Child poverty in English-speaking countries

The paper considers child poverty in rich English-speaking countries - the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland. Do all these countries stand out from other OECD countries for their levels of child poverty, as is sometimes assumed? And what policies have they adopted to address the problem? 'Poverty' is interpreted broadly and hence the available cross-national evidence on educational disadvantage and teenage births is considered alongside that on low household income. Likewise, discussion of policy initiatives ranges across a number of areas of government activity

Social Exclusion and Children: A European view for a US debate

The concept of social exclusion has been widely debated in Europe but its application to children has seen relatively little discussion. What could be meant by exclusion of children is the first main theme of the paper. Among other things, I consider the choice of reference group, the geographical dimension of exclusion, and the issue of who is responsible for any exclusion of children. The second main theme is the use of the concept of exclusion in the USA, where in contrast to Europe it has achieved little penetration to date. To assess whether there is fertile ground for discussion of social exclusion as it relates to children in the US, I discuss various features of US society and institutions including the measurement of poverty, analysis of children's living standards, state versus federal responsibilities, welfare reform and the emphasis on 'personal responsibility'.children, poverty, social exclusion

Private donations for international development

Charitable donations by private individuals and firms can help fund the Millennium Development Goals. What are the prospects for increasing donations for international development, whether from small scale donors, the super-rich (as in the recent gifts by Bill Gates and Ted Turner), or the corporate sector? The paper starts by reviewing how large are the sums currently given in OECD countries (including gifts of time) and the problems development has in competing with domestic causes. It then looks at possibilities for the future, including tax-deductions, the new 'global funds', corporate social responsibility and 'cause-related marketing', the use of the Internet, and long-term donor education

New directions in the analysis of inequality and poverty

Over the last four decades, academic and wider public interest in inequality and poverty has grown substantially. In this paper we address the question: what have been the major new directions in the analysis of inequality and poverty over the last thirty to forty years? We draw attention to developments under seven headings: changes in the extent of inequality and poverty, changes in the policy environment, increased scrutiny of the concepts of ‘poverty’ and inequality’ and the rise of multidimensional approaches, the use of longitudinal perspectives, an increase in availability of and access to data, developments in analytical methods of measurement, and developments in modelling

Private Donations for International Development

charities, philanthropy, volunteering, development finance

The effect of monitoring unemployment insurance recipients on unemployment duration: evidence from a field experiment

Programme administration is a relatively neglected issue in the analysis of disincentive effects of unemployment benefit systems. We investigate this issue with a field experiment in Hungary involving random assignment of benefit claimants to treatment and control groups. Treatment increases the monitoring of claims - claimants make more frequent visits to the employment office and face questioning about their search behaviour. Treatment has quite a large effect on durations on benefit of women aged 30 and over, while we find no effect for younger women or men.field experiment, monitoring, job search, unemployment insurance, Hungary

Educational achievement in English-speaking countries: do different surveys tell the same story?

International surveys of educational achievement are typically analysed in isolation from each other with no indication as to whether new results confirm or contradict those from earlier surveys. The paper pulls together results from four surveys to compare average levels of achievement, inequality of achievement, and the correlates of achievement (especially family background) among the six English-speaking OECD countries and between them and countries from Continental Europe. Our aim is to see whether a robust pattern emerges across the different sources: the Trends in International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS), the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA), the Programme of International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS)

The Implications of Exhausting Unemployment Insurance Entitlement in Hungary

The single most likely way to leave the unemployment insurance (UI) register in Hungary is not by getting a job but by running out of entitlement to benefit. This situation raises two questions. First, what are the implications of the cessation of UI for living standards? Second, does UI exhaustion have much effect on the probability of getting a job through increasing incentives to work? We investigate these issues with a survey of persons exhausting entitlement to UI in Summer 1995, paying special attention to the household circumstances of the unemployed and to the probabilities of claiming and being awarded means-tested assistance benefit.

The Informational Value of Job Search Data and the Dynamics of Search Behaviour: Evidence from Hungary

Labour market analysis places much emphasis on the concept of search. But there is insufficient empirical information on (a) the relationship between reported search and job-finding and (b) how search behaviour changes over a spell without work. We investigate these issues using a sample constructed from Hungarian labour force survey panel data of the flow from jobs to the state of "joblessness". The results on job exits call into question aspects of the standard international classification of "unemployment" and "out of the labour force". Transitions during joblessness in and out of search and the various categories of non-search are found to be only modest.

Is Child Welfare Converging in the European Union?

Discussion of convergence in the European Union in recent years has centred on macroeconomic indicators, in line with requirements for participation in the single currency. But it is convergence of living standards that is an ultimate goal of European Integration - the greater "economic and social cohesion" emphasized by the Treaty on Union. We assemble evidence on whether the well-being of one part of Europe's people, children, has been converging over the last two decades. We discuss methodological issues raised by measuring child welfare and its convergence in a group of countries, and then look in turn at trends in the economic well-being of children, mortality among children and young people, education, teenage fertility, and teenagers' own views of their life satisfaction. Evidence of convergence is mixed, and includes some trends of an unwelcome sort - convergence at a lower average level of welfare. The conclusions include comment on the need for more measurement of child well-being in Europe.