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Lisa Pelling

Lisa Pelling is a political scientist and head of the Stockholm-based think tank Arena Idé. She regularly contributes to the daily digital newspaper Dagens Arena and has a background as a political adviser and speechwriter at the Swedish foreign ministry.

Lisa Pelling

Lisa Pelling is a political scientist and head of research at the Stockholm-based think tank Arena Idé. She regularly contributes to the daily digital newspaper Dagens Arena and has a background as a political adviser and speechwriter at the Swedish foreign ministry.

The myth of meritocracy and the populist threat

Lisa Pelling 13th March 2023

Social democrats, Lisa Pelling writes, should abandon the idea of meritocracy if they are to reconnect with les classes populaires.

Nicaragua: from liberation to a new dictatorship

Lisa Pelling 9th January 2023

Lisa Pelling’s parents moved to Nicaragua to support the revolution. Its leader, she writes, has turned it into a tyranny.

Government by finger-pointing

Lisa Pelling 24th October 2022

The new Swedish government, Lisa Pelling writes, is obsessed with stigmatising immigrants and refugees.

Paving the way for radicalised violence

Lisa Pelling 18th July 2022

Mainstream politicians, Lisa Pelling writes, must recognise that their words have consequences.

Sweden’s schools: Milton Friedman’s wet dream

Lisa Pelling 16th May 2022

Lisa Pelling explains how ‘freedom of choice’ has wrought a vicious circle of inequality and underperformance.

How to welcome Ukrainian refugees

Lisa Pelling 14th March 2022

Lisa Pelling begins a new Social Europe column with lessons for integration—especially from Sweden.

Andersson’s agenda

Lisa Pelling 30th November 2021

Magdalena Andersson has been elected the first female prime minister of Sweden. Again.

Stefan Löfven—welding progressives together and keeping the far right at bay

Lisa Pelling 1st September 2021

The Swedish social-democrat leader, shortly to step down, didn’t buckle under pressure despite a slender parliamentary hold.

Sweden, the pandemic and precarious working conditions

Lisa Pelling 10th June 2020

Most commentary on the Covid-19 death toll in Sweden has been on the absence of lockdown, yet privatisation and precarity in eldercare should really be in the spotlight.

The Swedish face of inequality

Lisa Pelling 17th January 2019

Sweden used to be revered for stemming inequality through progressive taxation and universal welfare. Now tax breaks for the wealthy and ‘free choice’ in public goods such as education cocoon the rich from the rest. What does inequality look like? In Sweden, rising inequality can be easily detected in data on income distribution. According to […]

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Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


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The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

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Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


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The four transitions and the missing one

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