in the design of social assistance and apply a difference in difference (DiD) method combined with an inverse probability weighting (IPW) technique. In contrast to the existing literature, we find that in the short-term, the receipt of social assistance benefits is associated with lower levels of subjective well-being. Our findings also reveal that participation in social assistance leads to some reduction in satisfaction regarding recipients' own economic conditions. Moreover, we find that the negative effects on subjective well-being disappear for the oldest generations, which experienced the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By contrast, the effect is negative for the youth, who grew up in a new society where needing help is ultimately the responsibility of the individual citizen. For individuals with high trust in political institutions, the negative effect of state intervention does not hold, while it persists in case of low trust in political institutions.

Governments around the world have taken drastic measures to contain the spread of COVID-19. Policy responses to the pandemic could affect local food prices in important ways. In this paper, we hypothesize that food prices in regionally integrated markets are more sensitive to mobility constraints than those in segmented markets. We use World Food Programme price data from 774 retail markets in 44 low and middle-income countries to test whether and how food prices have been affected by the stringency of COVID-19 containment measures. We assess market segmentation based on pre-COVID-19 price data and measure government responses using the Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker. Our results show that more stringent policy responses increase food prices for integrated markets but not for segmented markets. The impact of the stringency of policy responses on food prices seems to be mediated by reductions in mobility and moderated by the dependence of markets on trade before COVID-19.

This manual has been written to respond to the need of making available an exhaustive compilation in the Italian language of the main topics and problems of the political economy of development in poor countries. So far, a discussion of such topics in Italian has not been available. The drafting of this manual has benefitted from the teaching and research experience of several academics of the faculty of economics of the university of Florence. Part 1 focuses on key methodological approaches derived from the theory of collective choices. In turn, Part 2 discusses the orthodox and heterodox macroeconomic reforms applied in developing countries, and their problems. Part 3 illustrates the domestic policies that have been or should have been adopted in the field of food security, land reform, environmental sustainability, taxation, social spending, labor markets and population. Part 4 discusses then the domestic policy reforms in the field of international trade, foreign direct investments, capital flows and international migration. Last, Part 5 illustrates the historical experience of five policy regimes (i.e. the import substituting industrialization, redistributive approaches, the Asian Miracle, Washington Consensus, and Sustainable Development) that have been introduced in the non-socialist developing countries between the decolonization of the 1950s and the present time. The methodological approach followed in the manual starts from an evaluation of the real-life impact on growth, income distribution, the wellbeing of the population, and the environment of the policies adopted during each policy regime and in the main economic areas. Whenever the policy measures introduced in the past generated unsatisfactory results, the manual suggests possible alternatives inspired by the structuralist and Keynesian schools.

First published:16 September 2019 This paper investigates the factors driving manufacturing growth accelerations in a sample of 134 developing countries over the period 1970 to 2014. We first identify growth acceleration episodes of manufacturing value added (MVA) by their year of initiation and according to a country's income classification. We then estimate a probit model to explain what factors predict these MVA growth accelerations. Our results show that human capital and institutions represent contextual factors that favor the growth of manufacturing, together with macroeconomic policies related to investment, and openness to foreign trade and capital. We also find that most of these factors not only foster episodic accelerations of industry, but they contribute as well to a sustained process of industrialization that characterized the process of economic growth of a few successful countries over the period 1970 to 2014. Government of Japan through the Development Cooperation Trust Fund

Media outlets globally have been reporting about civil protests against Chinese investments in Africa. We provide new evidence on this controversial topic and investigate the influence of Chinese official projects on political participation in 54 African countries between 20 0 0 and 2014. Using 50 x 50 km cells as the unit of analysis, we match data on the occurrence of protests and other forms of political participation to georeferenced data on projects financed by the Chinese government. We find that cells which receive a larger number of projects are more likely to experience protests. Further, our analysis suggests that citizens' heightened perception of China's rising influence on the domestic economy and lowered trust in the local government are two channels through which projects might motivate local protests. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper analyses how inequality across counties in the United States of America has shaped the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the incidence of protests. The empirical analysis combines weekly data between January and December 2020 on levels of COVID-19-related policy stringency and protest incidence at the county level with measures of county-level inequality at the start of the pandemic. The results show that more stringent measures to contain the pandemic were instrumental in driving the incidence of protests, but only in counties with high levels of inequality before the start of the pandemic, where grievances may have been initially stronger. Further analysis suggests that the impact of government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic is largely explained by changes in economic conditions (rise in unemployment and changes in economic activities and spending) in counties with the highest levels of inequality. Unequal counties with lower trust in political institutions but higher levels of social trust and civic engagement at the start of the pandemic are also more likely to experience more protests as a response to more stringent policies.

We study an age-old question in political economy: does government spending on welfare ensure peace? This question was at the heart of the European Welfare State model of the early 20th century, and remains relevant today in face of rising inequalities and political conflict. Yet there is limited empirical evidence about this question. We make use of a panel of 12 Latin American countries over the period 1970–2010 to show that welfare spending has led to substantial reductions in conflict across the region. This effect is more pronounced when associated with reductions in inequality and increasing social and institutional trust.

This paper aims to advance understanding about the relationship between taxation and inequality in developing countries, focusing on the recent experience of Latin America. Tax changes promoted equality since the early 2000s. In particular, the increasing contribution of direct taxes with respect to indirect taxes promoted the progressivity of the tax system and contributed to the reduction of inequality. Yet the effectiveness of taxation in promoting equality in Latin America is still limited by several factors such as the low average tax revenue, the inability to tax top incomes and the low contribution of taxes on property. © 2018 UNU-WIDER. Journal of International Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article empirically investigates the effect of structural transformation on wage inequality in Asia, using industry-level data for three skill groups of workers. While structural transformation, associated with technological progress, productivity catching-up, and capital deepening, has contributed to Asias sustained growth, its effect on income inequality remains uncertain. Our results show that the process of economic transformation has exacerbated inequality in the region by increasing the relative share of high-skilled workers in total compensation. This is mainly due to a shift toward more productiveand more intensive in the use of skilled laboractivities both within and between industries. However, we also find that policy responses, especially investments in education, mitigate the increase in inequality.

This paper investigates the long-term impact of economic shocks on populism, by exploiting a natural experiment created by the trade liberalization process implemented in Brazil between 1990 and 1995. This high impact and low duration event generated a profound shock to the economy with, we argue, long term implications for political outcomes. We focus on the 2002 and 2018 presidential elections in Brazil, which resulted in the election of a left-wing and a right-wing populist president, respectively. The results show that trade reforms explain the rise of populism in Brazil during the last two decades. Microregions with larger tariff cuts in the early 1990s had significantly higher preferences for Lula in 2002 and were also more likely to support Bolsonaro in 2018. The link between trade liberalization and populism is mediated by austerity in both cases. The shift between left-wing and right-wing preferences is driven by the supply side of populism, whereby each leader took advantage of existing cleavages in the country at the time of their election-driven by inequality in the case of Lula and by insecurity and corruption in the case of Bolsonaro-to develop narratives against austerity that would appeal to their target audiences.

We combine data on Chinese development projects with data from Demographic and Health Surveys to study the impact of Chinese aid on household welfare in sub-Saharan Africa. We use a novel methodology to test the effect of Chinese aid on three important development outcomes: education, health, and nutrition. For each outcome, we use difference-in-difference estimations to compare household areas near Chinese project sites to control areas located farther away, before and after receiving Chinese aid. This empirical strategy rules out many confounding factors that can bias measuring the impact of Chinese aid on our outcome variables. First, we find that Chinese projects significantly improve education and child mortality in treatment areas, but do not significantly affect nutrition. Second, social sector projects have a larger effect on outcomes than economic projects. Third, we do not find significant effects for projects that ended more than five years before the post-treatment survey wave. Our results are robust to a host of robustness checks.

This article analyzes the role of individual redistributive preferences on protest participation. The article focuses on Latin America, a region that has experienced substantial protests and demonstrations in the last decade, making use of individual-level data on redistributive preferences and protest participation collected across eighteen countries in 2010, 2012, and 2014. The results show evidence for an association between strong individual preferences for redistribution and participation in protests motivated by the low quality of services and institutions, failures to reduce corruption, and perceived lower standards of living. The results are robust to alternative estimators, samples, and model specifications and not affected by endogeneity concerns.

This paper aims to document and explain the evolution of inequality in Malawi over recent decades using data from various national and international sources. Inequality rose between 1968 and the late 1980s due to the agricultural export-led development model adopted by the Banda regime, which favoured the estate sector and medium-sized farms and thereby created a ‘dualism within the dualism’ that exacerbated the inequality inherited from the colonial era. Between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, inequality declined, in part owing to the adoption of the Starter Pack programme which covered all smallholders and substantially strengthened maize production per capita, including among the poorest farmers. Finally, inequality rose again between 2004 and 2011. Applying a microdecomposition analysis, this paper shows that a key driver of the rise in inequality during this period was the suboptimal structural transition of the economy from a low-inequality crop agriculture to high-inequality sectors such as livestock production, commerce, transport and formal and informal services located in both urban and rural areas. Such suboptimal structural transition was in part due to the decline of manufacturing induced by the trade liberalization of the 1990s and the skewed distribution of the rise in incomes from livestock production.

This paper analyses the drivers of successful industrialization in developing countries. We consider two different periods, 1970-1990 and 1991-2014, likely to be affected by different patterns of industrialization due to major political, technological and organizational changes. We subsequently develop a methodology to identify a small group of countries for each period, which have exhibited a pattern of industrialization that is not only remarkable in absolute terms, but also sustained. Our analysis reveals that successful industrialization is driven by a combination of factors, including a country's initial economic conditions, factor endowments and other characteristics, such as demography and geography. We also show that other variables that policymakers can control play a crucial role. This includes, among others, the promotion of investments (both public and privately funded) and education; the management of trade and capital openness; financial sector development and the promotion of both macroeconomic and institutional stability. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Latin American countries experienced important changes in the 2000s. The implementation of fiscal reforms, public debt reduction and the high level of accumulated reserves gave them more policy space than in the past. As a result, Latin American countries were able to implement countercyclical policies to face the negative economic and social consequences associated with the recent macroeconomic shock. Some countries performed better than others. In particular, Social Democratic and Centrist governments enjoyed more fiscal space; they had realized larger budget surpluses over the good years and were able to cope with the crisis without impairing their fiscal conditions. Yet, Latin America has experienced a public finance deterioration in the most recent years. While governments are showing an increasing ability on taxation they are still facing some problems on the expenditure side. As a result, fiscal policy returned acyclical after the period of the crisis. The sustainability of public accounts may be strengthened increasing tax pressure on the richest, reducing tax evasion and improving current spending efficiency. However, the increasing political problems are putting many questions about future trends of public finance in the region.

Time discounting is thought to influence decision-making in almost every sphere of life, including personal finances, diet, exercise and sexual behaviour. In this article, we provide evidence on whether a national poverty alleviation programme in Kenya can affect inter-temporal decisions. We administered a preferences module as part of a large-scale impact evaluation of the Kenyan Government's Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children. Four years into the programme, we find that individuals in the treatment group are only marginally more likely to wait for future money, due in part to the erosion of the value of the transfer by inflation. However, among the poorest households for whom the value of transfer is still relatively large we find significant programme effects on the propensity to wait. We also find strong programme effects among those who have access to credit markets though the programme itself does not improve access to credit.

The broad-ranging benefits of cash transfers are now widely recognized. However, the evidence base highlights that they often fall short in achieving longer-term and second-order impacts related to nutrition, learning outcomes and morbidity. In recognition of these limitations, several ‘cash plus’ initiatives have been introduced, whereby cash transfers are combined with one or more types of complementary support. This paper aims to identify key factors for successful implementation of these increasingly popular ‘cash plus’ programmes, based on (i) a review of the emerging evidence base of ‘cash plus’ interventions and (ii) an examination of three case studies, namely, Chile Solidario in Chile, IN-SCT in Ethiopia and LEAP in Ghana. The analysis was guided by a conceptual framework proposing a menu of ‘cash plus’ components. The assessment of three case studies indicated that effective implementation of ‘cash plus’ components has indeed contributed to greater impacts of the respective programmes. Such initiatives have thereby addressed some of the non-financial and structural barriers that poor people face and have reinforced the positive effects of cash transfer programmes. In design of such programmes, further attention should be paid to the constraints faced by the most vulnerable and how such constraints can be overcome. We conclude with recommendations regarding the provision of complementary support and cross-sectoral linkages based on lessons learned from the case studies. More research is still needed on the impact of the many variations of ‘cash plus’ programming, including evidence on the comparative roles of individual ‘plus’ components, as well as the knowledge, attitudes and behaviour pathways which influence these impacts.

This paper provides an impact evaluation analysis of the 2009 Australian Household Stimulus Package, which was composed by three main cash payments: the Back to School Bonus, the Single Income Family Bonus and the Tax Bonus for Working Australians. Using panel data from the 2008 and 2009 HILDA surveys, the results show that these cash payments reduced the risk of poverty and stimulated consumption expenditure. Nonetheless, only the Back to School Bonus and the Single Income Family Bonus were really important in achieving these goals, while the Tax Bonus for Working Australians did not contribute to stimulate consumption and failed to reduce the risk of poverty. Thus, the analysis confirms the crucial role of governments to protect the most vulnerable groups avoiding a dramatic deterioration of social outcomes and favoring a fast economic recovery when interventions are timely and well-targeted.

type="main"> In 2007, the Uruguayan government implemented a tax reform which introduced a new progressive labour income tax and a flat capital income tax, and reduced some indirect taxes, with the objective of improving fiscal balance, income distribution and economic growth. This article evaluates the impact of such tax reform on equity and efficiency on the basis of data derived from the Encuesta Continua de Hogares (ECH) for 2006 and 2009. Using a Difference-in-Differences technique, it shows that the new system reduced inequality by 2 Gini points without producing any discernible disincentive effect, suggesting that suitably designed reforms of direct taxation can simultaneously promote equity and efficiency.

Drawing on the contributions from the World Social Science Report 2016, Challenging Inequalities: Pathways to a Just World , this article examines the relationship between economic inequality and political participation. In particular, using the lens of the ‘power cube’ approach ( www.powercube.net ), we argue that understanding the impact of inequality on political participation requires moving beyond the study of its impact on more conventional forms of participation found in voting and ‘voice’ through established or formal democratic processes. Indeed, this relationship is also influenced by hidden and invisible forms of power, at multiple levels from the local to the global, which affect the rules of the game as well as individuals’ aspiration to participate, shaping whether, where and how citizens engage at all. Despite the power of inequality to shape its own consensus, recent evidence also points to the emergence of levels and forms of resistance to inequality outside of traditional channels of participation, which in turn help to expand and prefigure notions of what the new possibilities of change might be. Exploring these dynamics, the article concludes with a brief reflection on possible lessons for activists, policymakers and scholars working to understand, unravel and challenge the knotty intersections of inequality, power and participation.

The Chile Solidario programme is an innovative conditional cash transfer (CCT) in the Latin American context, aimed at addressing specifically the multidimensional nature of poverty. This paper, using data from the Panel Caracterizacion Socioeconomica Nacional (CASEN) Survey for the years 2001 and 2006, presents an impact evaluation of this programme. Using matching techniques to compare participants in the programme with a control group, and a difference-in-differences estimator, we evaluate its impact on various socioeconomic dimensions and results at the household and child level are differentiated. At the household-level, we find that the programme has a significant impact on lifting families out of extreme poverty and that it does not have disincentive effects on labour participation. For children, we find that it has contributed to increasing participation in school for those between the ages of 6 and 15 years, and to increased enrolment with the public health services. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper explores the relationship between a large government cash transfer programme, changes in inequality, and political participation in Mexico. The results show that increases in the coverage of the programme during the 2008 financial crisis resulted in greater individual participation in the last presidential elections and in higher individual propensity to vote, particularly for the incumbent party. The programme was particularly effective in increasing political participation among rural and indigenous groups, and had a mitigating effect on participation in presidential elections and the propensity to vote among the urban unskilled. The programme resulted also in reductions in individual participation in protests. Further analysis suggests that these changes were driven by redistributive gains following the changes to the cash transfer programme.

While structural transformation, driven by technological progress, productivity growth, and capital deepening, has contributed to Asia’s sustained rapid growth, its effect on income inequality is uncertain. The central objective of our paper is to empirically examine the effect of structural change on wage inequality in Asia, using industry-level data for three skill groups of workers. Our evidence indicates that structural change, pushed by productivity catch-up with advanced economies, capital deepness, and the shift of the economic structures to more skill-intensive industries, has exacerbated inequality in the region. However, we also find that policy responses, especially investment in education matching the higher demand for skills and competitive exchange rates, can mitigate the increase in inequality.

Published online: 15 Apr 2015 This paper analyses the long run determinants of wage inequality in the manufacturing sector for a group of East Asian countries that have experienced rapid structural transformations in recent decades. In line with the skill biased technological change hypothesis, our results show that within manufacturing structural change which fosters the participation of higher skilled workers is a strong determinant of the wage premium. However, the paper also highlights an unusual feature of the East Asian model, showing how well-designed education policies, prudent macroeconomic management and selective policies towards foreign capital can help to buffer the pressure of structural change on wage inequality, even in an open economy context.

Chile and Mexico experienced extraordinary economic and social improvements over the first decade of the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, the 2008–2009 international crisis dramatically affected these two economies via real channels. Both countries reacted to the external shock by implementing several measures. However – thanks to the policies implemented during the period before the crisis – the Chilean government enjoyed more fiscal space and was able to introduce a stimulus package twice as large the Mexican one. In particular, Chile supported families with children via the expansion of the main social protection programme, additional cash transfers to the poorest families with children and passive labour market measures. In contrast, the worsening of fiscal conditions pushed Mexico into a fiscal consolidation process since 2010. As a result, child poverty dropped in Chile while it rose sharply in Mexico.

As other countries, Australia was hit by the international crisis. While European countries implemented austerity measures worsening social conditions of their population and pushing the economy into a fallacious fiscal adjustment, the prompt reaction of the Australian government limited the possible negative effects caused by the macroeconomic shock and favoured the process of economic recovery. In particular, this paper provides an impact evaluation analysis at household and child level of the 2009 Household Stimulus Package which was composed by three main cash payments: the Back to School Bonus, the Single Income Family Bonus and the Tax Bonus for Working Australians. Using data from the 2008 and 2009 HILDA surveys, the results show that these cash payments reduced the risk of poverty and stimulated consumption expenditure. Nonetheless, only the Back to School Bonus and the Single Income Family Bonus were really important in achieving these goals, while the Tax Bonus for Working Australians did not contribute to stimulate consumption and failed to reduce the risk of poverty. Thus, the analysis confirms the crucial role of governments to protect the most vulnerable groups avoiding a dramatic deterioration of social outcomes and favouring a fast economic recovery when interventions are timely and well-targeted.

We examined 40 psychotherapies, some delivered in combination with pharma-cotherapy, which were all conducted by cognitive behavioral or psychodynamically oriented therapists in a general hospital center for the treatment of light to moder-ate depressive disorders. Our goal was to examine the relationship between early outcome (defined as change in Beck Depression Inventory scores between sessions 2 and 15) and early therapy alliance (as measured at sessions 1 to 5 by the Working Alliance Inventory). We also wanted to concurrently examine the effect of initial depressive symptomatology (BDI at session 2) on early outcome. For the entire sample, both early alliance and initial depressive symptomatology were found to significantly correlate with outcome, the latter more strongly so. However, after di-viding the patient sample into subgroups based on different initial levels of depres-sion, early outcome for patients with depression of intermediate severity was found to be better predicted by early alliance than by initial depression. These results sug-gest that there may be a patient subgroup for whom a good early alliance optimally mitigates the self-perpetuating action of initial depression.

The risk and time preferences of individuals as well as their subjective expectations regarding the future are likely to play an important role in choice behaviour. Measurement of these individual characteristics in large-scale surveys has been a recent development and empirical evidence on their associations with behaviour remains limited. We summarize the results of measuring individuals’ attitudes towards inter-temporal choice, risk, and the future in a large-scale field survey in Kenya. We also examine the impact of a cash transfer programme on these preferences and expectations. We find very low rates of inconsistency in interpreting questions on time and risk preferences. Cash transfers alone do not appear to impact time discounting or risk aversion, but they do have an important impact on subjective well-being measures and on future perceptions of quality of life. These in turn may affect forward-looking decisions such as financial and human capital investment, although this is not explored in this paper and remains part of the future research agenda.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of the different policy reactions of European governments to the recent economic crisis on income distribution and poverty, giving special attention to children. Almost all the governments introduced fiscal stimulus packages in the first phase of the crisis. Nonetheless, the persistence of bad economic conditions led to a drop in the countries’ revenues with a deterioration of their fiscal conditions. In addition, the pressure coming from the financial markets and the resurgence of an orthodox policy approach pushed many governments to introduce austerity measures since 2010. In particular, there was a growing consensus about the necessity of fiscal consolidation despite awareness of the possible negative impact on economic performance and social outcomes. Some governments preferred to increase taxes while others preferred to reduce public expenditure, also cutting benefits and services for children and their families.

Time preference, the weight that individuals give to future over current consumption, is a characteristic that is thought to influence decision-making in almost every sphere of life, including personal finances, diet, exercise, sexual behavior and the environment. In this article we provide evidence on whether a national poverty alleviation program in Kenya can affect inter-temporal decisions. We administered a preferences module as part of a large-scale impact evaluation of the Kenyan Government’s Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children. Four years into the program we find that individuals randomized to the treatment group are only marginally more likely to wait for future money. However among the poorest households for whom the value of transfer is still relatively large we find significant program effects on the propensity to wait. We also find strong program effects among those who have access to credit markets and are thus less liquidity constrained to begin with, though the program itself does not improve access to credit. The results demonstrate a unique and potentially powerful way in which large-scale unconditional cash transfers can contribute to economic development in Africa. And the external validity of the results is likely high given the similarity of the Kenyan program to other national programs in the region.

The risk and time preferences of individuals as well as their subjective expectations regarding the future are likely to play an important role in choice behaviour. Measurement of these individual characteristics in large-scale surveys has been a recent development and empirical evidence on their associations with behaviour remains limited. We summarize the results of measuring individuals’ attitudes towards inter-temporal choice, risk, and the future in a large-scale field survey in Kenya. We find very low rates of inconsistency in interpreting questions on time and risk preferences. Cash transfers alone do not appear to impact time discounting or risk aversion, but they do have an important impact on subjective well-being measures and on future perceptions of quality of life.

Though not a measure of direct child well-being, the strong association between child development and household income makes income poverty a useful indicator of the trajectory of child well-being both in the short- and medium-term. During the period 2008-2012 child poverty rates increased in 23 of the 41 OECD countries for which we have comparable data; in total, approximately 6.6 million children became poor and 4 million left poverty for a net increase of 2.6 million. Five countries at the bottom of our Child Poverty League Table had child poverty increases that were over 10pp. However, due to their relative size and despite only modest increases in child poverty rates, Mexico and the United States are home to over half of the newly poor children during this period with 2 and 1.7 million respectively.

Latin American countries experienced important changes over the last decade. The implementation of fiscal reforms, public debt reduction and the high level of accumulated reserves gave them more policy space than in the past. As a result, Latin American countries were able to implement countercyclical policies to face the negative economic and social consequences associated with the recent macroeconomic shock. Some countries performed better than others. In particular, Social Democratic and Centrist governments enjoyed more fiscal space; they had realized larger budget surpluses over the good years and were able to cope with the crisis without impairing their fiscal conditions.

This paper reports on how children have fared during the period of the global economic crisis (Great Recession) in rich European countries. The authors provide a descriptive overview of the evolution in a series of child well-being indicators over time (2007/8-2012/3 ) in 32 countries (the EU-28 plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey). The focus is on key child and adolescent outcome indicators that are expected to have been affected by the crisis and its related real-economy effects in the short and medium-term, including child monetary poverty and material deprivation, subjective well-being, and transition to adulthood (including education and employment). Countries’ performances are compared and ranked according to the change they experienced in these indicators over the period under analysis.

Although Hungary and Iceland suffered a similar fall in GDP, their respective governments decided to follow different strategies of adjustment. Each country cut spending according to different priorities. Moreover, the Hungarian government implemented a flat tax reform, while the Icelandic government replaced the previous flat tax system with a progressive structure. As a result, Iceland met the objectives of the IMF program, while worsening economic conditions forced Hungary to ask for additional external help. In terms of income distribution, social transfers contributed to reducing inequality in Iceland but not in Hungary, while the different tax strategies operated in contrary ways.

Chile and Mexico reacted to the crisis by implementing several policy responses, they achieved different outcomes. In particular, the Chilean economy recovered faster than the Mexican one. However, the main differences are related to social outcomes. On one hand, the Gini coefficient decreased in both countries. On the other hand, both overall and child poverty dropped in Chile while they rose sharply in Mexico. , Chile introduced a stimulus package twice as large the Mexican one. When the financial crisis arrived in late 2008 - Chile and Mexico started from different positions, they generated a different public effort, which in turn led to different economic and social results.

The analysis shows that the rankings are relatively stable: indeed, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries are still in the best performing group while the United States is still in the bottom of the ranking. Data analysis also highlights a common pattern for East European countries as material conditions improved and the behaviour of young people became more similar to their peers living in Western economies even though children’s living conditions have not improved overall. On the whole, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom recorded the most positive changes, while Poland, Spain and Sweden recorded the most negative changes.

This paper focuses on a portion of the Australian fiscal stimulus and in particular on the 2009 Household Stimulus Package composed of three main cash payments: the Back to School Bonus, the Single Income Family Bonus and the Tax Bonus for Working Australians. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of these bonus payments in reducing poverty and stimulating consumption. In addition, our analysis gives special attention to these outcomes among children and poor people, due to their increased vulnerability during times of crisis.

This paper aimed at comparing the well-being of children across the most economically advanced countries of the world while discussing the methodological issues involved in comparing children’s well-being across countries. A Child Well-being Index was constructed to rank countries according to their performance in advancing child well-being. The Index used 30 indicators combined into 13 components, again summarised in 5 dimensions for 29 rich countries. Data from various sources were combined to capture aspects of child well-being: material well-being, health, education, behaviour and risks, housing and environment. The scores for the countries on all variables and combinations of variables were discussed in detail. The Child Well-being Index revealed that the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries (excluding Denmark) did relatively better than the other countries while Romania and the United States performed well below the average. Overall, serious differences existed in child well-being across countries suggesting that in many, improvement could be made in the quality of children’s lives.

Together with the Innocenti Working paper on relative income poverty of children in rich countries (Bradshaw et al, 2012), this paper on multidimensional child poverty and child deprivation forms the background studies on which the Innocenti Report Card 10 is based (Measuring Child Poverty: New league tables of child poverty in the world‟s rich countries). The paper focuses on child deprivation in Europe and studies the degree to which it is experienced by children in 29 countries using a child specific deprivation scale. The paper discusses the construction of a child deprivation scale and estimates a European Child Deprivation Index for the 29 countries using 14 specific child related variables made available by the child module of the EU-SILC 2009 survey. The 29 countries are ranked according to the degree of child deprivation: the results show considerable differences between the countries. The (non-)overlap between child deprivation and child monetary poverty is considerable but limited. In general the results indicate where policy interventions can produce improvements.