Suchergebnisse

In the presence of anti-epidemic restrictions, telework has become widespread around the world. This trend has provoked numerous debates on how efficient and convenient work from home is compared to that performed on special premises. However, work from home is not the only non-standard form of work activity. This study explores different types of workplace — locations and premises where workers perform their duties. Empirical analysis exploits microdata from "The time use survey" conducted by the Russian Statistical Agency in 2019. The survey identifies six types of work: on standard premises (offices or shop-floors), telework, homebased work, work performed in special facility (like kiosks, pavilions, gas filling stations, garages, etc.), in open air facilities (like construction sites or agricultural fields), or transportation/delivery services. These types of workplace differ in terms of employment and working conditions, work safety and commuting time, potentially contributing to social stratification. Thus, heterogeneity in "workplaces" contributes to social stratification, affects distribution of economic benefits and health risks and can be an additional measure of labor market inequality.

The recent economic and sociological literature pays a lot of attention to the issue of income inequality and to preferences for the redistribution. This paper discusses various approaches which pretend to explain what shapes perceptions of income inequality and finally affects preferences for the redistribution. If people in a given country perceive the level of income inequality as too high and unacceptable, they may support various redistributive policies and measures. However, this does not always happen. Perceptions of inequality and preferences for redistribution vary across countries as well as across individuals within countries. The paper overviews existing theoretical and empirical studies and provides their synthesis. In its empirical section, the paper tests a few most frequently mentioned hypotheses. For this, it uses large cross-country data sets from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and the European Social Survey (ESS) covering 34 and 25 countries, respectively. One of the main findings is that the public attitude towards inequality depends little on the actual level of inequality. What appears to be more important is whether the society provides functioning escalators to individuals for moving up the socio-economic ladder and whether individuals have recently experienced actual upward mobility. What also matters is whether this mobility is considered by public fair and legitimate. This means that is driven by hard work (and is meritocratic) but not by pure luck, or connections, or bribes (is structural). Therefore, the perception of inequality and redistributive demands are largely shaped by dominant views on fairness, social mobility and trust to the state. If individuals see for themselves feasible prospects for advancement and can achieve more in a way they consider fair, they are more likely to tolerate the income inequality and their redistributive claims tend to become weaker. This brings to the forefront the issue of quality of state institutions and institutional environment. The corruption as a measure of the institutional quality emerges a very strong predictor for larger support to redistributive policies.

Educational attainment and vocational training are important components of the human capital and they both show large cross-country variation. Large differences in vocational training between countries have two major interconnected explanations. The first one deals with structural differences in technological structure of labour demand, while the second one associates incidence of on-the-job training with institutional environment fertile for high tech developments.

Using the cross-country ESS (2008) data file, the author explores welfare attitudes of population of European countries, the demand for social policy, the willingness to participate in its financing, and the difference between these two parameters. The paper argues that expectations associated with social policy and willingness to accept higher taxation in order to receive more benefits as well as the gap between these two depend on institutional characteristics of the countries that constitute the factors of fiscal illusion. Poor institutions and the lack of transparency in fiscal and social policies feed corruption and fiscal illusion, therefore generating misperceptions and free rider behavior.

In the present article, with use of mathematical methods, the wages dynamics in OECD countries and in Russia in 2000–2009 is demonstrated; its connection with GDP changes is examined in the context of other labor market quantitative indices; the influence of labor market institutes on the rates of increase in wages during crisis is considered. The explanation of reasons for cross-country diversity in real wages dynamics is given. It is concluded, that in the recession period the wages in most countries preserved the katabasis rigidity.

The COVID-19 pandemic that engulfed the world in early 2020 did not make an exception for anyone. However, the degree of its impact on countries and social groups varies significantly. This article discusses several factors that can shape these differences, focusing specifically on the correlation between the excess mortality during 2020–2021 and various dimensions of social vulnerability, specifically the ones that are caused by unprotected or low pay employment, self-employment, and higher exposure to work-related social contacts. In order to measure these factors, this study relies on the analysis of the Gini coefficient and some other indices that reflect the specifics of labour markets and social vulnerabilities. The assessment is based on data provided by Eurofound, Eurobarometer, the World Bank and OECD Statistics. The correlation between inequality/vulnerability and excess mortality rates can be explained by higher exposure of vulnerable social groups to the infection and their lower access to high quality healthcare. The econometric analysis supports the hypothesis that the cross-country variation in excess mortality rates during the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemics can be partially explained by socioeconomic characteristics of countries in the sample. Vulnerable groups are not only more exposed to health-related risks due to the pandemics but are also less likely to be vaccinated. Larger shares of the vulnerable groups and lower vaccination rates are associated with higher excess mortality rates conditional upon country characteristics such as GDP per capita, the share of university graduates and healthcare expenditures, as well as age structure. This relationship holds for different variables used, different country samples and data sets.

All social and economic aspects of human life can be described by statistical data that claims to be objective. Still, people hold a distinctive view of the world, differing widely from the official one. Statistics is the key means to make management decisions. It helps to adopt a balanced and responsible approach to determining priorities for the social development strategy. However, those steps taken by the government that do not correspond with subjective perception and expectations might be insufficient to improve the lives of the people. Individuals act and react according to their own views. Their behavior is key to understanding crucial social issues; it is also a reference point for social policies which might be more accurate than objective criteria. Discrepancies between academic and ordinary cognition are attributed to limited objective (statistical) data as well as the specific nature of individual perception of reality. In the first part of this paper, based on the findings of international research and public opinion polls (ESS, Ipsos MORI, Perils of Perception), the authors establish that perceptions dominant in the public mind are misaligned compared to conventional statistical evaluation. They also analyze the scale of misalignment variations in several countries. The second and third parts of the article examine the reasons behind these discrepancies. Having scrutinized the statistical "objectivity" of social and economic phenomena such as inflation, unemployment, migration and their reflection in the public mind, the authors conclude that objective indicators are not the ultimate truth. Their impartiality is based on data acquisition and calculations detailed in the general theory of statistics as well as generalized conventional definitions. Although subjective variables have been introduced into this field in recent times, the vast majority of statistical indices have not taken public opinion into account. The reality, however, is more complex and multifaceted, it does not fit into levelized indicators. Conversely, subjective public views do not appear out of thin air. They are largely affected by the trust in government institutions, influenced by ideologies and systems of value and cemented by the views of a reference group and media. These findings might help to fine-tune social policies and explain voting behavior.

Using different cross-country data sets and simple econometric techniques we study public attitudes towards the police. More positive attitudes are more likely to emerge in the countries that have better functioning democratic institutions, less prone to corruption but enjoy more transparent and accountable police activity. This has a stronger impact on the public opinion (trust and attitudes) than objective crime rates or density of policemen. Citizens tend to trust more in those (policemen) with whom they share common values and can have some control over. The latter is a function of democracy. In authoritarian countries — "police states" — this tendency may not work directly. When we move from semi-authoritarian countries to openly authoritarian ones the trust in the police measured by surveys can also rise. As a result, the trust appears to be U-shaped along the quality of government axis. This phenomenon can be explained with two simple facts. First, publicly spread information concerning police activity in authoritarian countries is strongly controlled; second, the police itself is better controlled by authoritarian regimes which are afraid of dangerous (for them) erosion of this institution.

The paper is based on representative population surveys conducted in various countries of Europe, Asia and North America and discusses cross-country variation in populations subjective perceptions of risk of unemployment. This risk is measured by directly asking respondents whether they fear losing their job and to what degree. The paper shows that the strength of the fear varies significantly across countries in the sample as well as across various subgroups of population within the countries. Higher unemployment strengthens the fear but country-specific behavioral reactions induced by the fear may differ. Population in the "old" capitalist countries seems to react differently than in the transition countries while in the former case the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian countries also demonstrate different patterns.

Our study explores subjective inequality using two different measures. The first one is agreement with the statement that the gap between the rich and the poor is large. The second one is an emotional reaction to this gap in terms of intensity of anger. Using data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) for 2019, we show that these measures, though correlated, are not duplicates. The first finding is that respondents are more likely to state significant gaps than to admit a negative emotion related to this fact. The second finding is that these dimensions of subjective inequality are associated with different behavioral reactions. Agreeing that the income gaps are too large correlates with demand for redistribution more strongly than the anger does. As to being angry on the inequality, it is more strongly associated with perception of potential conflicts between the poor and the rich. In other words, even agreeing that income inequality is high many individuals do not internalize it and do not accept it as a problem that touches their emotional health.

Poverty is a phenomenon of a societary kind, one of those global challenges that the world community will attempt to meet for more than a decade. That is why it is so important to understand, what the poverty presents in the era of globalization, what will happen to it in the near term. Will its extent change, and if so – which way? The discussion of these particular issues form the basis for this article.