Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article explores the determinants of relative market income poverty and poverty reduction among the working age population in 22 advanced industrial democracies. The article revisits Moller et al. (2003) but goes beyond the earlier study in four major ways. First, we are able to measure welfare state effort with social rights rather than expenditure. This allows us to separate the effect of policy from need, which jointly shape expenditure. Second, we bring the analysis up to date, covering some 10–15 more years, which allows us to compare our findings to those of the earlier study and to compare the periods before and after 2000. Specifically, we discuss the declining effectiveness of the welfare state in reducing poverty and the declining importance of partisan incumbency. Third, we pool data from three sources, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Eurostat Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC), to almost triple the number of observations for analysis compared to past analyses. Fourth, we use newer estimation techniques that deal better with serial correlation. We show that the primary determinants of market income poverty are volume of work as a result of economic and demographic factors, as well as remuneration of work at the bottom of the income distribution driven by labor market institutions. We then show that the main determinants of poverty reduction are social rights; controlling for social rights, need variables are important for explaining poverty reduction as well.

This article explores the consequences of public and private spending on education at all levels, looking at skills and income inequality. We use data for 22 affluent democracies from 1960 or 1995 (depending on data availability) to 2017. High levels of public education spending consistently lower income inequality, both measured as wage dispersion and as the education premium. In contrast, higher levels of private education spending are associated with both higher wage dispersion and a higher education premium. We show that this effect works in part through differential skills acquisition. Public education spending raises the math scores of 15-years old students at the mean and at the 25th percentile, but private education spending has no effect on skills at these levels. We find the same pattern among skills of adults; public education spending raises skills at the 25th percentile and the mean; private spending has no effect. Finally, we also show that higher levels of adult skills indeed depress the education premium.

This article explores the determinants of relative market income poverty and poverty reduction in advanced industrial democracies; that is, pre-tax and transfer relative poverty and reduction in poverty rates due to the tax and transfer system. Using data from twenty countries between 1969 and 2014, we show that the primary determinants of market income poverty are the availability of work, deindustrialization, and union involvement in minimum wage setting. Contrary to expectations, we find that wage dispersion in the lower half of the income distribution does not affect household poverty. We then show that the main determinant of poverty reduction is social spending on the non-aged. These results suggest that the main way in which states affect poverty via social policy is through the tax and transfer system, and that market income poverty is primarily the result of factors affecting volume of work and remuneration levels at the bottom of the distribution.

The last three decades have witnessed rising inequality and deepening financialization (however defined) in post-industrial democracies. A rapidly growing body of literature has linked the two phenomena (see e.g. Dünhaupt 2014, Godechot 2016, Flaherty 2015, Roberts and Kwon 2017). Contrary to existing scholarship, which has largely neglected the mediating effect of institutions, we argue that contextual differences play a crucial role in shaping the relationship between financialization and inequality. Drawing on the Varieties of Capitalism literature, we posit that a larger financial sector is associated with a more unequal distribution of income in liberal market economies, where the industry develops substantial autonomy from other actors. In contrast, the stronger position of labor in coordinated market economies is able to counteract the inequality-enhancing effects of financialization. We test these hypotheses with data on 18 and 21 post-industrial democracies between 1960 and 2013. Our analysis is largely consistent with our expectations.

Abstract
The rise of the super-rich has attracted much political and academic attention in recent years. However, there have been few attempts to explain the cross-national along with the temporal variation in the rise of top incomes. Drawing on the World Wealth and Income Database, we study the income share of the top 1% in current postindustrial democracies from 1960 to 2012. We find that extreme income concentration at the top is a predominantly political phenomenon, not the result of increasing marginal productivity of top managers in markets of increasing size. Top income shares are largely unrelated to economic growth, increased knowledge-intensive production, export competitiveness, financialization and wealth accumulation, though they are related to stock market capitalization. Instead, they are closely associated with political and policy changes such as union density and centralization, secular-right governments, top marginal tax rates and investment in public tertiary education.

In his introduction to this volume, Weyland locates the administrations of Socialist Presidents Ricardo Lagos (2000-06) and Michelle Bachelet (2006- 2010) closest to the moderate pole among current leftist governments in Latin America. We concur and hope to contribute to the discussion by elucidating the sources of this moderation and examining the performance of these governments in the areas of political management, economic policies, and social policies and labor market reforms. The Lagos and Bachelet governments have pursued similar market-friendly economic policies to their predecessors. Although both presidents have made important progress in overcoming the political institutionallegacies of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, moderate progress in labor market policies, and impressive progress in two social policy areas, very little improvement has been seen in the realm of fostering citizen participation and empowering labor and social movements through organization and linkages to political parties. We compare the Lagos and Bachelet governments to those of their Christian Democratic predecessors as well as to each other with the goal of identifying policy successes, failures, and omissions. We argue that the administrations' moderation stems from the political experiences of the leadership and their resulting approach to building relationships to the party rank-and-file and to civil society, the fact that these are coalition governments, and the constraints of the Pinochet political and economic legacies.

Why do Latin American countries exhibit stark differences in their ability to protect citizens from falling into poverty? Analysis of poverty levels measured by ECLAC in eighteen countries shows that political factors-including the democratic record, long-term weight of left-of-center parties in the legislature, and investment in human capital-are significant and substantively important determinants of poverty. These findings contribute to the growing literature that emphasizes the importance of regime form, parties, and policies for a variety of outcomes in Latin America, despite the weaknesses of democracy and the pathologies of some parties and party systems in the region.