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This chapter provides the context of the low-paid labour market to the analysis of in-work poverty. It discusses data and stylized facts of international comparison and evolution of low-wage employment. It points out that low pay is not at all identical with in-work poverty. The chapter singles out relevant strands of low-wage analysis: the ‘low-pay-no-pay’ cycle and state dependency of being low paid, and summarizes relevant elements grouped into the role of individual and job characteristics and individual transitions into and out of low pay, and broader theoretical explanations which distinguish between supply and demand without restraints on the one hand, and embedded in institutions on the other hand. It elaborates on the role of households in relation to the earnings distribution and advises broadening the scope of in-work poverty analysis to households which are not poor. Individual wage inequality provides only half the story of income inequality, as after the demise of the single-earner world a large majority of employees are now members of households with two or more earners. This affects the nature of the competition for jobs, including particularly for jobs at the lower end of the labour market. The thrust of the argument is that low-wage employment is not a matter of a stand-alone distribution of earnings in the labour market, but that it is rooted deeply in rapidly changing household labour supply behaviour.

The Netherlands is an example of a highly institutionalized labor market that places considerable attention on equity concerns. The government and social partners (unions and industry associations) seek to adjust labor market arrangements to meet the challenges of increased international competition, stronger claims on labor market positions by women, and the growing population share of immigrants and their children. The most notable developments since 2001 are the significant rise in part-time and flexible work arrangements as well as rising inequalities.

De diverse schrijvers van deze bundel geven hun inzichten over de erfbelasting – voorheen het Succesierecht; is die belasting rechtvaardig of juist niet? Premier Rutte betoogde in 2007 dat de erfbelasting de onrechtvaardigste belasting is die bestaat. Een verkiezingsbelofte van de Amerikaanse president Trump was dat hij een einde aan de 'death tax' zou maken. In 1966 pleitte PvdA'ers in 'Tien over Rood' voor een erfbelasting van 99%. En in deze bundel betoogt voormalig hoogleraar Flip de Kam dat de huidige tarieven van de erfbelasting best wel wat omhoog kunnen. Kortom: zo veel hoofden, zo veel zinnen. En: de huidige tarieven van deze belasting zijn ook opgenomen. Het boek is voorzien van eindnoten en een literatuuroverzicht per bijdrage.

This paper aims to provide a detailed picture in three parts of the statutory minimum wage in the Netherlands that provides a legally minimum level of pay which is binding for all sectors. First, we show how it was legally established in the 1960s and subsequently complemented with an extensive set of youth minimum wages, what the rules are that affect its uprating and how these are influenced by trade unions and employers’ associations. We examine how the level and the employment incidence of the minimum wage have evolved since the 1960s to gauge its significance for the development and distribution of wage earnings, including the incidence of low pay. In addition we consider briefly its relationship to personal and household incomes. Secondly, we discuss how the minimum wage relates to collective labour agreements, many of which stipulate wage scales which start at a higher level than the minimum wage. Particular attention is paid to the gap between the lowest wage scales and the minimum wage, which has narrowed considerably since the 1990s under pressure from the government, and how this is reflected in the distribution of wages. Finally, we present the results of three industry-based case studies of the role played by the minimum wage, or not, in the daily practice of collective wage and employment bargaining regarding both the minimum wage itself and the lowest wage scales of collective agreements in three particular industries: metal manufacturing, cleaning and super markets. We end with a brief appraisal of the changes and the future role of the minimum wage.

This volume grows out of the research on the United States summarized in Low-Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace (Appelbaum, Bernhardt, and Murnane 2003), which sought to understand how U.S. firms were responding to economic globalization, deregulation, and technological progress and the impact of these responses on typical low-wage frontline workers. Two broad conclusions emerged from the array of qualitative and quantitative data presented in Low-Wage America. First, while most U.S. firms responded to the economic pressures of the last three decades by engaging in cost-cutting efforts that resulted in deteriorating pay and working conditions for their frontline workers, some firms chose different competitive strategies that yielded better outcomes for workers. These alternative "high- road" labor market strategies included focusing on reorganizing the work process, increasing capital intensity, introducing new technology, implementing innovations in products and services, and providing more and better training. These measures generally sought to raise the productivity or lower the turnover of low-wage workers in ways that would offset the higher initial investments or ongoing costs of taking the "high road."1 The second broad conclusion of Low-Wage America was that labor market institutions have an important impact on firms' choices about how to respond to competitive pressures. From the end of the 1970s to the present, the decline in unionization rates and the erosion of the real value of the minimum wage, for example, have made it substantially easier for U.S. firms to respond to market challenges by taking the "low road." But still, some firms did choose high-road workplace practices in organizing and rewarding the work of less-skilled em ployees. And these decisions appear to have been shaped by labor market institutions-an employers' association in North Carolina that facilitated training and modernization, fostered new product development, sought new markets, and improved outcomes for both workers and companies; a training facility, jointly managed by hospitals and the health care union in New York City, that improved skills and pay for less-skilled hospital workers; high union density in a vacation destination city with upmarket hotels that led to substantially higher wages and better working conditions for hotel housekeepers. Nevertheless, only a small minority of the firms studied followed such high-road practices. In research focused solely on the United States, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the role of institutions in determining outcomes for workers in low-paid jobs. There is little institutional variation across the United States-the examples just given of strong labor market institutions in particular locales are widely recognized as exceptions to the general pattern of weak employers' associations, a low level of union density, and the failure of employers to train frontline workers. Our idea was that there might be much to be learned about the nature of jobs that are low-wage in the United States by studying these same jobs in other advanced industrial nations with very different institutional settings. More precisely, our key assumption was that the effects on national economies of changing technology, increasing globalization, and intensifying competition are filtered through institutional structures and, further, that these effects can be observed in the strategic decisions made by firms and in the quality of jobs held by workers. Indeed, this thinking was the genesis of the Russell Sage Foundation's decision to undertake industry-based case studies of job quality in foreign economies in 2005-2006. Selecting the comparison countries required balancing a set of factors. To be most useful, the comparison economies had to be different from the United States (and from each other), but not so radically different with respect to economic, political, and institutional (including cultural) institutions that they would bring little to a U.S.-focused discussion. Ultimately, three large economies-France, Germany, and the United Kingdom- And two smaller northern European economies-Denmark and the Netherlands-were selected. Researchers in all five countries followed a common methodology built around firm-level case studies in five industries-call centers, food processing, hospitals, hotels, and retail trade.2 Within each firm and industry, country teams focused on specific tasks typically performed in the United States by low-wage frontline workers: call center operators; operators in food processing; nursing assistants and cleaners in hospitals; hotel housekeepers; and cashiers and stock or sales clerks in retail. To complement these case studies, national researchers also used available data to draw the broader contours of low-wage and less-skilled work in each country.3 To measure the extent of low-wage work, national teams defined low-wage workers as those workers earning a gross hourly wage of less than two-thirds of each country's median gross hourly wage. The relative definition of low-wage work has several advantages over an absolute definition. The relative definition abstracts from differences in wages that simply reflect differences in average incomes across the six countries.4 More importantly, the relative definition reflects the view that relative pay matters both economically and socially. Firms are continuously making hiring and investment decisions based on the relative costs of different kinds of workers and different technologies. And workers are intrinsically concerned about the implied social valuation of their work that is included in the relative wage. This social aspect of pay suggests that relative pay is also a key dimension of job quality. Indeed, beyond pay, job quality is at the center of the analytical focus of this research. European countries have seen a renewed interest in this issue since the 1990s, and job quality has acquired an important place in the social and employment agenda of the European Union (see Gallie 2007). In this volume, we use the concept of job quality in its broadest sense, covering all the terms of employment and working conditions that may have an impact on the well-being of workers, both at work and in their private lives. Measuring job quality inevitably involves striking a balance between objective job characteristics and workers' subjective perceptions, including those related to job satisfaction. Most analyses of the key determinants of job quality focus on: compensation, including benefits or social entitlements (such as health insurance, pension, paid vacation, parental leave, paid sick days, and other nonwage compensation); contractual status, in particular whether the job is permanent or temporary (one of the fundamental determinants of job security); training and career opportunities; task discretion and other aspects of job design, such as work pace; health and safety conditions; and work schedules, including the scope for finding a balance between work and family life. The project's firm-level case studies, which focused on specific occupations in the same industries in all six countries, were particularly well suited to comparing these many dimensions of job quality across a variety of national institutional structures. As far as possible, national teams attempted to study eight firms in each industry in each country.5 In each firm, employers, executives, employees' representatives, and a sample of workers were interviewed following shared guidelines. The case studies also included workplace visits and, where possible, quantitative data provided by the firms. The results of each national research effort were first published in five national monographs.6 This volume seeks to extract some of the comparative lessons, reintroducing the American case. The main sources of the evidence and analysis here are the national monographs for the five European countries; this volume also draws less directly on earlier research presented in Low-Wage America, which has been updated and supplemented by U.S.-based researchers working with the European teams. The remainder of this chapter summarizes the main findings of the project. Copyright © 2010 by Russell Sage Foundation.

The movement of mothers, including those with young children, into paid employment outside the home has been one of the defining economic and social developments of recent decades. Further expansion is endorsed in the EU's Lisbon targets for enhancing the performance of the European economy, identifying low female participation as a major source of the US-EU employment gap. But this development brings its challenges. Women still provide most of the care for children (and other dependants) often curtailing or reorientating their labour market participation in order to do so. The reconciliation of work and family has therefore become a major new focus for social policies towards gender equality. At the same time employers have been expanding part-time jobs, and beginning to introduce other ‘family-friendly’ developments...

Contains fulltext : 134998.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Dutch inequality in market incomes has grown significantly and structurally, especially at the top. Income redistribution remained important but did not fully compensate, and policy actually enhanced inequality in net equivalized incomes. Lower minimum wages and benefits induced a sharp rise in the 1980s, and the ensuing restructuring of social security led to a slow further increase. Relative poverty trends follow the same pattern. The consequences for low incomes were exacerbated by a tax reform in 1990, but a more fundamental tax reform in 2001 neutralized part of this. Shifts in household composition offer considerable compensation for the rise in inequality. However, strong gradients by educational attainment have proliferated across many of the fields where we examined the social and political/cultural impacts of growing inequality. Only occasionally, and often hampered by a lack of long-run data, impacts are found that seem linked to inequality growth over time.

This paper argues that the sharp growth of educational attainment has won Tinbergen’s race as the qualification structure of employment lags increasingly behind, with a large and increasing underutilisation of individual attainment on the job as a result. With its strong gender dimension this has fostered the demise of the single-earner model of society to the advantage of dual-earner households. That shift has gone together with a strong expansion of part-time employment, albeit at different speeds internationally. In several countries this part-time growth is stimulated also by the combination of employment participation with the rapidly growing educational participation that underlies the growth in educational attainment. Taken together this has resulted in a steep uphill battle for the less educated when they try to secure jobs that allow making a living and sustaining a career in the labour market. This group faces strong competition from better-educated additional earners who are a member of dual-earner households, which often have an income found higher up the household income distribution. This institutes a self-reinforcing mechanism of income and labour-market inequalities. High-income households compete with low-income households for the same low-skill and low-paid jobs, and they do so frequently on a part-time basis that contributes to the fragmentation of those jobs. This process has established a job’s working time as an increasingly important vector of labour-market inequalities. In the paper the argument is first developed for the Netherlands because the country offers a special statistical classification of occupations (1960-2010) that directly links the occupational levels to levels of educational attainment. This case study is complemented with an international comparison using the ELFS and extending to incomes and earnings with the help of SILC. It shows the presence of similar effects found for the Netherlands for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK.

This paper argues that the sharp growth of educational attainment has won Tinbergen’s race as the qualification structure of employment lags increasingly behind, with a large and increasing underutilisation of individual attainment on the job as a result. With its strong gender dimension this has fostered the demise of the single-earner model of society to the advantage of dual-earner households. That shift has gone together with a strong expansion of part-time employment, albeit at different speeds internationally. In several countries this part-time growth is stimulated also by the combination of employment participation with the rapidly growing educational participation that underlies the growth in educational attainment. Taken together this has resulted in a steep uphill battle for the less educated when they try to secure jobs that allow making a living and sustaining a career in the labour market. This group faces strong competition from better-educated additional earners who are a member of dual-earner households, which often have an income found higher up the household income distribution. This institutes a self-reinforcing mechanism of income and labour-market inequalities. High-income households compete with low-income households for the same low-skill and low-paid jobs, and they do so frequently on a part-time basis that contributes to the fragmentation of those jobs. This process has established a job’s working time as an increasingly important vector of labour-market inequalities. In the paper the argument is first developed for the Netherlands because the country offers a special statistical classification of occupations (1960-2010) that directly links the occupational levels to levels of educational attainment. This case study is complemented with an international comparison using the ELFS and extending to incomes and earnings with the help of SILC. It shows the presence of similar effects found for the Netherlands for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK.

Il presente contributo mostra l'importanza del ruolo che i redditi individuali di mercato, la redistribuzione dei redditi derivante dai trasferimenti e dalla tassazione e la trasformazione dei modelli di formazione dei nuclei familiari - riflessi nelle stime del reddito equivalente - hanno giocato nell'evoluzione della classe media. La conseguente ricollocazione delle famiglie nelle diverse classi sociali (classe povera, classe media e classe ricca) viene misurata sulla base delle variazioni nei redditi lordi delle famiglie che si spostano da una classe all'altra. Questo mostra che la partecipazione diretta della classe media ai redditi di mercato è limitata e ha subito una forte flessione a favore della classe ricca, che è fortemente cresciuta. Tutto ciò è dovuto all'aumento dei redditi da lavoro, in particolar modo delle famiglie bireddito. Tuttavia, la tassazione e la stima in termini di reddito equivalente neutralizzano in larga parte il declino della classe media. Un'implicazione importante è che molte famiglie bireddito percepiscono redditi da lavoro elevati, principalmente sommando occupazioni tradizionalmente appannaggio della classe media, ma possono permettersi solamente uno stile di vita tipico della classe media.

Considering the contribution of the distribution of individual wages and earnings to that of household incomes we find two separate literatures that should be brought together, and bring “new institutions” into play. Growing female employment, rising dual-earnership and part-time employment underline its relevance. We discuss the measurement of wage inequality, data sources, and stylized facts of wage dispersion for rich countries. The literature explaining the dispersion of wage rates and the role of institutions is evaluated, from the early 1980s to the recent literature on job polarization and tasks as well as on the minimum wage. Distinguishing between supply-and-demand approaches and institutional ones, we find supply and demand challenged by the empirical measurement of technological change and a risk of ad hoc additions, without realizing their institutional preconditions. The institutional approach faces an abundance of institutions without a clear conceptual delineation of institutions and their interactions. Empirical cross-country analysis of the correlation between institutional measures and wage inequality incorporates unemployment and working hours dynamics, discussing the problems of matching individuals to their relevant institutional framework. Minimum wage legislation and active labor market policies come out negatively correlated to earnings inequality in US and EU countries.

Considering the contribution of the distribution of individual wages and earnings to that of household incomes we find two separate literatures that should be brought together, and bring ‘new institutions’ into play. Growing female employment, rising dual-earnership and part-time employment underline its relevance. We discuss the measurement of wage inequality, data sources, and stylized facts of wage dispersion for rich countries. The literature explaining the dispersion of wage rates and the role of institutions is evaluated, from the early 1980s to the recent literature on job polarization and tasks as well as on the minimum wage. Distinguishing between supply-and-demand approaches and institutional ones, we find the former challenged by the empirical measurement of technological change and a risk of ad hoc additions, without realizing their institutional preconditions. The institutional approach faces an abundance of institutions without a clear conceptual delineation of institutions and their interactions. Empirical cross-country analysis of the correlation between institutional measures and wage inequality incorporates unemployment and working hours dynamics, discussing the problems of matching individuals to their relevant institutional framework. Minimum wage legislation and active labour market policies come out negatively correlated to earnings inequality in US and EU countries.

This chapter provides the introduction to a collection of 11 comparative chapters and a concluding chapter which, based on 30 country studies (25 European, USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea; reported in the companion volume Nolan et al. 2013), look at the evolution of inequalities, their social and political impacts, and national policies regarding inequality. Four chapters consider the evolution of inequalities of income and their drivers, the role of earnings and employment, the inequalities of wealth, and those of education. Four subsequent chapters address the social and political impacts in a wide range of fields, such as poverty and social exclusion, health and housing, attitudes towards inequality, trust, and political legitimacy. Next, policies of redistribution, job provision and public services are discussed in two chapters, followed by a chapter on educational policies and inequality. The chapter explains the approach and its challenges and ends with a summary overview of inequalities.

This chapter summarizes key features of 30 country case studies of the evolution of income inequality, of outcomes in the social, cultural, and political realms that might potentially be affected, and of the effectiveness of policies in mitigating or exacerbating background inequalities. The volume documented trends in inequality and relative poverty over a period of time that spans major developments across all 30 countries, politico-economic transition in some, expansive commodification, and financialization in others, deep cultural and demographic change in most. No strong evidence has been found that increasing income inequality is associated with such negative social outcomes as more crime, more family breakdown, less trust, and greater social immobility, at least in the relatively short term. It is has been repeatedly demonstrated across the country studies that inequality in income is strongly associated with inequalities in other dimensions, including health, and these deep-seated social gradients are in themselves highly undesirable.

The chapter examines policies that may help combating educational inequalities in the competences achieved (i.e. quality of education). Using cross-sectional data the chapter demonstrates a correlation between institutional characteristics of educational systems and student achievement, including early tracking, vocational orientation, and forms of national standardisation. Looking at schooling the chapter adopts a longitudinal approach to educational policies. Using newly collected data, the chapter describes various policies to combating inequality in educational attainment, both in terms of distributions and in terms of inequality of educational opportunity by social groups. The chapter considers the relationships between educational policies, educational distributions and income inequality. EU-SILC data on educational and earnings attainment with comparative student achievement data since from the 1960s, allows examining to what extent educational policies affect quality and quantity of education, and how these educational distributions relate to the level of income inequality. The chapter discusses the potential opposition to the implementation of these policies.

This chapter studies the complex relationship between income inequality and the legitimacy of politics. By focusing on outcomes concerning national and supranational politics, the chapter argues that political correlates to inequality may not only widen cleavages in political interest, attitudes to democracy, and political representation, but may additionally have serious repercussions on the legitimacy of the democratic political system. The chapter demonstrates that a potential threat to the political system originates from ill-suited representation of lower income groups, and of their interests concerning the income distribution in society. Low salience of redistributive issues is not only observed through subjective political identification, but also through unequal political representation.

Door de onvrede over pensioenen, klinkt de roep steeds luider om mensen zelf te laten kiezen bij welk fonds zij hun pensioen willen onderbrengen. Een dergelijke keuzevrijheid levert echter weinig op, constateren Paul de Beer e.a. Het is beter om deelnemers meer zeggenschap te geven.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of labour earnings for income and income inequality -also among top incomes. With a focus on employees and Europe, the chapter elaborates on the relationship between the household income distribution and the individual earnings distribution. On the one hand, households flatten individual inequalities of earnings, by combining employees from different levels of the earnings distribution, and of employment, by bringing people together with diverging working hours - part-time employment appears to be surprisingly evenly spread over the household earnings distribution. On the other hand, the combination of earnings and hours within the household augments household inequality of earnings and employment. The chapter scrutinises the role of dual-earner and multiple-earner households, demonstrating its importance at the top of the distribution. Multiple earning is very important in countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the chapter speculates that it may be part of household formation aimed at reducing poverty.

Met enige regelmaat wordt gepleit voor meer keuzevrijheid in het pensioenstelsel. In dit paper onderzoeken wij vier scenario’s voor de introductie van keuzevrijheid. In de eerste twee scenario’s kunnen individuele werknemers c.q. werkgevers zelf bepalen bij welke pensioenuitvoerder zij hun pensioenregeling onderbrengen (de exit-optie). In de laatste twee scenario’s krijgen deelnemers aan een pensioenfonds individueel dan wel collectief meer zeggenschap over de pensioenregeling (de voice-optie). Wij onderzoeken in welke mate de vier scenario’s bijdragen aan meer maatwerk, meer continuïteit in de pensioenopbouw en een gunstiger kosten-batenverhouding, met behoud van een aantal elementen van het bestaande pensioenstelsel, zoals financiële houdbaarheid en solidariteit. We concluderen dat de scenario’s verschillend scoren op de verschillende beoordelingscriteria en randvoorwaarden, zodat niet objectief kan worden bepaald welk scenario het beste is. De twee scenario’s op basis van de exit-optie brengen de meeste risico’s met zich mee voor waardevolle elementen van het bestaande stelsel, terwijl het twijfelachtig is of zij tot een gunstiger kosten-batenverhouding zullen leiden. De individuele en de collectieve voice-optie voldoen wel aan alle randvoorwaarden. Scenario 3 is het meest geschikt om tegemoet te komen aan heterogene voorkeuren ten aanzien van de pensioenregeling.

There has been a remarkable upsurge of debate about increasing inequalities and their societal implications, reinforced by the economic crisis but bubbling to the surface before it. This has been seen in popular discourse, media coverage, political debate, and research in the social sciences. The central questions addressed by this book, and the major research project GINI on which it is based, are: Have inequalities in income, wealth and education increased over the past 30 years or so across the rich countries, and if so why? What are the social, cultural and political impacts of increasing inequalities in income, wealth, and education? What are the implications for policy and for the future development of welfare states? In seeking to answer these questions, this book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on economics, sociology, and political science, and applies this approach to learning from the experiences over the last three decades of European countries together with the USA, Japan, Canada, Australia, and South Korea. It combines comparative research with lessons from specific country experiences, and highlights the challenges in seeking to adequately assess the factors underpinning increasing inequalities and in identify the channels through which these may impact on key social and political outcomes, as well as the importance of framing inequality trends and impacts in the institutional and policy context of the country in question.

Keeping economic inequality in check is an uphill battle, though countries differ. General drivers seem mediated, moderated, accelerated or perhaps even replaced by demographic, institutions or policy-making changes. Growing inequality is not found robustly linked to worsening social outcomes (health, deprivation, housing, social cohesion, etc.), though better longitudinal data may change this; Social stratification is manifest. Political impacts (e.g. legitimacy) seem stronger, underpinning deep concerns about political influence of the rich, feeding into policies increasing inequality. People on low incomes face effects on health, living conditions, social ties, child development. Redistributing income is imperative so as to alleviate poverty and promote equality of opportunities. Prevention policies cannot replace direct redistribution. The best performing countries have a large welfare state that invests in people, stimulating them to be active and adequately protecting them when everything else fails. This continues to offer the best prospect for rich countries pursuing growth with equality.

This chapter provides the introduction to a collection of 30 country studies (25 European, USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea) of the evolution of inequalities of income, earnings and employment, wealth, and education, of their drivers as well as their social and political impacts in a wide range of fields, such as health, poverty, housing, social cohesion, trust, and political legitimacy. Policies of redistribution, job provision, and public services are also discussed. It discusses the context of scientific study and political debate of inequalities that make up the background of the thirty studies and presents the common approach that was chosen.

Een goede vergelijking van de ongelijkheid in Nederland met de uitkomsten van Piketty’s onderzoek is niet goed mogelijk, al was het maar omdat onze cijfers over vermogens niet verder teruggaan dan de jaren negentig. Maar duidelijk is dat de Nederlandse vermogensongelijkheid internationaal gezien groot is en groeit. Meer onderzoek is nodig.

Economische ongelijkheid in Nederland is terug op de wetenschappelijke en politiek-maatschappelijke agenda. Dit is begrijpelijk, want de recente WRR-verkenning laat zien dat de vermogensongelijkheid relatief hoog is, ook in internationaal perspectief, en hoger dan men zou verwachten op basis van de meer gelijkmatige verdeling van (besteedbare) inkomens. Door een aantal lacunes in de vermogensstatistiek aan te vullen, zou ons beeld van de vermogensverdeling nog vollediger worden en kan de maatschappelijke discussie scherper gevoerd worden.

The chapter scrutinises wealth inequality, its measurement, trends, drivers, and relationship with income, using GINI contributions and new analysis of data and literature. The chapter finds increasing wealth inequality and polarization, although levels and trends vary widely. The comparability of wealth data is challenged by the presence of debt, lack of equivalisation, differences in wealth holdings, and exclusion of pension assets. Cross-country differences in wealth inequality seem better explained by social expenditures and debt take-up than by demographic factors and the labour market; trends are better explained by growing debt and financial assets, their fiscal treatment, and ‘superstars’. The relationship with income is not straightforward: high income inequality does not necessarily go together with high wealth inequality, and income-poor households are not always wealth-poor. Wealth should be taken into account in analysing inequality, together with income, and deeper study is needed of the role of debt.

In this article compares the rise in inequality concerning net household incomes in a number of European countries and Canada, the USA and Australia. Two important factors are used to explain this worrying trend: a growing of unequal market incomes and/or a declining redistribution of income through taxes and transfers.

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Contains fulltext : 121021.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) 181 p.

De publieke premie verdween tijdens de jaren tachtig toen de link tussen publieke en private lonen werd losgelaten. Hoewel de balans gedeeltelijk werd hersteld door een loonsverhoging in het onderwijs, was de publieke premie in 2009 nog steeds -2 procent. Gemiddeld zijn lonen in de publieke sector ongunstig voor mannen, mensen ouder dan 35 jaar en hoger opgeleiden. Meestal verdienen vrouwen in de publieke sector meer dan in de private sector, maar dat is niet altijd het geval. Het jaar 1989 was een uitzondering en ook voor hoger opgeleide vrouwen geldt de afgelopen jaren een negatieve premie. The public premium has disappeared during the 1980s when public-private wage linkages have been abandoned. Although the balance was partly restored recently when wages in education improved, the public premium was still -2% in 2009. On average, public sector wages are unfavourable for men, people over 35 and higher educated. Most public-sector women earn a premium over private-sector women, but not in all cases: not in 1989, nor higher educated women in recent years.

Dit artikel analyseert de Nederlandse inkomensongelijkheid op grond van speciaal beschikbaar gestelde, gedetailleerde gegevens van het CBS. Ik gebruik een ongelijkheidsmaat die de aandacht richt op de afstand tussen de onderkant en de bovenkant van de inkomensverdeling. De conclusie luidt dat de inkomensongelijkheid van huishoudens nu in belangrijke opzichten groter is dan ooit gedurende de afgelopen 35 jaar - en stijgende. Drijvende krachten achter deze groei zijn een doorgaande stijging van loonongelijkheid en een afnemende inkomensherverdeling (uitkeringen en belastingheffing). De rol van inkomens uit onderneming en vermogen is verrassend gering. Voor de vermindering van de ongelijkheid is correctie voor de samenstelling van huishoudens (z.g. standaardisering) minstens even belangrijk als het herverdelingsbeleid van de overheid. Het effect van de standaardisering, en daarmee de huishoudvorming, verdient meer aandacht in het publieke en wetenschappelijke debat, naast arbeidsmarktongelijkheid en herverdelingsbeleid.

Labour-market Activity and the Household-income Distribution in European Countries

The essential guide for students and researchers interested in economic inequality Contains 27 original research contributions from the top names in economic inequality. The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality presents a new and challenging analysis of economic inequality, focusing primarily on economic inequality in highly developed countries. Bringing together the world's top scholars this comprehensive and authoritative volume contains an impressive array of original research on topics ranging from gender to happiness, from poverty to top incomes, and from employers to the welfare state. The authors give their view on the state-of-the-art of scientific research in their fields of expertise and add their own stimulating visions on future research. Ideal as an overview of the latest, cutting-edge research on economic inequality, this is a must have reference for students and researchers alike. Readership: Students, researchers, and policy makers with an interest in the economics of inequality and more generally those in related disciplines of development studies, politics, business, demography, and sociology.

This paper addresses the key issue for the GINI project of how best to approach the measurement of income inequality and wage inequality to enhance comparability across different studies. It focuses fi rst on income inequality, dealing with the defi nition of income, the income recipient unit, and the unit of analysis. The summary measures used to capture inequality are also discussed, with an emphasis on capturing trends at different points in the distribution, and sources for comparative data on inequality levels and trends are discussed. The paper then turns to inequality in earnings among employees and discusses the same set of issues in that context. The above bears directly on any analysis of inequality itself but it is also important for an analysis of the direct impacts of inequality at micro-level. For a (multilevel) analysis based on aggregate inequality as an input the paper provides an understanding of the need for comparable concepts and defi nitions across countries and links to data sources as well as aggregate levels. It also links to practical experiences of researchers with different datasets. For this and the datasets see the Data Portal at: http://www.gini-research.org.

The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality presents a challenging analysis of economic inequality, focusing primarily on economic inequality in highly-developed countries. This comprehensive and authoritative volume contains twenty-seven original contributions on topics ranging from gender to happiness, from poverty to top incomes, and from employers to the welfare state. The authors give their view on scientific research in their fields of expertise and add their own visions for future research. Keywords: developed countries, gender, poverty, employers, welfare state, scientific research, future research, economic inequality