Brian Nolan

• Professor (Full) at University of Oxford

While there is renewed interest in earnings differentials between social classes, the contribution of social class to overall earnings inequality across countries and net of compositional effects remains largely uncharted territory. This paper uses data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions to assess earnings differenti...

In this chapter we document some implications of the limitations of the ESeC measure in EU-SILC for the estimated size of social class and the monitoring of poverty by social class from a comparative perspective.

In striking contrast to the notion that democracy is under threat because 'the middle' has been 'squeezed' over recent decades, Iversen and Soskice (2019) in their book, Democracy and Prosperity, present an optimistic account about the future of democracy. We examine their key assumption that the symbiosis between democracy and advanced capitalism...

In sociology and political science, social class is among the most commonly used indicators of command over economic resources. However, we know relatively little about how the nature of the relationship between social class and earnings varies across countries. In this paper, we utilize data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living...

Although it is heartening to see wealth inequality being taken seriously, key concepts are often muddled, including the distinction between income and wealth, what is included in "wealth", and facts about wealth distributions. This chapter highlights issues that arise in making ideas and facts about wealth inequality precise, and employs newly-avai...

Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in the classical sense, rejecting any sub-field labelling of his interests and expertise, and he made contributions right across econ...

This paper explores the incidence of job loss by wage level during the Great Recession, using data for Ireland. Ireland experienced a particularly pronounced decline in employment by international and historical standards, which makes it a valuable case study. Using EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data, our analysis reveals that...

The aim of this chapter is to highlight some key aspects of recent economic research on the welfare state and antipoverty policy in rich countries and to explore their implications. We begin with the conceptualization and measurement of poverty before sketching out some core features and approaches to the welfare state and antipoverty policies. We...

Ireland is one of the countries most severely affected by the Great Recession. National income fell by more than 10 per cent between 2007 and 2012, as a result of the bursting of a remarkable property bubble, an exceptionally severe banking crisis, and deep fiscal adjustment. This paper examines the income distribution consequences of the recession...

This paper is prepared as a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution, Volume 2 (edited by A. B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Elsevier-North Holland, forthcoming). Like the other chapters in the volume (and its predecessor), the aim is to provide a comprehensive review of a particular area of research. The aim of this chapter is to highlight...

Between 2009 and 2011, data were collected under the first wave of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Over 8,500 people aged 50 and over and living in Ireland were interviewed on a wide range of topics covering socioeconomic and health issues. Our primary goals in this paper are (a) to present details on two of the variables which will...

Addresses issues about inequality widely debated in the media in recent years. Advances academic research in the field by in-depth analysis of country exeriences. Provides in-depth analysis of key issues in the social sciences across a range of disciplines. Provides detailed background and information about inequality experiences and impacts in ind...

Captures and investigates inequality trends in income, wealth, education, and the labour market. Provides detailed information on inequality experiences across 30 countries examining trends over 30 years. Combines statistically sophisticated comparative analysis with evidence from individual countries experiences. Complements the volume 'Changing I...

La réduction de la pauvreté et de l'exclusion sociale est un des objectifs de la stratégie 2020 de l'Union européenne. Le bien fondé et le succès d'une telle politique nécessitent le choix d'indicateurs pertinents permettant non seulement de saisir les écarts de pauvreté entre pays mais également d'identifier, pour chaque pays, les groupes d'indivi...

La réduction de la pauvreté et de l'exclusion sociale est un des objectifs de la stratégie 2020 de l'Union européenne. Le bien fondé et le succès d'une telle politique nécessitent le choix d'indicateurs pertinents permettant non seulement de saisir les écarts de pau‑ vreté entre pays mais également d'identifier, pour chaque pays, les groupes d'indi...

As economic inequality in Europe has continued to rise, it has become the subject of increasing academic attention. What are the drivers of inequality? How does it affect intergenerational economic and social mobility? At what point does inequality become a drag on economic growth or a threat to social order? What economic policy tools are availabl...

This publication contains current research and analysis on a broad range of issues topical to Australia's social policy and its administration.

The European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2005 wave includes a special module on inter-generational transmission of poverty. In addition to the standard data relating to income and material deprivation, information relating to parental background and childhood circumstances was collected for all household members aged...

This chapter describes the main concepts of social inclusion used by the European Commission and EU countries in the context of the social open method of coordination (OMC). The discussion aims to bring out the value of going beyond purely income-based measures of poverty to include other dimensions, which is what the indicators adopted for monitor...

This working paper focuses on the role of minimum wages, in conjunction with tax and benefit policies, in protecting workers against financial poverty. It covers 20 European countries with a national minimum wage and three US States (New Jersey, Nebraska and Texas). It is shown that only for single persons and only in certain countries do net incom...

Ireland offers a valuable case study of the evolution of wage inequality in a period of exceptional growth in output, employment and incomes from 1994 to 2007. We find that dispersion in hourly wages across all employees fell sharply to 2000, before increasing though much less sharply to 2007. Returns to both education and work experience declined...

We explore the potential of data from EU‐SILC (‘Statistics on Income and Living Conditions’) for the enlarged European Union for the study of low pay and its relationship to household poverty and vulnerability. Limitations of the earnings data currently available mean the analysis covers only 14 of these countries. For employees who are not low pai...

As awareness of the limitations of relying solely on income to measure poverty and social exclusion has become more widespread, attention has been increasingly focused on multi-dimensional approaches. To date efforts to measure multidimensional poverty and social exclusion in rich countries have been predominantly ad hoc and have relied on data tha...

Dans cet article, nous cherchons a savoir si la pauvrete au travail est en hausse et si, du point de vue de la pauvrete, il convient de s’inquieter d’une augmentation eventuelle des emplois faiblement remuneres. En nous fondant sur les donnees de l’enquete EU-SILC, nous demontrons que le lien entre les emplois faiblement remuneres et la pauvrete au...

Working-age households where no-one is in work have become an increasing focus of policy concern even before the economic crisis, and the European Union (EU) has included household joblessness in its new poverty reduction target for 2020. This paper focuses on the variation across EU countries in the prevalence of household joblessness and its impa...

Housing is an important aspect of living standards and quality of life for older persons, but the housing-related problems they may face encompass rather different circumstances, relating to the condition of the dwelling, how well equipped it is, whether housing costs represent a serious burden, and whether the neighbourhood environment is problema...

Research on poverty in rich countries relies primarily on household income to capture living standards and distinguish those in poverty, and this is also true of official poverty measurement and monitoring. However, awareness of the limitations of income has been heightening interest in the role that non-monetary measures of deprivation can play. T...

Poverty alleviation is a central aim of economic and social policy, and yet there is no consensus about what poverty means or how it is best measured. Often, the households below an income poverty line are counted as poor, but there may be no firm basis for concentrating on that particular income level. There may also be wide variations among the h...

This paper addresses the key issue for the GINI project of how best to approach the measurement of income inequality and wage inequality to enhance comparability across different studies. It focuses fi rst on income inequality, dealing with the defi nition of income, the income recipient unit, and the unit of analysis. The summary measures used to ca...

As part of its 2020 Strategy adopted in 2010, the EU has set a number of headline targets including one for poverty reduction over the next decade. This is a major development in the role accorded to social inclusion in the EU, and thus very important at the level of principle. However, the specific way the target itself has been framed, and the im...

An important aspect of the impact of the economic crisis is how pay in the public sector responds - in the face not only of the evolution of pay in the private sector, but also extreme pressure on public spending (of which pay is a very large proportion) as fiscal deficits soar. What are the effects on the income distribution of cutting public sect...

The economic crisis impacts directly on the distribution of income via unemployment and private sector wages, but the way policy responds in seeking to control soaring fiscal deficits is also central to its distributional consequences. Having sketched out the background in terms of inequality trends during Ireland’s boom and the channels through wh...

Data from the Irish Census of Industrial Production are used to illuminate changes in the distribution of earnings from 1937 to 1968, an important period in Irish economic history, relevant to debates about globalization and inequality. Between the late 1930s and mid-1950s there was a greater compression of earnings than in the US's ‘great compress...

Non-monetary indicators of deprivation are now widely used in studying poverty in Europe. While measuring financial resources remains central, having reliable information about material deprivation adds to the ability to capture poverty and social exclusion. Non-monetary indicators can help improve the identification of those experiencing poverty a...

The international financial crisis manifests itself in Ireland not only as a crisis of the banking system, but also as a major fiscal crisis, aggravated by years of soft revenue policy and a housing bubble that has burst spectacularly. The severe drop in economic output results in a crisis of employment and a definitive end to the ‘Celtic Tiger’ er...

Child poverty is firmly on the policy agenda in many OECD countries. One of the main issues in the debate is the appropriate balance between the so-called “benefits strategy” (increasing the adequacy of benefits for low-income families with children) and the so-called “work strategy” (promoting policies to increase employment among poor families)....

Child poverty is firmly on the policy agenda in many OECD countries. One of the main issues in the debate is the appropriate balance between the so-called “benefits strategy” (increasing the adequacy of benefits for low-income families with children) and the so-called “work strategy” (promoting policies to increase employment among poor families)....

This paper briefly summarises the evidence that Ireland has a relatively high level of income inequality, which has been rather stable over time and reflects institutional legacies and choices made in the past. A comparative and over time perspective suggests that modest reductions in income inequality are achievable within the framework of Ireland...

This paper, using data from the 2006 Irish Census, provides evidence of the structural disadvantage of women, relative to men, workers -and of the structural advantage of Irish speaking, relative to non-speaking, workers -in Ireland's labour market with advantage and disadvantage being defined in terms of occupational outcomes. The former finding i...

This paper, using data from the 2006 Irish Census, provides evidence of the structural advantage of Irish speaking, relative to non-speaking workers in Ireland's labour market with advantage and disadvantage being defined in terms of occupational outcomes. To the best of our knowledge there has been no systematic investigation of any advantage enjo...

This paper describes the main concepts of social inclusion used by the European Commission and EU countries in the context of the social open method of coordination (OMC). The discussion aims to bring out the value of going beyond purely income-based measures of poverty to include other dimensions, which is what the indicators adopted for monitorin...

This paper uses new data from EU-SILC for twenty-six European countries to examine the structure and distribution of material deprivation in the enlarged EU. We identify three distinct dimensions of material deprivation relating to consumption, household facilities and neighbourhood environment, and construct indices of these dimensions for each co...

Health plays a central role in people’s perceptions of their quality of life, and access to good health care is a key ingredient in an overall sense of security and well-being. This chapter examines how health and health care have evolved over the course of Ireland’s economic boom. Media coverage highlights the negatives: increasing suicide, road d...

The determinants of general practitioner (GP) visiting patterns in Ireland, in particular the role of eligibility for free GP care, are examined using microdata from a nationally representative survey of the population in 2001. Whereas most studies find that need factors such as age and health status are most important in determining GP visiting ra...

The link between income and subjective satisfaction with one’s financial situation is explored in this paper using a panel analysis of 1,998 individuals tracked through the course of the boom period in Ireland, 1994-2001. A dynamic ordered probit model which incorporates state dependence and controls for correlated individual effects and the initia...

The development of material deprivation indicators at EU level has become a priority for Eurostat. Further attention will be focused on this issue by the inclusion in the 2009 round of EU-SILC of a special module on material deprivation. However, considerable disagreement seems to exist as to whether it is possible to construct indices that are sat...

As the extent of disability increases in society, there is an increasing need to understand its consequences for many aspects of social inclusion. Using the Living in Ireland Survey 1995-2001 (n=2727 adults), we provide a rigorous analysis of the transitions into and out of disability and the related consequences for various characteristics of soci...

As the extent of disability increases in society, there is an increasing need to understand related consequences in many aspects of social inclusion. In this paper, we provide a rigorous analysis of the transitions into and out of disability and the related consequences for employment. We compare the effect of onset, exit and persistent disability...

With the arrival of economic boom in Ireland from 1994 onwards, housing has surfaced both as a social policy and macro-economic concern. The social policy concern is that housing demand, fuelled by rising incomes, low interest rates and demographic growth, has raced ahead of supply and has given rise to house price increases, affordability pressure...

This book has sought to provide an analysis of the challenges facing the Social Inclusion Process and how it can be taken forward, in a context in which the interdependence of the European Union's economic, employment, social, and environmental goals is to the fore. The importance of ensuring close links between the Social Protection and Social Inc...

This chapter presents a brief historical account of the development of EU cooperation in social policy from the Treaty of Rome to the re-focused Lisbon Strategy post-March 2005, and the adoption of new working arrangements and revised objectives for the Open Method of Coordination on social protection and social inclusion in March 2006, leading up...

This chapter contributes to the dynamic process of developing the common social indicators, in the context of Enlargement; a new EU data source (EUSILC) with a new income concept; a streamlined OMC on social protection and social inclusion; and new policy concerns. It emphasises the development of non-income-related indicators on deprivation, housi...

Teenage parenthood is recognised as a significant disadvantage in western industrialised nations. It has been found to increase the likelihood of poverty and reinforce inequalities. This book explores the links between welfare state provision and teenage reproductive behaviour across a range of countries with differing welfare regimes.

The link between income and subjective satisfaction with one’s financial situation is explored in this paper using a panel analysis of 4,000 individuals tracked through the course of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom period, 1994-2001. The impact of the level of individual and household income, the time-path of income and the impact of reference group income...

In Ireland, the public health system has a symbiotic relationship with private health insurance not seen in other European countries. Everyone has entitlement to public hospital care from the state, but half the population now pay for private health insurance. The insured avail of “private” health care, much of it delivered in public hospitals, and...

The link between income and subjective satisfaction with one’s financial situation is explored in this paper using a panel analysis of 4,000 individuals tracked through the course of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom period, 1994-2001. The impact of the level of individual and household income, the time-path of income and the impact of reference group income...

In this paper we seek to make use of the newly available Irish component of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) in order to develop a measure of consistent poverty that overcomes some of the difficulties associated with the original indicators employed as targets in the Irish National Anti-Poverty Strategy. Our a...

In April 2000 the Irish government introduced a national minimum wage of IR£4.40 (&U20AC;5.58) an hour. We use data from a specifically designed survey of firms to estimate the employment effects of this change. Employment growth among firms with low-wage workers prior to the legislation was no different from that of firms not affected by the legis...

In this paper we evaluate trends in levels of economic vulnerability in Ireland during the period 1994-2001. We also document changes in the consequences of such vulnerability for social exclusion and in the social demographic factors with which it is associated. Over time there was a sharp decline in economic vulnerability. Furthermore, the degree...

Protecting children from the sharpest edges of poverty during their years of growth and formation is both the mark of a civilized society and a means of addressing some of the evident problems that affect the. quality of life in the economically developed nations. The proportion of children living in poverty has risen in a majority of the world's d...

There are concerns that the unprecedented economic boom which Ireland experienced in the second half of the 1990s has raised only some living standards and has widened income gaps. This paper analyzes Ireland's income distribution in comparative perspective, to understand how Ireland's distribution changed and how it compares to other rich countrie...

Expenditure on medical treatment has tended to rise as a proportion of national income throughout the European Union. A particular concern is that, with an ageing population, the pressures on health expenditure will increase further. The aim of this particular work package is to describe and model health and morbidity, and the associated use of hea...

In Ireland, approximately 30% of the population receive free GP services (medical card patients) while the remainder (private patients) must pay for each visit. In 1989, the manner in which GPs were reimbursed by the State for their medical card patients was changed from fee-for-service to capitation while private patients continued to pay on a fee...

This paper uses harmonized data for the member states of the European Union to analyse household income packaging from a ‘welfare regimes’ perspective. Using data from the third wave of the ECHP, it looks at how the role of welfare transfers in the income package varies across countries and welfare regimes, and assesses whether this is consistent w...

This chapter considers the challenge of advancing the Social Inclusion Process in the context of the re-focused Lisbon Strategy, and of embedding the Process in domestic policies and implementing a social-inclusion mainstreaming through establishing a scheme of systematic policy assessments at EU, national, and sub-national levels. It proposes the...

Over the past decade or so the context in which Irelands complex mix of public and private health care operates has changed radically, as the numbers purchasing health insurance have soared and the nature of the insurance market has changed in response to EU regulations. This has widened the divide between those with and without health insurance, a...

The extent to which the cost of obtaining health care influences the utilisation of GP and other health services is a frequently analysed topic. A key issue concerns the extent to which access to private health insurance and/or eligibility for free public health services results in differences in utilisation that cannot be explained by differences...

A variety of recent reports and strategy documents have highlighted the intimidating range of challenges facing Ireland-s health system as it seeks to improve its performance. In this short paper we cannot deal with these in any comprehensive fashion, but instead focus on three specific issues. First, we illustrate the value of trying to benchmark...

Previous research has suggested that hidden income arising from home ownership has important consequences for poverty measurement as it tends to favour certain low income groups, especially the elderly, and to have a moderating effect on poverty rates in countries with high levels of home ownership. This article explores both methodological and sub...

In December 2001, the Laeken European Council adopted a set of commonly agreed and defined indicators for social inclusion. These should play a central role in monitoring the performance of Member States in making progress towards the key EU objectives in this area set by the Nice European Council in 2000, and represent a major step forward in the...

This paper analyses the extent of equity of health service delivery across the income distribution in Ireland – that is the extent to which there is equal treatment for equal need irrespective of income. We find that almost all services, apart from dental and optician services, are used more by those at the lower end of the income distribution, but...

The extent and nature of participation in the labour market by persons affected by disability has a multitude of direct and indirect effects on their living standards and quality of life, and so is a critical area for investigation and policy concern. This paper seeks to quantify the effects of disability on labour force participation in Ireland fo...

This paper investigates inter-industry wage differentials in Ireland, taking advantage of access to a dataset that is uniquely suitable for this purpose, the 1996 Structure of Earnings Survey. This allows us to measure not simply overall differentials in the average wage across sectors, but also the extent to which these are associated with a range...

Although relative income poverty rates vary from year to year, the rankings of different industrialised countries according to these poverty measures tend to be rather stable. Ireland is consistently among a group of countries with relative income poverty rates considerably above the European Union average (though not as high as the USA). This has...