This book includes empirical contributions focusing on disadvantaged workers. According to the European Commission’s definition, disadvantaged workers include categories of workers with difficulties entering the labour market without assistance and hence, requiring the application of public measures aimed at improving their employment opportunities. In addition to the labour market perspective, this is also relevant in terms of social cohesion, which is one of the central objectives of the...

The book provides a panoramic approach to social exclusion, with emphasis on structural causes (education, health, accidents) and on short term causes connected with the crisis which started in 2008. The picture emerging, based on econometric analysis, is that the crisis has widened the risk of social exclusion, from the structural groups, like disabled people and formerly convicted people, to other groups, like the young, unemployed, low skilled workers and immigrants, in terms of income,...

There are fewer people living in extreme poverty in the world today than 30 years ago. While that is an achievement, continuing progress for poor people is far from assured. Inequalities in access to key resources threaten to stall growth and poverty reduction in many places. The world's poorest have made only a small absolute gain over those 30 years. Progress has been slow against relative poverty as judged by the standards of the country and time one lives in, and a great many people in...

Perceptions of Africa have changed dramatically. Viewed as a continent of wars, famines and entrenched poverty in the late 1990s, there is now a focus on “Africa rising†? and an “African 21st century.†? Two decades of unprecedented economic growth in Africa should have brought substantial improvements in well-being. Whether or not they did, remains unclear given the poor quality of the data, the nature of the growth process (especially the role of natural resources), conflicts that affect par...

Upon signing the Millennium Declaration in 2000, the international community committed itself to eight development goals with timebound targets and measurable indicators. The third of these eight goals was to "promote gender equality and empower women". The third Millennium Development Goal (MDG3) in the Millennium Declaration has spurred national and international efforts to improve women's situation around the globe. Equality for Women: Where Do We Stand on Millennium Goal 3? tracks co...

For anyone wanting to learn, in practical terms, how to measure, describe, monitor, evaluate, and analyze poverty, the Handbook is the place to start. Designed initially to support training courses on poverty analysis, it consists of explanatory text with numerous examples, interspersed with multiple-choice questions (to ensure active learning) and combined with extensive practical exercises using Stata statistical software. The sixteen chapters cover the measurement of poverty and poverty li...

Over the past decades, many different kinds of models have been developed that have been of use to policy makers, but until now the different approaches have not been brought together with a view to enhancing the systematic unification and evaluation of these models. This new volume aims to fill this gap by bringing together four decades’ worth of work by S. I. Cohen on economic modelling for policy making. Work on older models has been rewritten and brought fully up to date, and these old...

Young people are a vulnerable category of workers, finding themselves in a delicate phase of their working life: their first entry into the labour market. In many European countries, youngsters are unemployed or have difficulty finding and obtaining jobs. This situation has deteriorated particularly after the crises, recessions and stagnation that has impacted European economies in recent years. In addition to the cyclical or crisis impact, structural factors are also very important. Addit...

The recent recession has led to an ongoing crisis in the youth labour market in Europe. This timely book deals with a number of areas related to the context, choices and experiences of young people, the consequences of which resonate throughout their lives. The focus of the contributions to this volume is on issues which, whilst undoubtedly important, have thus far received less attention than they arguably deserve.The first part of the book is concerned with issues related to educ...

This volume contains research on how we measure poverty, inequality and welfare and how we use such measurements to devise policies to deliver social mobility. It contains ten papers, some of which were presented at the third meeting of The Theory and Empirics of Poverty, Inequality and Mobility at Queen Mary University of London, London, October 2016.The volume begins with theoretical issues at the frontier of the literature. Three papers discuss the impact of social welfare polici...

This book focuses on the questions of how territorial differences in productivity levels and unemployment rates arise in the first place and why territorial differences in labor market performance persist over time. Unemployment divergence and unemployment club convergence have been touched on in a large number of works and have recently also been studied using spatial econometric analysis. In this book we aim to develop the debate to include several important new topics, such as: the reas...

This book investigates issues related to health inequality with a particular interest on developing countries. It provides rigorous empirical work on both trends and causal factors behind health inequality, analyzes the implications of health deprivations on poverty traps and suggests practical policies which can be implemented.