Irene Bucelli has been reviewing different philosophical positions and theories that underlie concerns about poverty and inequality and explores the extent to which these are compatible and can, in fact, overlap. This paper concludes that it is possible to argue that our concerns with poverty and inequality are not mutually exclusive and that a ‘pluralist’ view can incorporate different justifications for being concerned about both.

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In this paper, Lin Yang reviews the different concepts and measures of inequality and poverty. It highlights how some measures are likely to lead to a higher empirical correlation between the two phenomena for mathematical reasons and provides a strong basis for our empirical studies.

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Eleni Karagiannaki carried out an extensive examination of the empirical cross-country relationship between income inequality and income poverty.  Her research shows that higher income inequality (measured in a variety of ways) is associated with higher income poverty across countries and that there exists a positive relationship between changes in income inequality over time and changes in relative income poverty. 

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There may be some concern about the circularity in looking at the relationship between income inequality and income poverty, so Lin Yang and Polly Vizard investigated the relationship between income inequality and three further measures of poverty (material deprivation, a multi-dimensional poverty index and a capability-based multi-dimensional measure of poverty. In this paper they provide evidence that the positive correlation between inequality and poverty is not limited to income measures of poverty, and holds after controlling for a range of micro-level and macro-level variables.

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The post-war period in Europe, between the late 1940s and the 1970s, was characterised by an expansion of the role of by the state, protecting its citizens from risks of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity. This security began to erode in the 1980s as a result of privatisation and deregulation. The withdrawal of the state further accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, as countries began pursuing deep austerity. The result has been a rise in what has been termed ‘precariousness’. Here the authors review the development of the concept of precariousness and related phenomena of vulnerability and resilience, before reviewing evidence of growing precariousness in European countries. It describes a series of studies of the impact on precariousness on health in domains of employment, housing, and food, as well as natural experiments of policies that either alleviate or worsen these impacts. It concludes with a warning, drawn from the history of the 1930s, of the political consequences of increasing precariousness in Europe and North America.

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Underpinned by the assumption that unemployed persons are passive recipients of social security, recent welfare reforms have increased benefit conditionality in the UK and introduced harsher penalties for failure to meet these conditions. Yet, conditionality may result in vulnerable groups disproportionately experiencing disentitlement from benefits, one of the rights of social citizenship, because they are, in some cases, less able to meet these conditions. Rising sanctions, then, may be the product of a disconnection between welfare conditionality and the capabilities of vulnerable claimants. To test this hypothesis, the authors evaluate whether sanctions are higher in areas where there are more vulnerable Jobseeker's Allowance claimants, namely, lone parents, ethnic minorities and those with disabilities. They find that sanction rates are higher in local authorities where more claimants are lone parents or live with a disability, and that this relationship has strengthened since the welfare reforms were introduced under the Conservative-led coalition. Failure to meet conditions of benefit receipt may disproportionately affect vulnerable groups.

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Since the onset of the Great Recession in Europe, unmet need for medical care has been increasing, especially in persons aged 65 or older. It is possible that public pensions buffer access to healthcare in older persons during times of economic crisis, but to our knowledge, this has not been tested empirically in Europe. The authors integrated panel data on 16 European countries for years 2004–2010 with indicators of public pension, unemployment insurance and sickness insurance entitlement from the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset and unmet need (due to cost) prevalence rates from EuroStat 2014 edition. Using country-level fixed-effects regression models, they evaluate whether greater public pension entitlement, which helps reduce old-age poverty, reduces the prevalence of unmet medical need in older persons and whether it reduces inequalities in unmet medical need across the income distribution.

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Imposing financial penalties on claimants of unemployment insurance may incentivise labour market re-entry. However, sanctions may have differential effects depending on the work-readiness of the claimants. In this paper, Aaron Reeves explores whether sanctioning disabled claimants is associated with greater labour market activity or inactivity among disabled people using data on 346 British local authorities between 2009-2014. When the number of sanctioned disabled claimants rises (as a proportion of all claimants) the proportion of economically inactive people who are also disabled becomes larger. There is not a clear relationship between sanctioning disabled claimants and the proportion of employed people who are disabled.

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It is not clear whether the harm associated with smoking differs by socioeconomic status. This study tests the hypothesis that smoking confers a greater mortality risk for individuals in low socioeconomic groups, using a cohort of 18,479 adults drawn from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. 

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Food insecurity has been rising across Europe following the Great Recession, but to varying degrees across countries and over time. The reasons for this increase are not well understood, nor are what factors might protect people’s access to food. Here the authors test the hypothesis that an emerging gap between food prices and wages can explain increases in reported inability to afford protein-rich foods and whether welfare regimes can mitigate its impact. They find that rising prices of food coupled with stagnating wages are a major factor driving food deprivation, especially in deprived groups; however, our evidence indicates that more generous welfare systems can mitigate this impact.

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This paper draws on 120 years of biographical data (N = 120,764) contained within Who’s Who—a unique catalogue of the British elite—to explore the changing relationship between elite schools and elite recruitment. The authors find that the propulsive power of Britain’s public schools has diminished significantly over time. This is driven in part by the wane of military and religious elites, and the rise of women in the labor force. However, the most dramatic declines followed key educational reforms that increased access to the credentials needed to access elite trajectories, while also standardizing and differentiating them. Notwithstanding these changes, public schools remain extraordinarily powerful channels of elite formation. Even today, the alumni of the nine Clarendon schools are 94 times more likely to reach the British elite than are those who attended any other school. Alumni of elite schools also retain a striking capacity to enter the elite even without passing through other prestigious institutions, such as Oxford, Cambridge, or private members clubs. The analysis not only points to the dogged persistence of the “old boy,” but also underlines the theoretical importance of reviving and refining the study of elite recruitment.

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Living with housing problems increases the risk of mental ill health. Housing problems tend to persist over time but little is known about the mental health consequences of living with persistent housing problems. We investigated if persistence of poor housing affects mental health over and above the effect of current housing conditions. The authors used data from 13 annual waves of the British Household Panel Survey (1996 to 2008) (81,745 person/year observations from 16,234 individuals) and measured the persistence of housing problems by the number of years in the previous four that a household experienced housing problems. OLS regression models and lagged-change regression models were used to estimate the effects of past and current housing conditions on mental health, as measured by the General Health Questionnaire. Interaction terms tested if tenure type modified the impact of persistent poor housing on mental health. In fully adjusted models, mental health worsened as the persistence of housing problems increased. Adjustment for current housing conditions attenuated, but did not explain, the findings. Tenure type moderated the effects of persistent poor housing on mental health, suggesting that those who own their homes outright and those who live in social housing are most negatively affected. Persistence of poor housing was predictive of worse mental health, irrespective of current housing conditions, which added to the weight of evidence that demonstrates that living in poor quality housing for extended periods of time has negative consequences for mental health.

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Unmet medical need (UMN) had been declining steadily across Europe until the 2008 Recession, a period characterized by rising unemployment. This paper examines whether becoming unemployed increased the risk of UMN during the Great Recession and whether the extent of out-of-pocket payments (OOP) for health care and income replacement for the unemployed (IRU) moderated this relationship.

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This report addresses the question of whether there is a set of policy levers that could, together, encourage employers to improve disabled people’s employment and pay. It also considers how proposals could be framed and pursued, to enable people to unite to achieve them.

Links to report: 

Full PDF report, see here
Full Word report, see here
Easyread version, see here
Executive Summary, see here

Links to video and audio: 

Audio, see here                                                                                                        Video, see here

 More information on the launch 

Blog, see here

Blog, see here

An understanding that poverty and inequality are inextricably linked has given rise to a number of large international organisations setting joint inequality-poverty reduction targets on the basis that poverty cannot be seriously tackled without addressing inequality. However, the evidence base was relatively weak with only limited information available on the relationship between the two phenomena. The programme was designed to expand the evidence base on the links between inequality and poverty and to fill this knowledge gap. In the research summarised in this report we explored the relationship between inequality and poverty by: • Examining philosophical concerns for poverty and inequality and how they may overlap • Estimating the empirical relationship between income inequality and a variety of poverty measures • Reviewing the existing evidence base on potential mechanisms that may drive any relationship

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