Our journey to net zero: Understanding household and community participation in the UK’s transition to a greener future

Our new report warns the government’s existing net zero transition policies are likely to make the poor poorer, and push struggling communities further into deprivation and exclusion. This research – which was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and developed with the University of Leeds, University of York and Trinity College Dublin – finds the poorest 40% of households at risk of falling into ‘transition poverty’. It calls for public involvement in a fair and inclusive net zero strategy to mitigate this, and outlines eight key policy recommendations

Dual-Earner Family Policies at Work for Single-Parent Families

Family dynamics are changing and single-parent families are becoming more common across countries. In their flagship report “Progress of the World’s Women, 2019–2020,” UN Women (2019) demonstrated that, contrary to popular belief, couples with children do not constitute a majority of all families, but rather there are many different types of families. Single parenthood is considered a “new social risk” in poverty and inequality (Bonoli, 2013). Therefore, policy makers and legislators have designed targeted policy specifically for single parents, such as targeted child benefits to single parents. In addition, legislation and social policy have been designed and implemented specifically for single parents, such as child support and family law such as child custody and shared residence. This study takes a different approach, based on the universalist argument that without adequate social protection that benefits all families, those families that are more vulnerable are often hit the hardest. We focus on family policies, and specifically we examine whether and to what extent single parents benefit from the same family policies that are available to all families with children

Money Matters: a Nuanced Approach to Understanding the Relationship between Household Income and Child Subjective Well-Being

This paper examines the links between household income and child subjective well-being. Previous studies produce contradictory findings: qualitative investigations indicate a strong relationship which is elusive in quantitative studies. I hypothesise that the reason for this discrepancy is that household-level measures of child poverty do not adequately capture children’s active roles in forming views on their material needs, assessing their comparative socio-economic status, and contributing to processes and outcomes of intra-household resource sharing. Thus a relationship between household income and subjective well-being is hypothesised to exist, but to be mediated by factors including (among others) material deprivation, perceptions of fairness in the processes and outcomes of intra-household allocation, and subjective material well-being. Drawing on survey data from a sample of 1010 parent-child (aged 10–16) pairs in England, structural equation modelling is used to examine these potential mediating effects. Findings indicate that income has a complex role to play in child subjective well-being, with significant direct and indirect associations. Income, deprivation, perceptions of the fairness of intra-household allocation processes and outcomes, and subjective material well-being are all significantly interrelated and are all predictors of subjective well-being. The complex nature of these relationships illustrates the multi-dimensional nature of child poverty and its impacts. Household income is an important factor; but alone it cannot capture children’s active roles in assessing their needs and material living conditions. This confirms the importance of considering children’s agency in understandings of child poverty and material well-being, and including their reports in studies of child poverty and intra-household allocation

The gender pay gap in the Australian private sector: is selection relevant across the earnings distribution?

We use quantile regression and counterfactual decomposition methods to explore gender gaps across the earning distribution for a sample of full-time employees in the Australian private sector. Significant evidence of a self-selection effect for the women into full-time employment (or of components of self-selection related to observable or unobservable characteristics) is, interestingly, not found to be relevant in the Australian context. Substantial gender earnings gaps (and glass ceilings) are established, however, with these earnings gaps found to be predominantly related to the women receiving lower returns to their observable characteristics than the men

The gender pay gap in the Australian private sector: is selection relevant across the earnings distribution?

We use quantile regression and counterfactual decomposition methods to explore gender gaps across the earning distribution for a sample of full-time employees in the Australian private sector. Significant evidence of a self-selection effect for the women into full-time employment (or of components of self-selection related to observable or unobservable characteristics) is, interestingly, not found to be relevant in the Australian context. Substantial gender earnings gaps (and glass ceilings) are established, however, with these earnings gaps found to be predominantly related to the women receiving lower returns to their observable characteristics than the men

Children of austerity impact of the great recession on child poverty in rich countries

Through 11 diverse country case studies (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States), this volume describes the evolution of child poverty and material well-being during ..