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Michael Dauderstädt

Michael Dauderstädt is a freelance consultant and writer. Until 2013, he was director of the division for economic and social policy of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.

Michael Dauderstädt

Europe-wide inequality during the pandemic

Michael Dauderstädt 13th December 2022

The pandemic increased inequality between member states but Europe-wide inequality has continued to decline, if more slowly.

Global inequality and the pandemic: exaggerated hopes and fears?

Michael Dauderstädt 21st September 2021

The pandemic has barely increased global income inequality—but it has made other inequalities worse.

Covid-19 and Europe-wide inequality

Michael Dauderstädt 23rd March 2021

Between 2017 and 2019, income disparities in Europe decreased. The pandemic stopped that decline.

EU-wide inequality is back to pre-crisis levels

Michael Dauderstädt 15th April 2020

After almost a decade, EU-wide inequality finally regained its previous low of 2009 due to relatively strong growth in the poorer member states between the Baltic and the Balkans.

Inequality in Europe—wider than it looks

Michael Dauderstädt 3rd September 2019

Most discussion of inequality in Europe is confined to individual member states. Aggregating incomes across the EU, however, presents a sobering picture.

Addressing poverty and inequality in Europe

Michael Dauderstädt 15th January 2019

Official EU statistics mask the alarming extent of poverty and inequality in Europe. Despite slight recent easing, its dangerous scale threatens Europe’s social and political cohesion. Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, has published official figures on pan-European poverty and inequality since 2005, in the form of the poverty rate and the S80/S20 ratio. The poverty […]

Europe-Wide Inequality

Michael Dauderstädt 17th May 2017

Inequality within member states has become a much debated and researched issue over the last decade (see OECD here and here). Reducing the inequality between member states (i.e. convergence) is a target the European Union (EU) has set itself in its treaties and monitors through its cohesion reports. But what about the EU as a […]

Reducing European Inequality: Cohesion Through Convergence

Michael Dauderstädt 24th April 2017

When founded in 1957, the then European Economic Community comprised six relative prosperous countries, albeit including a very poor region, the Italian Mezzogiorno. With the first enlargement in 1972, poor Ireland joined the Community, bringing a start to its regional policy to promote growth in its poorer regions. The EU publishes regularly cohesion reports that […]

Inequality in Europe: complex and multidimensional

Michael Dauderstädt 19th April 2017

Talking about inequality in Europe brings one face-to-face with a complex pattern of possible issues and dimensions, which can be measured in different ways. As Table 1 shows, inequality exists regarding different characteristics such as income, wealth or life expectancy between different entities such as persons, households, sexes, labour and capital, regions or countries. Economics […]

Reducing Inequality: Social Europe And Cohesion

Michael Dauderstädt 8th December 2014

‘Social Europe’ implies for most experts the development of national welfare states and their protection against the forces of globalization and international competition as most contributions to the present project show. This emphasis has its strong merits as peoples’ welfare depends to a large extent on the growth of their national economies and on the […]

Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

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.


WATCH HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Let’s end involuntary unemployment!

What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

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.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

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.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


DOWNLOAD HERE

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