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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between economic development and income distribution for Iran. Using time series data for the period 1967‐1993, it is found that there is no significant relationship between the Gini coefficient for household expenditure and per capita income. This result means there is no evidence in Iran, for the period analysed here, of there being a U‐relationship between these two variables as suggested by Kuznets. However, the empirical econometric results lend support for the view that institutional or structural variables affect income distribution. This paper has four policy messages for Iranian decision makers. First, income inequality can be reduced by stimulating the goods‐producing sectors of the economy such as agriculture, manufacturing etc. Second, expansion of most of the service sectors, such as trade, real estate etc., in Iran, because of the association in such sectors with rent seeking behaviour, is found to be positively related to inequality. Third, government subsidies and transfers have not decreased income inequality in Iran. On the contrary, the empirical evidence indicates that government transfers have exacerbated inequality. Fourth, government per capita expenditures (current and capital) have played an important role in alleviating relative poverty.

Adults raised in poor households tend to be more prone to live in poverty than the rest, ceteris paribus. This holds true even in the presence of observed income transmission channels such as education attainment. We identify this differential poverty risk as intergenerational transmission of economic disadvantage (ITED). This chapter contributes to the literature on cross-country differences in the intensity of ITED in the EU by explicitly testing how macro-economic/institutional features shape the phenomenon. Working on a sample of 30- to 39-year-old interviewees from the EU-SILC 2011 module on Intergenerational transmission of disadvantages, the authors find that, first, past income inequality is positively correlated with current ITED intensity; second, past efforts on inequality reduction via social protection for families with children and unemployment benefits are negatively correlated with later ITED levels; finally, educational expansion correlates with lower ITED, pointing to the relevance of public investments in education as a way to fight inequality of opportunity.

The main aim of this study is to investigate the role of fathers and mothers in the intergenerational educational persistence for sons and daughters under two dimensions that characterize the clusters of countries: redistributive policy and governance.

Data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM), hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components and panel regression are used in this study to estimate intergenerational educational correlation and to investigate its determinants related to the parents’ and descendants’ education variables in 93 countries grouped in four clusters. The empirical analysis is differentiated by gender combinations of parents and descendants.

In the clusters of countries characterized by high inequalities and poor governance, our findings show that the role of the fathers is stronger than that of the mothers in educational transmission; fathers and mothers are more influential for the daughters rather than for the sons; parental educational privilege is the main driver of intergenerational educational persistence; there is an inverse U-curve in the association between educational inequality of the parents and educational correlation for the sons. Differently, in the countries characterized by high income, low redistributive conflict and better governance, the role of the mothers is stronger and education mobility for the daughters is higher than that for the sons.

The authors’ results remark on the importance of social welfare policies aimed to expand a meritocratic public education system including schooling transfers for lower social class students and narrowing the gender gap in educational mobility between daughters and sons. Social welfare policies should also be oriented to spread high quality child care systems that help to foster greater women equality in the labor market, because the strength of educational persistence depends on the position of the mother in the economic hierarchy.

The distinctiveness of the paper can be found in the fact that this study investigates the parental role differentiating by gender and coupling hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components with panel regression models. This allows us to have a sample of 93 countries aggregated in four groups defined in two dimensions: redistributive policy and governance. Amongst the determinants of educational transmission, we consider not only education’s years of the parents but also other determinants, such as educational inequality and privilege of the parents. We also identify the effects of investment in human capital and educational inequalities for the descendants on education mobility.

Both labour groups and the national press frequently justify demands for protection against industrial adjustment on the grounds that it leads to the destruction of communities and traditional ways of life, with a devastating effect on welfare. To justify this claim in the context of a Ricardian open‐economy model requires quite strong restrictions on worker preferences, but a plausible case can be made. Presents a model based on the attachment of workers to their socio‐cultural environment, and suggests some policy options for redressing trade‐induced inequities.

Whether welfare provision should be broad-based or selectively targeted at the poor is one of the most common themes in social policy discourse. However, empirical evidence concerning people's preferences about these distributive justice principles is very limited. The current paper aims to bridge this gap, by analyzing Europeans' opinions about a hypothetical transformation of the welfare state that would provide social transfers and services only to people on low incomes.

The analysis draws on data from the 2016 European Social Survey and covers 21 countries. In order to understand what would motivate people to support the complete means testing of welfare provision, we use multilevel models with individual-level and contextual predictors.

The results show that the upper and middle classes are the most opposed to the idea, presumably as they would be the net losers from such a reform. Furthermore, our results indicate that more-egalitarian people show a higher level of support for means testing, even though the political left has traditionally promoted universalism. Some key characteristics of the welfare state also matter: People are more likely to endorse complete means testing in countries with less-generous provision and a higher incidence of poverty. However, the extent to which the existing welfare state relies on means testing has no influence on people's opinions about implementing a fully means-tested welfare model.

Some of the key findings are likely to be of interest to activists advocating on behalf of the poor and the socially vulnerable. Although it is generally assumed that universal provision is the best strategy to address the needs of disadvantaged people, our results suggest that from an electoral point of view, targeting within universalism may be a more appealing welfare strategy.

This paper details one of the very few studies to examine preferences for means-tested welfare provision in a comparative context. In addition, one of the contextual variables used in the analysis – the proportion of means-tested social benefits out of the total expenditure on social benefits – is unique to this study.

This paper investigates the relationship between national culture and the main dimensions of employment flexibility. A cultural model of comparative labour market flexibility is developed. Using Hofstede’s indices for measuring national culture, hypotheses concerning the association between a range of variables measuring employment flexibility (such as employment patterns, working time, unemployment and labour mobility) are regressed on Hofstede’s four cultural variables. The results suggest a strong association between Hofstede’s masculinity versus femininity index and employment patterns, working timeand unemployment. Employment “inflexibility” is linked to cultural values reflecting feminine gender structuring of society. A strong relationship between Hofstede’s individualism versus collectivism variable and labour mobility is also established, which suggests that labour mobility is less, and job tenure longer in countries where there is greater cultural loyalty to the group. The results are supportive of a cultural model and have implications for both comparative labour market theory and policy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) on the private transfer behavior of the non-co-resident adult children to their elderly parents in rural China, and hence address the income redistribution effectiveness of public program for the elderly in rural China.

Pooled data from two waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study and the combination of regression discontinuity design and difference in difference method are used to perform the analysis.

No evidence is found that pension payment from NRPS program does significantly crowd out the economic support from the adult children to their elder parents. The heterogeneous effects at different income percentile indicate that pension payment significantly increases the probability of receiving gross transfers and likelihood of the net transfer being positive for those elderly individuals with low income; in particular, the distinctive “family binding” arrangement may dramatically contribute to increasing the probability of receiving private transfers for the pension recipients.

The empirical findings would have far-reaching implications for the efficacy of public transfer or re-distributive programs such as NRPS; for the rural elderly, in particular, the unique “family binding” mechanism under the NRPS program may have positive welfare effects on the intended beneficiaries. Furthermore, an understanding of the inter-linkage between informal arrangements of elderly support and social re-distributive program provides further insight into the design of social security systems targeted to the vulnerable group in developing countries.

Most countries around the world base their old‐age pension programs largely on the pay‐as‐you‐go defined benefit (PAYGO DB) model. However, due to a number of factors including population aging, the maturing of these schemes, rapidly increasing old‐age pension costs, and the perceived need to become more competitive in international markets, many nations have become increasingly concerned about the present (or projected future) economic burden of paying for the pension benefits promised by these schemes. This concern has led policy makers to look for alternative models. One of the most innovative alternatives to emerge during the past ten years is the notional defined contribution (NDC) model. In this article we describe this model and discuss some of the implications of a shift to this model for women and low‐wage workers. We conclude that in the industrial nations women and low‐wage workers are likely to do less well with schemes based all or in part on the NDC model because such schemes are typically designed to be less redistributive (from higher to lower income groups) than the PAYGO DB schemes they will be replacing. However, in developing countries the reverse will often be true as the NDC schemes are likely to be replacing PAYGO DB schemes that tend to redistribute from low‐income groups to higher income groups. Relative to funded DC schemes a major advantage of the NDC model is that it does not subject individual pension benefits to the volatility of financial markets. This issue is relevant to workers in both developed and developing nations, but it is a particularly important consideration in developing nations.