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The Hungarian Economic Association organised a conference in memory of Gábor Kézdi on 20 December 2021. Gábor Kézdi, one of the most influential Hungarian economists of his generation, died last year at the age of 50. His career as a researcher and teacher was an inspiration and an example not only to the economics profession but also to the wider social science community (including the author of these lines). His research addressed many topics of interest to sociologists and social policy researchers, such as educational inequalities, school segregation, prejudice and discrimination, the situation of the Roma population in Hungary and empirical studies of the effects of social policies.

Social workers may play an important role in the implementation of welfare policies targeted at the poor. Their norms, beliefs, and attitudes form local anti-poverty programmes and affect discretionary practices with their clients. Despite this, we know little about how social workers’ exposure to poverty shapes their attitudes towards poverty and their causal attributions for poverty. This study investigates social workers’ poverty explanations and the extent to which they depend on the level of local poverty. Data from a survey conducted among Hungarian social workers were analysed using multilevel linear regression models. To measure local poverty, we used a composite index of poverty, as well as a subjective measure of exposure to poverty. Our analysis revealed that most social workers explained poverty with structural causes, but individual blame was also frequent. Contrary to our hypothesis, the level of local poverty did not significantly increase the adoption of structural explanations but did raise the occurrence of individualistic ones. However, the effect of local poverty was non-linear: social workers tended to blame the poor for their poverty in the poorest municipalities, where multiple disadvantages are concentrated, while moderate poverty did not lead to such opinions. Our results suggest that efforts should be made to improve the poverty indicator framework to better understand the phenomenon of spatial concentration of multiple disadvantages and its consequences for the poor.

In line with previous research, we confirm that welfare programs in Hungary are poorly targeted in terms of socio-economic status (SES). However, by adding age to our models, we demonstrate that even if the status is irrelevant in explaining access to social benefits and services, age is not. Applying simple regression techniques, we compare both the theoretical importance (based on regression coefficients) and the dispersion importance (using Shapley-value decomposition of the R2) of age and SES in explaining the receipt of and contributions to both in-kind and in-cash benefits at the level of the general government in Hungary. We conclude that what appears to be a dysfunctional instrument in alleviating poverty and inequality in a univariate model is actually a channel of resource reallocation that connects working-age people to children and to the elderly when the model includes two predictors.

Social scientists identify two core functions of modern welfare states as redistribution across (a) socio-economic status groups (Robin Hood) and (b) ‘the lifecycle’ (the piggy bank). But what is the relative importance of these functions? The answer has been elusive, as the piggy bank is metaphorical. The intra-personal time-travel of resources it implies is based on non-quid-pro-quo transfers. In practice, ‘lifecycle redistribution’ must operate through inter-age-group resource reallocation in cross-section. Since at any time different birth cohorts live together, ‘resource-productive’ working-aged people are taxed to finance consumption of ‘resource-dependent’ younger and older people. In a novel decomposition analysis, we study the joint distribution of socio-economic status, age, and respectively (a) all cash and in-kind transfers (‘benefits’), (b) financing contributions (‘taxes’), and (c) resulting ‘net benefits,’ on a sample of over 400,000 Europeans from 22 EU countries. European welfare states, often maligned as ineffective Robin Hood vehicles riddled with Matthew effects, are better characterized as inter-age redistribution machines performing a more important second task rather well: lifecycle consumption smoothing. Social policies serve multiple goals in Europe, but empirically they are neither primarily nor solely responsible for poverty relief and inequality reduction.

This chapter looks at trends in 10 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, exploring both convergence between these countries and the centre of the European Union on the one hand and comparative inequality trends within some of the CEE economies on the other. Time trends are presented from the beginning of the 1990s until the most recent available year. The aim is to explore patterns of income convergence and inequality developments experienced during and after the transition from non-democratic regimes and centrally planned economies to competitive markets and representative democracies. Attention is paid to between-country similarities and dissimilarities of the paths taken, attempting to find out whether homogeneity or heterogeneity dominates between the observed countries, both in relation to trends and results.

What are the net inter-age resource transfer burdens over the life course of working-age parents as compared to working-age non-parents in Europe? We estimate all cash, in-kind, and time transfers of the market economy and the household economy, through both public and familial channels, for fourteen European countries in the early 2000s. We advance National Transfer Accounts methodology by splitting up macro-aggregates into three groups: parents, non-parents living in childless households and non-parents cohabiting with children. We find that non-parents contribute almost exclusively to public transfers in net terms, somewhat more than parents do. But parents provide, in addition, a still larger amount of familial transfers. As a result, parents contribute on average 1.8 times as many net transfers as non-parents do, overall. Especially in view of the public good nature of children and contemporary rates of childlessness in Europe, this asymmetric transfer burden carries multiple implications for debates on public policy and a just society.

This chapter examines income sharing by young adults living with their parents. Using data from EU-SILC 2010, the chapter explores the determinants of contributions to household expenses among young adults (aged 18–34 years) living with their parents in 17 European Union countries. The examination finds that income sharing in the household tends to attenuate income differences between household members and to help members with low resources. The results also show inequalities in young adults’ experience of co-residence with parents: young adults in low-income households tend to contribute more to the household than do those in higher income homes. In addition, the results show that the majority of young adults benefit from intra-household sharing of resources. There is, however, a minority of young adults whose income is lower when the actual extent of income pooling is taken into account in the calculation of equivalized household income.

The European Union (EU) is living tremendous challenges generated by the high level of social disparities within and between national populations. European institutions have a decisive role in changing this situation and improving social protection policies. Chapters of this book demonstrate that despite certain successes of the EU’s tools in the social domain, there is much to be done to achieve the social goals of the EU, namely the promotion of convergence between countries and improving social cohesion within countries.

Young people were hit particularly hard by the recession which struck the European Union (EU) economies during 2008–2009 and have continued to experience problems during the prolonged period of economic stagnation which has followed. Although the impact of the recent economic crisis on young people appears to have been considerable, it has not been homogeneous. Countries most affected by the recession in Southern and Eastern European regions showed especially high youth unemployment rates. Difficulties on the labour market during the crisis and subsequent years have multiple consequences for the young population. Youth poverty increased and inequality between younger and older adults has widened. Moreover, increased economic hardship proved to have long-lasting effects, for example, by contributing to a delay in the process of transition to adulthood. The aim of this chapter is first to describe the evolution of the labour market situation and poverty among the young since the economic crisis.

The paper, based on recent EU-SILC data, investigates the patterns of income inequalities in “old” and “new” EU member states. We describe income inequality within countries as well as income differences between states and test our results using different methodological assumptions. Our results show that the group of new member states was no less heterogeneous in terms of inequality and poverty than the EU15 at the time of EU enlargement. The most important difference between the two country groups is found in their GDP levels and in some measures that are directly related to economic development. We observed that sensitivity to changes in the equivalence scales is not systematically related to membership status; thus for overall inequality comparisons of countries, a standard scale seems appropriate. The possibility of a difference between “old” and “new” EU member states in the role of incomes in generating overall welfare of households calls, however, for caution in interpretation.

The analysis approaches satisfaction with work as affected by demographic and social characteristics as well as by labor market and labor organization position. Furthermore the impact of expectations to and evaluation of the job is also considered. The international variation in the explanatory mechanisms of satisfaction with work is analyzed by comparing five groups of European societies. First, distinction is made between 'old' European market economies and 'new' post-socialist countries. Second, based on economic indicators, the first group of countries is divided into three subgroups: West (Center 1), Scandinavia (Center 2), and Periphery, while the second group of countries is divided into more developed and less developed transition societies. The ISSP 1997 Work Orientation Module data are used for the analysis. Only respondents in labor force are analyzed (N=11739). The paper presents descriptive statistics for the clusters of the countries as well as for the dependent and independent variables in the analysis. Then, ordered logit models are used to predicting satisfaction with work. The explanatory variables contain objective status indicators, subjective evaluation of the job, the country groups and interaction terms. Results reveal that both status indicators and attitudes toward the job are significant predictors of the general satisfaction in agreement with gender paradox, life cycle, reference-group and status discrepancy hypotheses. However, these explanatory mechanisms vary a lot by the groups of countries. If controlling for composition effects within these groups of countries, Scandinavia turns out to be a place with highest satisfaction and developed transition societies are characterized by the lowest satisfaction with work.

This paper aims to assess the contribution of different income sources and population characteristics to income inequality and it’s change during the 2004-2010 period in EU Member States. The analysis uses EU-SILC data to study the components of income inequality and its change both during years of economic growth (2004-2007) and during years of economic slowdown (2007-2010). The study analyses the contribution of different income sources by using the Shorrocks decomposition method and the role of different population characteristics using a regression-based method. The analysis shows that between 2004 and 2007 inequality of market income declined, most importantly in countries with important gains in employment, while between 2007 and 2010 market income inequality was rising in the majority of the countries. During the years of economic growth inequality of disposable income was also on the decline in most of the countries, while during the crisis years it increased more moderately pointing to an important redistributive effect of government taxes and transfers. Market income had an inequality increasing effect during the 2007-2010 period in Denmark, Cyprus, France and the UK, but in most of these countries (except France) government taxes and transfers moderated this effect. During the years of economic growth Poland and Estonia experienced the largest fall in inequality of disposable income. Changes in income differences by levels of work intensity contributed to inequality decline in both countries. The role of education level proved to be different however, having an inequality decreasing effect in Estonia and an inequality increasing effect in Poland. Between 2007 and 2010, the largest increases in inequality of disposable income were found in Ireland, Spain and Slovakia. In the case of Spain and Ireland the variables studied in the analysis did not contribute to explain this increase, while in the case of Slovakia almost the entire increase in inequality is the result of the inequality increasing effect of increasing income differences by levels of household work intensity.

Despite high general level of school enrolment and attendance in high-income countries a substantial gap is often seen between schooling outcomes of children from high-income and low-income families or between majority and minority ethnic groups. As a policy solution to this problem several countries have adopted so-called conditional cash transfers, which are targeted transfers incorporating a behavioural condition. As reviewed for example by Fiszbein and Schady (2009), conditional cash transfers have been increasingly popular in developing countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia, but these types of programs are also part of the welfare state of some high-income countries. In high-income countries such transfers most frequently relate to labour market transfers and conditions require active labour market behaviour of transfer recipients. In this review we are interested in human-capital related CCT programs that operate in OECD countries. The first section gives a summary of the aims, types and potential effects of conditional cash transfers. Then section two provides an overview of conditional cash transfer programs adopted in high-income OECD countries. The third section reviews results about the effects of these programs on human capital accumulation of disadvantaged children.

Income inequality began to increase back in the 1980s, with the Gini index reaching 0.24 in 1987. There was a marked increase in inequality during the early years of transition, and the Gini index reached 0.30 in 1995. Changes in inequality were smaller in the period 1995–2005, the overall pattern being stagnation until the economic crisis broke. The changes in inequality can be separated into various periods. The first, the early 1990s, was characterized by rapid and profound changes in the structure of the economy. Hungary’s trade with her eastern neighbours collapsed, and socialist mega-enterprises went bankrupt and were dismantled. This period was characterized by a massive decline in employment and a fall in the country’s GDP between 1990 and 1993. Between 1995 and 2006, GDP grew at around 4 per cent annually. Foreign direct investment played a major role in kick-starting and accelerating this growth, which brought about a significant technological modernization of production processes. Technological change increased demand for young educated labour, while employment prospects worsened for the poorly educated and older cohorts with obsolete human capital. Wage inequality – and most importantly, returns to education – continued to increase during this phase. The employment rate of the poorly educated remained at the lowest level in the EU, partly because of the underdeveloped small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector. In 2004–08, income inequality decreased. Redistribution policies played a significant role, by first increasing transfers to the lower middle class and then increasing the tax burden on the upper middle class.

Introduction This report describes the results of work package 5 of the European research project Growing Inequalities’ Impacts (GINI). The GINI project is funded by the seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission. Its main mission is to study the effects of economic and educational inequalities on a wide range of outcomes, including housing, health, family formation, living standards, political participation, social trust and value orientations. Furthermore, the GINI project assesses not only whether inequality is related to such outcomes, but whether public policies have modifi ed or mitigated undesirable outcomes related to inequalities. ....

By way of introduction This report provides the fi rm foundation for anchoring the research that will be performed by the GINI project. It subsequently considers the fi elds covered by each of the main work packages: ● inequalities of income, wealth and education, ● social impacts, ● political and cultural impacts, and ● policy effects on and of inequality. Though extensive this review does not pretend to be exhaustive. The review may be “light” in some respects and can be expanded when the analysis evolves. In each of the four fi elds a signifi cant number of discussion papers will be produced, in total well over 100. These will add to the state of the art while also covering new round and generating results that will be incorporated in the Analysis Reports to be prepared for the work packages. In that sense, the current review provides the starting point. At the same time, the existing body of knowledge is broader or deeper depending on the particular fi eld and its tradition of research. The very motivation of GINI’s focused study of the impacts of inequalities is that a systematic study is lacking and relatively little is known about those impacts. This also holds for the complex collection of, the effects that inequality can have on policy making and the contributions that policies can make to mitigating inequalities but also to enhancing them. By contrast, analyses of inequality itself are many, not least because there is a wide array of inequalities; inequalities have become more easily studied comparatively and much of that analysis has a signifi cant descriptive fl avour that includes an extensive discussion of measurement issues. @GINI hopes to go beyond that and cover the impacts of inequalities at the same time

The European Commission awarded a contract in November 2005 to a consortium composed of the TARKI Social Research Institute (Hungary), CASE, Center for Social and Economic Research (Poland) and CEPS to analyse the socio-economic developments and the process of structural reforms in what were then four candidate countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey. The objective was to identify the major challenges in the current demographic, social and economic context that could be considered relevant in determining the capacity of these countries to function in the European Union. This study presents a synthesis of the findings for all four countries, and consists of an analytical section and a statistical annex. The four country reports are published separately in this same series.

Over coming decades, changes in population age structure will have profound implications for the macroeconomy, influencing economic growth, generational equity, human capital, saving and investment, and the sustainability of public and private transfer systems. How the future unfolds will depend on key actors in the generational economy: governments, families, financial institutions, and others. This path-breaking book provides a comprehensive analysis of the macroeconomic effects of changes in population age structure across the globe.