Suchergebnisse

In many countries, we have seen an increase in economic inequality over the past 20 to 25 years. The populations might therefore have changed their attitude about how and how much different countries should intervene to reduce the extent of economic inequality. A question is whether there is any connection between changes in redistribution preferences and trends in economic inequality in the prosperous Nordic welfare states. This article contributes by examining whether there are differences in redistribution attitude and changes herein based upon socio-economic criteria, which might include self-interest arguments. Nordic countries are interesting because there have been differences in development, and even strong growth in economic inequality, especially in Sweden and Denmark, although these countries in the literature have been seen as highly equal societies. The analysis shows that support for redistribution is relatively stable over time in each country, but also that there are major differences between countries, with support being much higher in Finland compared with Denmark. Females, discriminated groups and the unemployed generally support redistribution to a higher degree. Ageing generally increases redistributional support, while more education reduces support for government redistribution in Finland. In all four countries, the highest income groups are less supportive of redistribution of income.

Purpose
This study aims to investigate whether perceptions about female workplace participation in a number of Arab countries has changed during or after the Arab Spring.


Design/methodology/approach
Data are from the representative harmonized cross-sectional World Values Survey. Descriptive measures and regression approaches are applied. Different dimensions of perceptions about female emancipation are presented, while also a composite index derived from these dimensions is analysed.


Findings
There was some change for the better (job and education gender equality), but not uniformly across countries, e.g. generally good development in Egypt and Iraq, but a standstill in Jordan, and backsliding was seen in Morocco. Applying the composite index of female emancipation using regressions confirm these results – even when male and female respondents are analysed separately.


Research limitations/implications
More Arab nations in the study would have been good such that the extent and consequences for an even larger part of the Arab world could be presented. Unfortunately, these data are not available. This implies that the representativeness of the results for the whole of the Arab world is perhaps reduced.


Practical implications
The results can inform policymakers and non-governmental organizations, etc., regarding areas where more focus is needed such that women's rights will not merely be statements on paper but also mean that females are also emancipated in practice.


Originality/value
New evidence is presented based on comparable data for Arab nations analysing the possible effects of the Arab Spring on perceptions about female emancipation.

Hvordan måler man fattigdom forstået, som det ikke at kunne klare sig selv, i det samfund man lever i? Fattigdomsopgørelser er ofte baseret på indkomst, som siger noget om mulighederne, men ikke noget om faktisk levevis. Der er derfor behov for metoder, som mere direkte belyser, hvad det vil sige ikke at kunne klare sig selv. I den sammenhæng har fattigdomsforskere peget på konsekvenser i form af afsavn. Den engelske fattigdomsforsker Peter Townsend var banebrydende inden for området. Artiklen sætter fokus på afsavnsbegrebet, dets oprindelse, anvendelse og udbredelse og peger på metodiske problemer ved afsavnsopgørelser. Det diskuteres, om der findes et indkomstniveau, under hvilket afsavnene er væsentligt mere omfattende end over dette indkomstniveau – altså findes knækket (kink), eller er der snarere tale om et missing link mellem afsavn og økonomisk levestandard? Afsavnstilgangens anvendelighed i Danmark, EU og globalt, samt over tid problematiseres. Den seneste udvikling i teoretiske bidrag til opgørelse af flere samtidige afsavn præsenteres, herunder Foster & Alkires multidimensionale mål for fattigdom og Arndt et al.s first order dominance-kriterie. Endelig illustreres afsavnstilgangen dels ved at se på afsavn blandt modtagere af de laveste sociale ydelser sammenlignet med andre forsørgelsesgrupper og dels ved en præsentation af afsavn i en EU-sammenhæng.


ENGELSK ABSTRACT:

Finn Kenneth Hansen and M. Azhar Hussain: Deprivation: Calculating the Extent of Poverty

Poverty is often based on income, which says something about the possibilities of providing for oneself, but nothing about real living conditions. Therefore we need methods to measure more precisely what it means to not be able to provide for oneself. To do so, poverty researchers have identified the consequences of poverty in terms of deprivation. Peter Townsend has been the leading scholar in this research field. This article focuses on the concept of deprivation, its origin, use and dissemination, and also points out the methodological problems of measuring deprivation. One of the debates is whether there is an income level below which deprivation is almost absolute – or whether there is a missing link between deprivation and income. The article analyses the deprivation approach in Denmark, EU and globally, and over time. Recent developments in theoretical contributions to the compilation of multiple deprivation measures are presented, including Foster & Alkire's multidimensional poverty measure and Arndt et al.'s first order dominance criterion. Finally, we analyze deprivation among recipients of the lowest benefits in Denmark as compared to other groups in the country employing these theoretical approaches, and then present deprivation in an EU context.

Key words: Poverty, deprivation, methodology, multidimensional, EU.

During the last two decades most Western countries have experienced increased net immigration as well as increased income inequality. This article analyzes the effects on income inequality of an increased number of immigrants in Denmark and Germany for the 20- year period 1984-2003 and how the impact of the increased number of immigrants differs between the two countries. We find higher inequality for immigrants than natives in Denmark but vice versa for Germany. Over the period 1984-2003, this particular inequality gap has narrowed in both countries. At the same time, the contribution of immigrants to overall inequality has increased, primarily caused by increased between-group inequality. The share of immigrants in the population is more important for the change in overall inequality in Denmark than in Germany, while the opposite is the case for inequality among immigrants.

Abstract

Introduction:
Effective educational interventions to knowledge, attitude, and prevention of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) may limit the spread of the disease. However, the relevance of HIV knowledge to followers of religions is unknown. We assessed the 2015–2016 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from India to investigate the levels of knowledge of HIV/AIDS among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists in relation to standard sociodemographic variables in India.


Methods:
We used the individual and household level data from the internationally and temporally harmonized cross-sectional DHS. These data were representative of the national population and were collected from January 2015 to December 2016.


Results:
The age range of the population was 15–54 years (n = 224,531). We found the highest level of knowledge of HIV/AIDS among Sikh men (than the followers of other religions (80.4%–92.7%). Conversely, Muslims and Hindus were least knowledgeable of HIV/AIDS (80.4% and 81.2%). Younger participants (82.5%), residents of urban areas (90.6%), more educated (98.6%), never married (84.9%), wealthier (95.5%), and having more access to mass media (90.4%–96.7%) were more aware of HIV/AIDS-related knowledge. Among various religions, Sikhs were more educated (16.1% with higher education), wealthier (59.5% in the top quintile), with higher exposure to communication means than Muslims, Hindus, and Christians.


Conclusion:
We report that Sikh men are most knowledgeable of HIV compared to Sikh women and followers of other religions. Our findings may help formulate public health strategies targeting various religious groups to reduce the incidence of HIV/AIDS.

The poverty mapping methodology for estimating welfare rankings from small areas has proven to be useful in guiding allocation of government funds, regional planning, and general policy formulation. Nevertheless, poverty mapping also suffers from a series of by now well recognized shortcomings. We apply an approach based on first order dominance (FOD) to small area estimation. Five advantages to the FOD approach are highlighted. First, it can serve as a complement to, substitute for, and/or extension of the poverty mapping methodology. Second, it directly uses census data with a minimum of assumptions imposed. Third, the methodology is straightforward to implement and the concepts are intuitive. Fourth, the FOD approach is multi-dimensional allowing for a broader conception of poverty. Finally, FOD indicators can be chosen that relate directly to public expenditure priorities We apply the approach to census data from Mozambique for 1997 and 2007 and compare results with the poverty mapping methodology. We conclude that the FOD approach is well suited to small area estimation.

In the European context where fiscal consolidation is required in many countries, tax non-compliance behaviour becomes a very relevant issue for governments and policy makers. In this paper, we aim at contributing to the assessment of tax non-compliance, by estimating individual measures of tax evasion, focusing on employment earnings for two countries, Denmark and Estonia. Additionally, we simulate two different scenarios - a "true world" where some individuals underreport their income to the tax authorities and a "perfect world" where everyone reports truthfully their incomes - in the European microsimulation model EUROMOD, allowing us to obtain the fiscal and distributional effects of taking into account evaded employment income. Furthermore, the Estonian country case allows us to illustrate the importance of linking survey and administrative data not only to accurately estimate tax evasion, but also to correct survey income amounts for measurement error. Preliminary findings indicate that taking into account non-reported incomes has non-negligible fiscal and distributional effects when these are taken into account to compute tax liabilities and benefits, even in a country where estimated non-reported income represent a low percentage of earnings, such as Denmark.