Many studies have investigated the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions associated with household consumption, highlighting that richer households have a substantially larger carbon footprint than poorer households. While these studies have typically used income or household expenditures as a proxy of households' living standards, the association between emissions and wealth has hardly been studied. Wealth is not just an important component of households' material living standards, known to be imperfectly correlated with income and expenditures, but it is also a very relevant dimension for climate policies. For instance, affluent households have more scope to invest in reducing emissions (e.g. insulation of their homes). Therefore, in this paper, we compare the inequality of emissions over wealth groups as well as groups defined by other living standard concepts such as income, expenditure and the joint distribution of income and wealth to add a focus on wealth to the analysis of emission inequality. Our study focuses on Belgium and the United Kingdom, which differ considerably in their level of wealth inequality. Our results highlight that the social distribution of emissions varies between expenditures, income, wealth and the joint distribution of income and wealth, with per capita emissions being more strongly associated with the joint distribution of income and wealth than with income alone. We also show that a significant share of households has both low income and low wealth, and may thus be lacking the means to prepare for a carbon-neutral future. Although increasing wealth taxation could provide much-needed revenues for low carbon investments, our results suggest that it would have a lower direct impact on the level of emissions and emission inequality compared to increasing taxes on high incomes.

In many European countries, about half of those eligible for means-tested social benefits, do not receive the benefits to which they are entitled. In the literature, a wide range of factors have been identified that potentially contribute to the non-take-up of social benefits. Particular attention has been paid to factors that relate to the claimants themselves, including the experienced or perceived costs associated with claiming benefits and negative attitudes towards claiming benefits. However, the theory on the conditions under which claiming costs matter is still underdeveloped, while the evidence on the relative importance of claiming costs is to a large extent indirect and based on proxy variables. In this paper, we measure individual and household (dis)incentives for taking up social assistance benefits more directly, and evaluate to what extent they are associated with non-take-up of social assistance for people at active age in Belgium. To do so, we use a combination of register data and data from the TAKE survey, a new representative survey tailored for studying the determinants of non-take-up in Belgium. Combining both sources of information and detailed simulations of eligibility, we show that information costs are much better at predicting non-receipt of social assistance than process costs and stigma. While attitudes towards the receipt of benefits are of little consequence, optimism about the future seems to matter more, as does the level of material deprivation experienced by the household. We also explore under what conditions information costs matter most. While findings are not very robust, our data suggest that the importance of information costs is mediated by the level optimism about the future and changes in household composition that act as trigger events.

The income and expenditure elasticity of household carbon footprints (CF) is a recurrent summary measure of the social stratification of greenhouse gas emissions. In top-down-estimates, when microdata are lacking, it is also used to estimate the inequality in emissions between households across the income or expenditure distribution. In this article, we point to several key methodological considerations when computing the elasticity of household CFs, and demonstrate their practical and empirical implications by making use of Belgian survey data. We find that the choice between income and expenditure as the main variable is most consequential for the estimated elasticity of household CFs, while the income elasticity of household emissions is more sensitive to a broader range of methodological choices. This has implications for top-down estimates of emissions along the income distribution, and related indicators of the inequality in household emissions by income groups.

Non-take-up of means-tested benefits is a widespread phenomenon which undermines the effectiveness and fairness of social policies. The digitalisation of the welfare state creates new opportunities for proactively contacting people who are potentially entitled to benefits, but do not take up their social rights. In this study, we report on how new data flows were used to reach out to potential beneficiaries of the Increased Reimbursement of health care, a programme targeted at low-income households in Belgium. By randomizing the period in which potential beneficiaries were contacted, we were able to identify a three- to four-fold increase in take-up among those contacted as a result of the outreaching activities. Households that did not respond to the intervention, the never takers, have lower pre-intervention healthcare expenditures. This suggests that non-take-up was reduced primarily among those who would expect to benefit most from receiving the Increased Reimbursement. Exploiting the combination of rich administrative data with experimental evidence, we also find that early responders are mostly older and have higher historic health expenditures than late responders. Furthermore, results point to the need for balancing well the inclusiveness of the intervention with an increased number of applications by ineligible people.

The methodology currently used to measure poverty in the European Union faces some important limitations. Capturing key aspects of poverty is done using a dashboard of indicators, which often tell conflicting stories. We propose a new income-based measure of poverty for Europe that captures in a consistent way in a single indicator the level of relative poverty, the intensity of poverty, poverty with a threshold anchored in time and a pan-European perspective on poverty. To do so, we work with a recently developed poverty index, the extended headcount ratio (EHC) and derive the relevant poverty lines to apply the index to poverty in Europe. We show empirically that our measure consistently captures the aspects typically monitored using a variety of indicators and yields rankings that seem more aligned with intuitions than those obtained by these individual indicators. According to our measure, Eastern Europe has a much higher level of poverty than Southern Europe, which, in turn, has a considerably higher level of poverty than North-Western Europe. In North-Western Europe, the evolution of our measure over time correlates most strongly with the at-risk-of-poverty rate, while in Southern and Eastern Europe, it correlates most strongly with at-risk-of-poverty with the threshold anchored in time.

This article studies earnings inequality between social classes across 30 European countries. Class inequality in earnings is found across the board although there are some exceptions. However, the degree of class inequality varies strongly across countries being larger in Western and Southern European countries and smaller in Eastern and Northern European countries. Furthermore, we find that differences in class composition in terms of observed characteristics associated with earnings account for a substantial proportion of these between-class differences. Differences between classes in the returns to education and other characteristics play less of a role. In all these respects there is a sizeable cross-national variation. This points to important differences between countries in how earnings are structured by social class.

In Europe, food insecurity is still a serious concern for individual and public health. Although progress has been made in reducing undernourishment, other types of malnutrition such as obesity and overweight are on the rise. Policies that aim at improving healthy eating and addressing food insecurity tend to focus on food aid, nutritional education and financial incentives. These policies are generally not targeted at the problem of insufficient income as a key barrier to access a healthy diet. In this paper, we present new evidence which shows that insufficient household income and inadequate minimum income policies constitute a remaining concern for accessing a healthy diet. We make use of estimates of the minimum cost of a healthy diet in 24 European countries, in accordance with national food-based dietary guidelines. We use these unique data to (1) estimate the proportion of people living in (sub)urban areas with insufficient income to access a healthy diet, before and after housing costs, based on representative income survey data (EU-SILC), and, (2) compare the cost of a healthy diet with the level of minimum income schemes for specific household types using microsimulation techniques. We find that in 16 out of 24 countries at least 10% of the population in (sub)urban areas risks to be confronted with income-related food insecurity. Our findings show that policies directed at tackling food insecurity should be embedded in broader economic and social policies that promote an adequate income for all, and limit the cost of other essential goods and services.

It is a well-known feature of social protection systems that not all persons who are entitled to social benefits also claim these benefits. The costs people face when claiming benefits is considered an important cause of this phenomenon of non-take-up. In this paper, we developed and examined the psychometric properties of a new scale, the Claiming Cost Scale (CCS), which measures three dimensions of costs associated with claiming benefits. A multi-phase instrument development method was performed to develop the instrument. The item pool was generated based on a literature review, and presented to academic experts (n = 9) and experts by experience (n = 5) to assess content and face validity. In a second stage, centrality and dispersion, construct validity, convergent and divergent validity, and internal reliability of the instrument were tested. These analyses were based on two samples (n = 141 and n = 1265) of individuals living in low-income households in Belgium. Nine items were retained, which represent three factors (Information costs, Process costs and Stigma). The confirmatory factor analysis proved adequate model fitness. Both convergent and divergent validity were good, and internal consistency was adequate, with Cronbach's alpha ranging between .73 and .87. The findings showed that the CCS is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the costs potential beneficiaries face when claiming benefits. Consisting of only nine items, the scale can be easily implemented in large-scale survey research or used in day-to-day work of service providers who are interested in understanding non-take-up of their service.

This article studies earnings inequality between social classes across 30 European countries. Class inequality in earnings is found across the board although there are some exceptions. however, the degree of class inequality varies strongly across countries being larger in Western and Southern European countries and smaller in Eastern and Northern European countries. Furthermore, we find that differences in class composition in terms of observed characteristics associated with earnings account for a substantial proportion of these between-class differences. Differences between classes in the returns to education and other characteristics play less of a role. In all these respects there is a sizeable cross-national variation. This points to important differences between countries in how earnings are structured by social class.

While there is renewed interest in earnings differentials between social classes, the contribution of social class to overall earnings inequality across countries and net of compositional effects remains largely uncharted territory. This paper uses data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions to assess earnings differentials between social classes (as measured by ESeC) and the role of between-class inequality in overall earnings inequality across 30 European countries. We find that there is substantial variation in earnings differences between social classes across countries. Countries with higher levels of between-class inequality tend to display higher levels of overall earnings inequality, but this relationship is far from perfect. Even with highly aggregated class measures, between-class inequality accounts for a non-negligible share of total earnings inequality (between 15 and 25% in most countries). Controlling for observed between-class differences in composition shows that these account for much of the observed between-class earnings inequality, while in most countries between-class differences in returns to observed compositional variables do not play a major role. In all these respects we find considerable variation across countries, implying that both the size of between-class differences in earnings and the primary mechanisms that produce these class differences vary substantially between European countries.

Understanding the demand-side drivers and the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions is key to designing fair and effective environmental policies. In this study, we quantify the relationship between the carbon footprint of consumption and socio-economic characteristics of Belgian households. We use a dataset that combines household-level consumption data with an environmentally extended input-output model which quantifies the greenhouse gas emissions embedded in the supply chain of goods and services that households consume. We find that income and household size are the most important determinants of household consumption-related emissions. We also find the emission intensity of household consumption in the lower part of the income distribution is higher than that of richer households because poorer households spend a higher share on emission intensive products, especially energy.

Background The purpose of this article is to report on a comparative analysis of the official food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG) that were applicable in 2015 in 25 EU Member States. We assess FBDG in relation to the main guidelines established by the FAO/WHO, the EURODIET project and the EFSA, with a particular focus on identifying strengths and limitations of current FBDG in Europe towards addressing diet-related health inequalities. Methods This is a review research, in which a mixed-methods sequenced procedure was utilized. In each EU country key informants, including sociologists, economists, dietitians and nutritionists were asked to provide data regarding: (i) current dietary guidelines and national health priorities, (ii) model of health promotion currently available, (iii) results of the latest food consumption survey. All documents were reviewed by the coordinating team. Full data were analysed by two nutritionists, using a tabulated sheet to organize and compare the results. Results While all countries have national FBDG, the level of detail and quality varies substantially with regard to: time of last update; availability of recommendations for specific target groups; specification of frequency and portion size; the graphical representation; recommended amounts and limits of foods consumed; and recommendations regarding physical activity. Conclusions European countries have great opportunities to improve FBDG to better serve Public Health policy through a more consistent foundation of how these guidelines are developed, the inclusion of different population subgroups as a target for recommendations and the implementation of monitoring systems.

The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is currently the most important comparative survey on household incomes in Europe. The survey is regularly used for studying income patterns, poverty and income inequality in the EU. It is also an important source of information for studying the impact of taxation and social policies on the income distribution and carrying out ex-ante policy evaluations of planned policy reforms (see, for instance, Atkinson et al., 2017 for an introduction to EU-SILC). In other words, crossnational policy-learning and monitoring of poverty and inequality is an important purpose of EU-SILC. As a result, cross-country comparability of EU-SILC, and in particular the measurement of incomes, is key.Given sizeable differences in economic structures and, especially, tax-benefit systems in the EU, collecting (dis) aggregated information on individual and household incomes in a comparable way is very challenging. The setup has to cope with defining variables in such a way that they are sufficiently generic to allow for meaningful comparisons, while also being sufficiently specific such that it is clear for each country what income components should be aggregated into each variable, and comparability is maximised. The survey structure and implementation arrangements are very diverse in EU-SILC. Therefore, its users have to account for important cross-national variations in implementation that may affect comparability. This includes the main source (s) of the survey (register data versus interviews), the mode of interviewing, and the questionnaire design as well as the degree of imputation and the …

In sociology and political science, social class is among the most commonly used indicators of command over economic resources. However, we know relatively little about how the nature of the relationship between social class and earnings varies across countries. In this paper, we utilize data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) to study the relation between social class and earnings inequality across 30 European countries. We find that while working-class individuals have lower average earnings than their upper-class counterparts in all countries, there is considerable variation across countries in the earnings ratios. Class also contributes to overall earnings inequality. However, by using a variation of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we show that a sizeable share of between-class inequality can be accounted for by differences in the population composition of social classes. In sum, our results reveal that there is a non-negligible relationship between class and earnings, but the magnitude of class inequality, and how much class accounts for overall inequality, differs substantially across countries.

In this report, we document and analyse how individual income components are aggregated into the EU-SILC target variables. Even though general and country-specific descriptions of income target variables are available in the EU-SILC methodological guidelines and in the national quality reports, it is often not clear how exactly each of the national income components is classified and aggregated into a target variable in practice. On the basis of a survey among national statistical institutes, we compiled a database which maps the exact classification of income components into the EU-SILC target variables. The focus of the database is on EU-SILC 2015, covering 26 EU-SILC countries. The database contains information on the composition of variables on total income before and after transfers; income from benefits, work and capital; social contributions and taxes. For each component, we look at compliance with Eurostat guidelines, misclassifications and omitted income sources, all potentially undermining cross-national comparability. This report is accompanied by a paper which brings together the main findings regarding challenges for cross-country comparability and recommendations for improving further the quality and comparability of the EU-SILC income variables. The MetaSILC 2015 database can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TLSZ4S

This chapter discusses Tim Goedemé's cross-national research work in order to establish reference budgets for EU member states and facilitate the European Commission's (EC) task of monitoring income adequacy in Europe. It focuses on the “Improving Poverty Reduction in Europe” (ImPRovE) project that worked closely with six country teams based in Antwerp, Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Helsinki and Milan. It also looks into the development of more comprehensive reference budgets that span all expenditures needs in both food and non-food. The chapter reflects on the key lessons and contributions from the ImPRovE project and discusses some of the issues on establishing a common language and “standardized” approach. It suggests how approaches on reference budgets strengthen EU social protection systems and social indicators and provide new sociological insights into European societies and public attitudes.