Poverty trends during two recessions and two recoveries: lessons from Sweden 1991–2013

We study cross-sectional and long-term poverty in Sweden over a period spanning two recessions, and discuss changes in the policy context. We find large increases in absolute poverty and deprivation during the 1990’s recession but much smaller increases in 2008-2010. While increases in non-employment contributed to increasing poverty in the 1990’s, the temporary poverty increase 2008-2010 was entirely due to growing poverty among non-employed. Relative poverty has increased with little variation across business cycles. Outflow from poverty and long-term poverty respond quickly to macro-economic recovery, but around one percent of the working-aged are quite resistant to such improvements

Grid computing for social science

No abstract available

Using occupation-based social classifications

Occupation-based social classifications are important social indicators, but are easily misunderstood. Using survey data from the UK and Sweden, we summarize the empirical relations between a number of alternative occupation-based social classifications. Results indicate similarity between most measures, though there are often quite considerable differences in the properties of related classifications according to the level of detail at which they have been operationalized (such as the number of categories). While these findings may seem unsurprising, they are in conflict with canonical theoretical interpretations attributed to occupation-based measures, where the level of detail is often overlooked, whereas the concepts associated with different measures are emphasized

Lifespan variation by occupational class: compression or stagnation over time

Cross-sectional analyses of adult lifespan variation have found an inverse association between socioeconomic position and lifespan variation, but the trends by social class are unknown. We investigated trends in lifespan variation over four decades (1971–2010) by occupational social class (manual, lower nonmanual, upper nonmanual, other) using Finnish register data. We performed age and cause-of-death decompositions of lifespan variation for each sex (a) by occupational class over time and (b) between occupational classes at a shared level of life expectancy. Although life expectancy increased in all classes, lifespan variation was stable among manual workers and decreased only among nonmanual classes. These differences were caused by early-adult mortality: older-age lifespan variation declined for all the classes, but variation in early-adult mortality increased for all classes except the highest. The manual class’s high and stagnant lifespan variation was driven by declines in circulatory diseases that were equally spread over early mortality-compressing and older mortality-expanding ages, as well as by high early-adult mortality from external causes. Results were similar for men and women. The results of this study, which is the first to document trends in lifespan variation by social class, suggest that mortality compression is compatible with increasing life expectancy but currently achieved only by higher occupational classes