Journal of Economic Inequality最新文献

This paper provides evidence on the impact of major epidemics from the past two decades on income distribution. The pandemics in our sample, even though much smaller in scale than COVID-19, have led to increases in the Gini coefficient, raised the income share of higher-income deciles, and lowered the employment-to-population ratio for those with basic education compared to those with higher education. We provide some evidence that the distributional consequences from the current pandemic may be larger than those flowing from the historical pandemics in our sample, and larger than those following typical recessions and financial crises.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10888-022-09540-y.

This paper provides novel evidence on the importance of the phenomenon of poverty and its heterogeneity across European countries. We analyze the determinants of poverty in Europe and their evolution over time by disentangling the role of genuine state dependence and heterogeneity. We apply alternative dynamic probit models accounting for endogenous initial conditions and correlated random effects to the pre-Great Recession period of 2005-2008 and the post- Great Recession period of 2015-2018 using EU-SILC longitudinal datasets for a sample of European countries in order to estimate genuine state dependence and uncover the role of observable and unobservable factors in determining the risk of poverty. Our findings suggest that the degree of genuine state dependence is relevant in Europe and that it increased slightly from pre- to post-Great Recession. This suggests that measures aimed at lifting individuals out of poverty, including cash transfers, have become even more important during the Europe 2020 decade. Our analysis also reveals that Europe is characterized by an increasing scarring effect of poverty, the trend of which has been exacerbated in the post-recession period. The analysis at the country level clarifies why the evolution of genuine state dependence was heterogeneous. While a clear pattern within macro-regions does not emerge, we find an association between country-level variation in genuine state dependence and some macroeconomic indicators. Finally, our results suggest that the protective role of higher education has diminished over time, while the role of employment stability and of childcare provision during early childhood has become even more important in the post-recession period.

We evaluate the COVID-19 resilience of a Continental welfare regime by nowcasting the implications of the shock and its associated policy responses on the distribution of household incomes over the whole of 2020. Our approach relies on a dynamic microsimulation modelling that combines a household income generation model estimated on the latest EU-SILC wave with novel nowcasting techniques to calibrate the simulations using external macro controls which reflect the macroeconomic climate during the crisis. We focus on Luxembourg, a country that introduced minor tweaks to the existing tax-benefit system, which has a strong social insurance focus that gave certainty during the crisis. We find the system was well-equipped ahead of the crisis to cushion household incomes against job losses. The income-support policy changes were effective in cushioning household incomes and mitigating an increase in income inequality, allowing average household disposable income and inequality levels to bounce back to pre-crisis levels in the last quarter of 2020. The share of labour incomes dropped, but was compensated by an increase in benefits, reflecting the cushioning effect of the transfer system. Overall market incomes dropped and became more unequal. Their disequalizing evolution was matched by an increase in redistribution, driven by an increase in the generosity of benefits and larger access to benefits. The nowcasting model is a "near" real-time analysis and decision support tool to monitor the recovery, scalable to other countries with high applicability for policymakers.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at doi:10.1007/s10888-021-09524-4.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1007/s10888-021-09499-2.].

This analysis makes use of economic forecasts for 2020 issued by the European Commission in Autumn 2019 and Spring 2020, and of a counterfactual under a no-policy change assumption, to analyse the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on EU households´ income. Additionally, our analysis assesses the cushioning effect of discretionary fiscal policy measures taken by the EU Member States. We find that the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to affect significantly households' disposable income in the EU, with lower income households being more severely hit. However, our results show that due to policy intervention, the impact of the crisis is expected to be similar to the one experienced during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. In detail, our results indicate that discretionary fiscal policy measures will play a significant cushioning role, reducing the size of the income loss (from -9.3% to -4.3% for the average equivalised disposable income), its regressivity and mitigating the poverty impact of the pandemic. We conclude that policy interventions are therefore instrumental in cushioning against the impact of the crisis on inequality and poverty.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10888-021-09485-8.

We analyse the UK policy response to Covid-19 and its impact on household incomes in the UK in April and May 2020, using microsimulation methods. We estimate that households lost a substantial share of their net income of 6.9% on average. But policies protected household incomes to a substantial degree: compared to the drop in net income, GDP per capita fell by 18.9% between the first and second quarter of 2020. Earnings subsidies (the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme) protected household finances and provided the main insurance mechanism during the crisis. Besides subsidies, Covid-related increases to state benefits, as well as the automatic stabilisers in the tax and benefit system, played an important role in mitigating the income losses. However, analysing the impact of a near-decade of austerity on the UK safety net, we find that, compared to 2011 policies, the 2020 pre-Covid tax-benefit policies would have been less effective in insuring incomes against the shocks. We also assess the potential distributional impact of introducing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) instead of the Covid emergency measures and find that a UBI would have supported the incomes of different vulnerable groups but would have provided less protection to those hit hardest by the labour market shocks.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10888-021-09491-w.

We here use panel data from the COME-HERE survey to track income inequality during COVID-19 in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Relative inequality in equivalent household disposable income among individuals changed in a hump-shaped way between January 2020 and January 2021, with an initial rise from January to May 2020 being more than reversed by September 2020. Absolute inequality also fell over this period. Due to the pandemic some households lost more than others, and government compensation schemes were targeted towards the poorest, implying that on average income differences decreased. Generalized Lorenz domination reveals that these distributive changes reduced welfare in Italy.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10888-021-09499-2.