Income inequality and solidarity in Europe

This paper studies the relationship between income inequality, a macro-level characteristic, and solidarity of Europeans. To this aim, solidarity is defined as the ‘willingness to contribute to the welfare of other people’. We rely on a theoretical idea according to which feelings of solidarity are derived from both affective and calculating considerations – we derive competing hypotheses relating the extent of income inequality to these ‘underlying’ motivations for solidarity. Using data from the 1999 European Values Study (EVS), we apply multilevel analysis for 26 European countries. Controlling for household income and a range of macro-level characteristics, we find evidence that in more unequal countries people are less willing to take action to improve the living conditions of their fellow-countrymen. This is true for respondents living in both low- and high-income households. According to our theoretical framework, this finding suggests that, at least when measured in terms of ‘willingness to contribute to the welfare of other people’, feelings of solidarity seem to be influenced more strongly by affective, rather than by calculating considerations.     

Settler Welfare on Tropical Forest Frontiers in Latin America

Because of urgent concerns to protect tropical forests in Latin America, social science research on them has been generally ‘forest-centred.’ This forest-centred approach considers the people who inhabit the frontier as agents of land use change and forest conversion focusing on how their actions affect forest cover. Welfare indicators for forest frontier populations (income, education, health, access to basic services) are addressed only incidentally in terms of how they influence land use. ‘People’ centred research, which asks questions from the perspective of human welfare such as, ‘Are frontier settlers better off than they were before?’ or ‘What kind of socio-economic impacts does frontier life have on the people who live there?” and “How can their lives be improved?,” has been less common. As a result, we know much about the impacts, especially adverse impacts, which settler activity on the frontier has on forest cover but little about the impacts settlement has on settlers, themselves. This paper attempts to shift discussion towards these kinds of questions and a more people centred approach by reviewing existing research that directly addresses the welfare of settlers in tropical forest frontiers in Latin America. We also review research that touches on settler welfare by considering the concept of ‘sustainability’ on the forest frontier and stakes out a comprise position between ‘forest’ and ‘people’ centred questions or concerns. Settler welfare is defined primarily in economic terms. Household income, wealth, and agricultural productivity are interpreted a proxies for welfare in most cases. We also consider welfare in terms of access to basic services (health and education) and living conditions. We particularly consider how settler welfare indicators may change over time on the frontier. Tropical forests, defined as tropical, moist, broadleaf forests, are the main ecological setting of interest. These forests are generally the largest unoccupied areas in many Latin American countries and are thus, also the main ‘agricultural frontier’ or areas of new settlement by small farmers.     

The Value of Community Cohesion Among Vietnamese Students in Era of Urbanisation and Globalisation

The concept of community cohesion as applied in social research is about more than tackling social exclusion and also involves sustaining relationships of trust and neighbourly interaction. Community cohesion is a function of connections and relations maintained between individuals, groups and associations. It can be fostered through measures that build feelings of trust, safety and belonging between people and can form a basis for shared values and norms of behaviour. This concept originates from Emile Durkheim, who identified the interdependence between members of a social group who share solidarity, loyalties and responsibilities. In Vietnam, various idioms and proverbs about social solidarity and social cohesion express the significant role of community in the lives of individuals as well as an individual’s responsibilities towards the community. Recent public debates suggest that social cohesion is changing or fraying, especially among youth, owing to the social, economic and cultural impacts of globalisation and urbanisation. However, there is lack of research focusing on community cohesion among young people in general and students in particular in the Vietnamese context. This paper reports on a research project on student life conducted in twelve Hanoi universities, and with 484 research participants, utilizing surveys, interviews and focus groups. This paper aims to identify the current situation and trends in student values with regards to community, particularly their views on community participation, and their responsibilities to communities, friends and society in general. The findings suggest that in spite of significant changes associated with urban life and globalisation, students still positively value community cohesion and engage in practices that maintain solidarity, trust and interdependencies with a range of consociates.     

Social Comparisons and Life Satisfaction Across Racial and Ethnic Groups: The Effects of Status,Information and Solidarity

This paper explores the role of within group social comparisons on the life satisfaction of different racial and ethnic groups in the US. For Whites, we find that higher group income levels are associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, a result that is consistent with a preference for within group status. In contrast, life satisfaction is increasing in group income for Blacks. This result is consistent with the existence of social norms that emphasize Black solidarity. It is also consistent with an information effect in which Blacks rely on peer income levels to form expectations regarding their future prospects. We introduce a theoretical framework to help to distinguish between solidarity and information effects. Our empirical results provide strong support for the hypothesis that solidarity rather than information accounts for the positive relationship between average Black income and the subjective wellbeing of US Blacks. Finally, we consider two theories of social solidarity and find support for social salience but not social density in determining the strength of solidarity effects.     

Welfare State Development,Individual Deprivations and Income Inequality: A Cross-Country Analysis in Latin America and the Caribbean

Several scholars have confirmed the role that the welfare state (WS) plays in reducing poverty, promoting equality and ensuring the common wellbeing. One of the limitations of the scholarship has been the conceptualization and operationalization of the WS and poverty as one-dimensional variables. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between welfare state development, single-dimensions deprivations and income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean, before and after controlling for demographic and cyclical factors. The WS is operationalized as a one-dimensional variable, but also taking into account its multidimensional nature. Three individual deprivations suffered by people on poverty and two income inequality indicators are used as dependent variables. Three pooled time-series cross-section regression analyses with panel-corrected standard errors models were carried out on 18 countries in the region around 2000, 2005 and 2010. This paper shows that the development of social-welfare programs and institutions seems to be an effective way of tackling individual deprivations suffered by people on poverty in the region. On the other hand, the WS development didn’t appear to be effective to reduce income inequality. The outcomes of welfare institutions appear to be the pivotal dimension to reduce income inequality and income deprivations in the region.     

Personal income taxation under mobility, exogenous and endogenous welfare weights, and asymmetric information

This paper analyses how governments should tax labour income accruing to a group of highly skilled and geographically mobile individuals who divide their time or career between several jurisdictions. The analysis differs from previous models on migration and taxation by addressing optimal regulation when agents work for several principals. Optimal taxation is developed for social welfare functions with exogenous and endogenous welfare weights. Marginal income taxes are applied for screening purposes, and the rates are lower with endogenous than with exogenous welfare weights. Received: 22 January 1998/Accepted: 3 July 1999)     

"Asian" men on the scene: challenges to "gay communities"

This article examines common assumptions behind the notion of "gay community," contrasting these views with the experiences of homosexual men originating from Southeast Asia on the commercial gay scene in Melbourne, Australia. The narratives here reveal fragmented social networks involving various social groups, categories of people and an "In/Out" culture where informants were culturally marginal. Fitting into the scene culture involves processes of assimilation, and loss of connection even with supportive ethnic networks. While all men who look for a place to belong on the scene generally feel pressure to assimilate to a predominantly white middle-class gay culture, Southeast Asian men generally had more cultural distance to cover. Men who are not well assimilated face exclusion, invisibility and discrimination. Differences and discrimination within Southeast Asian based networks also contributed towards fragmented relations. This article raises questions about dominant gay cultural forms, assumptions of gay solidarity, and how ethnic minority men make sense of and negotiate their sexual and social experiences.     

Welfare Attitudes Towards Anti-poverty Policies in China: Economical Individualism,Social Collectivism and Institutional Differences

Public attitudes towards welfare programs is a crucial topic in the field of social policy research. Current studies on welfare attitudes has long been a lack of an explicit conceptualization, and mainly conducted at the individual level with the focus on self-interest. This study distinguished the dimensions of welfare attitudes into responsibility, efficiency and effectiveness, and examined the factors that influence welfare attitudes towards anti-poverty policies in China. Data used in this study came from Chinese National Survey of Public Welfare Attitudes in 2018 with a final sample size of 8296 respondents from three deliberately selected provinces in China. It concluded that welfare attitudes share the traits of economical individualism, social collectivism and institutional differences. Positive perception of work ethics and social cognition about income inequality were two important factors associated with welfare attitudes towards anti-poverty policy. People who were against indolence, idleness and male breadwinner and who were highly sensitive of income inequality were more supportive of the notion that government is responsible for protecting their livelihood, nevertheless, less satisfied with the current standard of substance allowance and performance of policy implementation, indicating an orientation of both individualism and collectivism of welfare attitudes. Besides, welfare attitudes were also motivated by institutional differences such as regional disparities and migrant identity. Therefore, this study suggests that the government should be need-oriented in dealing with of the different dimensions of poverty, and should establish a more unified and generous social welfare system that benefits both the natives and migrants.

     

Welfare Costs of Inflation: Evidence from China

In this paper, we use the China General Social Survey 2010 data to estimate the impact of inflation on the welfare of residents. By using the happiness research approach, we find that on average, a 0.1 % rise in inflation rate will cause a welfare loss of about 73.0–164.1 RMB, mainly from unexpected inflation. Furthermore, welfare costs to different income groups vary significantly: for those whose household income reaches 100,000 RMB, the welfare loss resulted from a 0.1 % rise in inflation only reduces about 0.057 % of their income, while for the below 10 thousand income group, the cost is as high as 0.739 %. It also shows that there are substantial differences in different income groups’ sensitivities to different kinds of commodities. Specifically, low-income residents are seriously harmed by an increase in food and residence prices, whereas their middle-income counterparts are mainly affected by price changes in healthcare, personal articles, transportation, communication, recreation, and education. Besides, we find that subjective well-being of debtors are significantly boosted by inflation.     

Migration of the poor

One aspect of migration which has been largely overlooked by researchers is the migration of people receiving public assistance benefits. The migration, or lack of migration, of these people has clear policy implications. Poor people put numerous demands on the locality where they reside, including demands for welfare benefits. The research presented in this paper reveals that movers receiving AFDC payments are able to improve their economic standing more than those who do not move. It is also shown that states with a net in-migration of public assistance recipients but net out-migration of non-recipients do have higher benefit levels than states with net out-migration of recipients and net in-migration of non-recipients. Employment and income data do not show the same differences between the state types.     

Popular Criteria for the Welfare Deservingness of Disability Pensioners: The Influence of Structural and Cultural Factors

Research has shown that several criteria underlie people’s opinions about the welfare deservingness of benefit recipients. However, it remains unknown which factors are associated with the emphasis that people place on such criteria. Using a 2006 Dutch national survey on the welfare deservingness of disability pension recipients, we study the influence of structural and cultural factors on people’s emphasis on three deservingness criteria: control, need, and reciprocity. OLS regression analyses show that people’s emphasis on specific deservingness criteria is strengthened by structural factors that indicate the possibility of resource competition such as the following: age, lower levels of education, unemployment, and lower income. However, actual personal experience with receiving welfare benefits weakens criteria emphasis. Cultural factors such as the espousal of views from the political right and the possession of a strong work ethic are associated with a heightened emphasis on deservingness criteria.     

Analyzing the Effects of Negative and Non-negative Values on Income Inequality: Evidence from the Survey of Household Income and Wealth of the Bank of Italy (2012)

Generally, inequality indices play a basic role in the analysis of welfare economics, also appearing as technical tools applied to income data. A good deal of findings in this research field is provided by the Gini coefficient, typically used for non-negative income values. Even if negative income is often an unfamiliar concept, its presence in real surveys may lead to difficulty in applying the classical Gini-based inequality measures, as they lie outside their standard ranges. In this paper, the more general issue of negative values is considered and a reformulation of the main Gini-based inequality measures adjusted for the problem of negative values is adopted with the purpose of providing theoretical extensions for the income decomposition approach by both income sources and area components. Investigations about the related inferential issues, conducted thorough simulation studies based on resampling techniques, highlight how the traditional approach of removing negative income values may yield different results in terms of inequality estimation, proving that the proposed approach, based on preserving negative values, is the more appropriate practice to follow to avoid the loss of data that really provide a coherent picture of the inequality condition.     

Pay-as-you-go social security and endogenous fertility in a neoclassical growth model

This paper theoretically studies how unfunded pay-as-you-go social security affects economic growth, the fertility rate, and welfare in a neoclassical growth model. In addition, this paper considers a more general form of child-rearing cost, which is a mixture of time and money. The first observation is that whether the fertility rate increases or not by the expansion of the pay-as-you-go social security depends on (1) the size of the monetary child-rearing cost relative to the time spent on child-rearing and (2) the current fertility and interest rate in laissez faire. The second observation is that income per worker can increase by an expansion in pay-as-you-go social security when the output elasticity of capital is sufficiently small and the payroll tax rate is high. The last finding is that welfare can be improved even though capital is underaccumulated in an economy.     

Support Needs of the Survivors of the August 17, 1999 Earthquake in Turkey

This paper aims to present a sociological analysis of social supportrelated to disaster sociology in general and earthquakes specifically.The analysis is based on field research conducted a year after the17 August 1999 East Marmara Earthquake where 18000 people died;50000 people injured; 5000 buildings collapsed and 340000 of themdamaged; 14513 businesses closed; 150000 people became unemployed;and 129338 forced to live in prefabricated houses. The researchprimarily aims to understand the support needs by focusing mainlyon the following issues about the earthquake survivors: (i) whichand what support types and areas are mostly desired by them; (ii)which independent variables are the most effective on their demands;and (iii) from which persons or institutions they have receivedsupport and wanted to be supported by. Marginal development of thecivil society; high degree of expectations of almost everythingfrom the state; psychological factors being less influentialcompared with West and education being the primary influentialfactor are some of the significant results of this research.     

Explaining welfare recidivism: what role do unemployment and initial spells have?

The question of high welfare re-entry rates has attracted great attention from economists and policymakers. Using a very rich administrative data set for the minimum income program of the Madrid Government (over 50,000 spells), this paper aims to broach various questions arising from the issue of welfare re-entry. We try to identify what factors determine observed differences in the durations of the first off-welfare spell. We analyze the combined effects of the length and type of exit of the first spell, unemployment, and sociodemographic characteristics. The experience of the first spell and, to a lesser extent, employability can contribute toward lengthening the time spent outside the program. Our results also show that off-welfare spells of households leaving the program in periods of low economic growth will be longer than those that do so during economic expansions. With the exception of unemployment effects, our estimates yield very similar results to those obtained in the U.S. studies, suggesting that U.S. welfare policies and analyses are not entirely irrelevant for European discussions of welfare policies.     

Direct Versus Indirect Questioning: An Application to the Well-Being of Farm Animals

Recent events suggest people are increasingly concerned not just with their own well-being but that of animals as well. However, there is little systematic evidence on people’s willingness-to-trade their own well-being and quality of life for improvements in the well-being of farm animals. In this paper, we utilize a straightforward and unobtrusive technique to mitigate socially desirability effects and gage the publics’ opinion about farm animal welfare: indirect questioning. In survey of United States households, we find sharp differences between direct and indirect questions related to farm animal welfare. For example, whereas only 15.6% of the public said they think low meat prices are more important than the well-being of farm animals, 67.5% said the average American thinks low meat prices are more important than the well-being of farm animals. This finding, coupled with the extant literature on indirect questioning, suggests that people’s concerns for farm animal welfare are actually much lower than what they say they are.     

Cultural Connection Predicts Perceptions of Financial Security for Māori

This paper examines the impact of relative income on income satisfaction with given absolute income. We conducted an experiment in China where participants earned three different levels of income according to their relative performance in a task. While the treatment group was informed about their relative income, the control group only knew their own absolute income. We found that while controlling for absolute income and other factors, information about relative income increases the satisfaction of the high-income group and reduces the satisfaction of the low-income group. Relative income may interact with individual characteristics, such as gender, to affect income satisfaction. We also found that relative income treatment significantly increases income satisfaction inequality, primarily by causing social comparisons among different income groups, which has some welfare implications.     

Parental leave policies,intra-household time allocations and children’s human capital

This paper uses a general equilibrium model of marriage and divorce to assess how public policies on parental leave and leave benefits affect intra-household decision making, family structure, intergenerational mobility, and the distribution of income. The benchmark economy is calibrated to US data to replicate some characteristics relevant to the interaction between the marriage and labor markets. The effects of unpaid leave, paid leave benefits, and mandated leave on human capital investment, distribution of income, and welfare are then analyzed.      

中国老年人隔代照料与 健康后果的实证研究及政策思考

在中国家庭代际关系的研究中,隔代照料这一选题极为重要,隔代照料也是老年和家庭福利政策制定的重要影响因素。老年人隔代照料与健康问题日益受到国内学者的关注,但对两者相关性的深入实证考察较少,仅有的研究也未就隔代照料产生的健康后果达成共识,政策应对亦存局限。为此,本文基于2014年中国老年社会追踪调查(CLASS)截面数据,探讨中国老年人照料孙子女对自身健康产生的后果及几个主要变量之间的交互作用,对其进行量化研究并通过稳健性检验。研究得出三项基本结论:隔代照料的健康后果受到照料强度、子女特征、居住模式及老年人自身罹患慢性疾病状况的影响,在不同的特征状况下呈现不同的健康结果;照料者受教育程度、照料者性别、健在子女数等变量间的交互作用对被解释变量(照料者健康)产生了不同程度的调节作用,成年子女向上的代际支持也对老年照料者的健康发挥了调节作用;使用工具变量(照料者是否享受老年优待政策)进行因果识别在一定程度上克服了解释变量与被解释变量间的内生性问题。最后,本文基于上述实证研究的结果从代际关系视角、社会性别视角和老年婚姻社会功能等方面提出公共政策的应对思考,以期为制定相应的老年和家庭福利政策提供策略和依据。     

中国城市居民劳动供给行为特征

经过40多年的改革开放和计划生育政策实施,我国城市居民家庭规模、家庭财富、受教育程度等影响劳动供给行为的因素均发生了巨大变化。这种变化对就业政策的制定和相关福利政策的实施都有较大影响。运用来自29个省市6675个城市家庭、8771个居民的调查数据对我国城市居民劳动供给行为进行了研究。结果表明:我国城市居民劳动供给曲线整体上呈现向右上方倾斜的特征,随着工资上涨,劳动者工作时间随之增长,但是工资弹性仅有0.52,处于缺乏弹性的区间;分类型看,女性、户主、受教育程度较低者工资弹性较大,对工资变动更加敏感;女性、户主、受教育程度较高者收入弹性更大,对收入变动更加敏感;分年龄阶段看,18—30岁的新生代劳动力工作时间受工资和非工资收入影响均不显著,31—45岁的劳动力比45岁以上劳动力工资弹性和收入弹性更高,对工资和非工资收入更加敏感。本文的研究结果对细化实施就业政策和制定相关福利政策具有一定启示作用。