Richard Hauser – författare

The intention of this book is threefold: presenting and advancing German reporting on income distribution and poverty, looking at experiences with advanced reporting schemes in two other EU countries, and discussing concepts for comparable social monitoring in the European Union. The first group of papers elaborates on recent findings for Germany (trends in the personal distribution of income and income poverty, multidimensional approaches to measure poverty and extreme poverty, redistribution). Of special interest is a critical methodological review of the two main German databases for distribution analyses, taking the suggestions of the Canberra Group as a reference. The second group of contributions reviews research on income distribution and poverty in Great Britain and Ireland. The last paper discusses concepts of comparable indicators for poverty and social exclusion in the EU.

The book examines the development and the dynamics of the personal distribution of income in Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States and some other OECD countries. Starting with the distribution of labour income, the issue is then expanded to include all monetary incomes of private households and to adjust for household size by an equivalence scale. Some authors analyse one country in detail by decomposing aggregate inequality measures, other authors focus on direct comparisons of some features of the income distribution in Germany with those in Great Britain or in the United States. The results suggest dominant influences of unemployment as well as of tax and transfer policies and different welfare regimes, respectively, but also show that our knowledge about distributional processes is still limited.

The intention of this book is threefold: presenting and advancing German reporting on income distribution and poverty, looking at experiences with advanced reporting schemes in two other EU countries, and discussing concepts for comparable social monitoring in the European Union. The first group of papers elaborates on recent findings for Germany (trends in the personal distribution of income and income poverty, multidimensional approaches to measure poverty and extreme poverty, redistribution). Of special interest is a critical methodological review of the two main German databases for distribution analyses, taking the suggestions of the Canberra Group as a reference. The second group of contributions reviews research on income distribution and poverty in Great Britain and Ireland. The last paper discusses concepts of comparable indicators for poverty and social exclusion in the EU.

Another reason for the burgeoning literature on personal income distribution is the improved availability of data on individual income, which are a major prerequisite for detailed analyses of distribution topics.