Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the relationship between regional or 'contextual' poverty, income inequality and unemployment and individual political participation in the mid-1990s for the following Western European countries: Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. This research is based on the notion that there are 'concentration effects' of poverty and unemployment that negatively affect the regional networks and structures facilitating individual political and economic participation (see Wilson, 1987; Cohen and Dawson, 1993). In exploring this connection, I construct regional poverty rates and inequality scores (the ratio of household income at the ninetieth and the tenth percentiles of the distribution) for these countries by aggregating the individual-level data made available through the efforts of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). Regional unemployment figures are from Eurostat (2000). I predict individual political participation in national elections and in the 1994 European Parliamentary election in a binary logistic regression analysis controlling for age, education, gender, individual household income and individual unemployment using data from the Eurobarometer (1994). I find evidence that individuals are less likely to vote in regions with higher levels of poverty and income inequality even beyond their individual economic and social circumstances. In sum, this research suggests that there are political consequences associated with regional economic distress that might threaten the maintenance of democracy and European enlargement in Europe.

This paper offers an overview of income inequality and government redistribution between the late 1960s and 2010 in 20 developed countries. Our primary data source is household-level income surveys available from the Luxembourg Income Study Database (LIS). These data allow us to measure overall redistribution; to explore whether redistribution has been achieved primarily through direct taxes or social transfers; to compare the redistributive effect of old-age pensions and transfers to those of working age; and to explore several approaches to second-order feedback effects whereby taxes and transfers affect private sector income. We find that there is substantial cross-national variation in overall fiscal redistribution and that transfers account for the majority of redistribution in the countries we examine. With respect to changes over time, we find that overall redistribution has increased steadily since the early 1970s in most countries and has largely, but not entirely, kept pace with a substantial growth of private sector inequality.

Objective. We offer an alternative to the conventional measure of government redistribution that seeks to address problems of second‐order effects whereby income guarantees arising from public pensions make it less necessary for people to save for their retirement, rendering the "pregovernment" counterfactual to the observed postgovernment distribution unrealistic.Method. We use household‐level data from the Luxembourg Income Study to calculate an alternative measure of government redistribution that includes public‐sector pensions in "pregovernment" income alongside private‐sector pensions, on the assumption that each represents a claim on future income.Results. Employing the alternative method described in the article results in lower values for redistribution than the conventional measure.Conclusion. We suggest that our alternative method be used in addition to the conventional method in cross‐national research, in an effort to achieve a more complete understanding of government redistribution in the developed countries.

The traditional way of measuring government redistribution across countries is to compare the income households report that they receive from private sources with the income they receive after government transfers have been added and taxes and social insurance contributions deducted. Unfortunately, this conventional measure does not capture 'second order' effects whereby income guarantees arising from public pensions make it less necessary for people to save for their retirement, rendering the 'pre-government' counterfactual to the observed post-government distribution unrealistic. In addressing this problem, we offer an alternative to the conventional direct redistribution measure that considers claims to future income generated by both the public and the private sectors. Data have been calculated for 51 country-years from household income surveys available from the Luxembourg Income Study.