Suchergebnisse

How should relative poverty be defined and measured in a European Union where there are substantial variations in income between countries, as well as within countries? This paper uses objective and subjective deprivation indicators to assess the appropriate balance between national and Europe-wide relativities in explaining social exclusion. The analysis suggests that Europe-wide comparisons are more important to the perception of poverty than the convention of national relative poverty lines would have led us to expect. Even relative poverty is more prevalent in the new low-income (eastern) countries than in the old high-income (western) countries. But this is as much a political as an empirical issue.

The number of people claiming incapacity benefits increased rapidly to the mid 1990s, and has hardly reduced since then. This paper uses survey data to plot trends over time in the prevalence of disability, and in the employment rates of disabled people, in a way which is independent of, but comparable with, benefit statistics. The research is mainly based on General Household Survey data across the period 1974 to 2005. Much of the analysis is based on a loose definition of disability, but this is effectively complemented by more detailed data on health conditions available in some GHS years.

Social security benefits designed to meet the extra costs faced by disabled people have been in place since the early 1970s, and currently cost nearly 15 billion per year. Over the period the benefits have enjoyed bilateral political support, and the only major changes (eg in 1992) have been to extend entitlement and increase expenditure. But remarkably little is known about the impact of these benefits exactly what difference they make to claimants care and mobility arrangements, to their overall standard of living, and to their social inclusion and sense of identity. The Department for Work and Pensions is considering how to study the impact of disability benefits in more depth. The Department has commissioned this feasibility study, to summarise the questions and assess alternative research approaches, with a view to launching more detailed investigations.

This article challenges the growing orthodoxy among analysts and makers of social policy that an index of material deprivation should be preferred to low income as a measure of poverty. Such scales are nevertheless invaluable as indicators of living standards, and can be used to improve our understanding of social exclusion, and the role of low income in that process. Income and deprivation data from seven waves of the British Household Panel Survey are used to show that poverty may be less common, but also more severe, more stable and more intransigent, than standard annual income tables indicate. These lessons are applied to a discussion of the government's plan to introduce a deprivation index into its suite of child poverty measures.

The economic position of disabled people is often summarised by comparing their overall employment rate with that of non-disabled people. But the average figure masks a very wide range of variation in the prospects faced by individual disabled people – immensely wider than the range for the population as a whole. The severity of their impairments is a crucial influence, but the Labour Force Survey makes no attempt to measure it. Disabled people are also sensitive to other disadvantaging factors such as age and poor qualifications. More detailed consideration needs to be given to what distinguishes between those disabled people who are, and are not, in work.

Recent research provides evidence of continuing economic disadvantage among minority groups. But the wide variation between specific groups contradicts the notion that being a member of a minority group is, in itself, associated with financial hardship. This article summarises some of the quantitative evidence about ethnic minority incomes. Chinese and Indian households are characterised by a wide range of inequality within each group, with many prosperous families as well as some poor ones. Caribbean and African households are often poorer than white households, but Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are easily the poorest groups in Britain, and depend very heavily on means-tested benefits.