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This chapter explains the welfare functions of communes and work units before China's economic reforms. It also describes the new social security measures which came about after 1978 such as old age pensions in cities and the countryside, the Minimum Standard of Living Scheme, and the Five Guarantees. Moreover, the impact of China's social security reforms on the well-being of welfare recipients in the context of the modified human dignity framework is addressed. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has nearly completely destroyed its core value of equality. The new social security system is biased towards both urban areas and people engaged in the labour market. It should be stressed that China has made remarkable progress in terms of poverty reduction.

This chapter provides an overview of a conceptual framework and analytical tool for measuring UK living standards (UK-LS). It aims to supplement and complement B-SEM and PSE poverty and social exclusion measures by combining objective indicators of living conditions (resources) and subjective assessments of those living conditions (outcomes) falling into eleven dimensions under three overarching domains: ‘what we have’, ‘what we do’, and ‘where we live’. Descriptive and exploratory analyses using selected examples of ‘what we have’ domain reveals that individuals with varying levels of ‘resources’ (ie. income, wealth, material goods etc) differ on objective and subjective ‘outcomes’ of living standards within and across living standards dimensions. We conclude that multidimensional indicators of living standards can provide a supplementary and complementary evidence base to inform policy and research by expanding focus beyond those traditionally considered poor or socially excluded for those higher up the range of living standards. However, in order for the conceptual model and analytical framework to be useful, potential users must be clear about resources versus outcomes when seeking to uncover the complex interactions (and associations) between objective and subjective indicators of living standards and equally important the purpose for which the UK-LS analytical framework is being used.

This chapter utilizes the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) survey to analyze social stratification and income inequality in South Africa at the end of the apartheid. It discusses the method of using household survey data to map the class position of South African households. First, the occupations of individual people are classified. Next, households are classified in terms of occupations of working members. Finally, this schema is modified to take into account income from wealth and entrepreneurial activity. The outcome is a nine-class schema. Analysis shows that class is closely correlated with household income, living conditions, attitudes, health, and education.

This chapter uses the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) survey to analyse the pattern of income inequality at the end of apartheid and on the eve of democratisation. The survey shows that the mean incomes of the richest households were one hundred times greater than the incomes of the poorest households. The chapter also describes different ways of estimating the relative contribution to inequality of interracial and intraracial inequality.

This chapter asks whether some or all of the unemployed should be viewed as a distinct underclass. It argues that one segment of the unemployed can be identified as a discrete underclass, which comprises of unemployed people who were heavily disadvantaged in the labour market. The chapter utilizes the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) data to identify an underclass of unemployed people at the end of apartheid.

This chapter examines fifty years of poverty measurement, in particular the development of deprivation-based measures from Townsend’s definition of being ‘excluded from ordinary patterns’ of behaviour through Mack and Lansley’s idea of ‘socially-perceived necessities’ to wider frameworks based around Sen’s concept of ‘capabilities’. It argues that these developments have contributed to a widespread acceptance that poverty is relative, with what is seen as inadequate living standards changing as society changes. The chapter charts trends in deprivation and income poverty, and their growing divergence. While both measures reflected the sharp rise income inequality in the 1980s, in this millennium deprivation-based measures have continued to rise while relative income poverty has stabilised. This indicates that deprivation measures better reflect the adverse impact of stagnating wages, rising insecurity and declining public provision. The chapter concludes that poverty research needs to be firmly positioned within wider debates about growing economic and social inequalities.

This chapter describes how the New Zealand Government in 2019 demonstrated its commitment to well-being as a public policy with the release of its Wellbeing Budget. It details how the New Zealand Treasury’s Living Standards Framework (LSF) has guided the Treasury’s policy advice to governments in New Zealand, using the Wellbeing Budget as a key example of the application of the LSF in practice. The LSF is a population-level economic framework with a multidimensional well-being outcomes focus and associated measurement, analysis, and assessment tools. It helps the government to express, analyze, and implement its well-being objectives in the form of concrete policy action. As well as government budget management, the LSF has been applied to strategic fiscal and economic policy development. Priority policy areas for funding and other interventions addressed in the Wellbeing Budget included mental health, family and sexual violence, and sustainable land use. The chapter then looks at the experience of applying LSF tools to various stages of the policy process, including examples of cross-agency collaboration and the resulting policy packages informed by the LSF.

Poverty as measured by material deprivation through lack of economic resources remains absolutely central to understanding the causation and patterning of most aspects of social exclusion and a wide range of social outcomes. Concerns are expressed about the implications of trends to greater inequality, marketization and loss of social cohesion, as well as stagnating living standards and increased precarity in the workplace and housing market. While the multi-dimensional perspective combining poverty and social exclusion is shown to be of value the emerging behavioural agenda around poverty requires critical challenge.

Some commentators argue that greater economic growth implies less absolute poverty. This is wrong. If the economic development process is accompanied by an increase in inequality, this may prevent the benefits of growth reaching the fringes of the population: the poverty and social exclusion indicators could remain the same or even worsen. The estimates presented in this chapter—based on a unique collection of household budgets covering 150 years of Italy’s history—establish a number of unknown “facts” about the incidence and depth of poverty in Italy. This knowledge enables us to evaluate how the economic progress of the country—the spectacular increase in per-capita GDP —has been distributed among the Italians and whether it reached the poorest segment of the population. No country in the world can boast an estimate of the absolute poverty trend along such a long time frame.

This chapter argues that the political response to the current recession must ensure that the return to growth results in broad-based prosperity that benefits all workers. The single-minded focus on deficit reduction in Britain and America alike fails to address the deeper crisis in living standards that goes back to well before the current downturn began. A plan for broad-based growth must include action to generate more revenue from taxation and to increase government spending on social and physical infrastructure. Investing more in education and childcare would both help employment and reduce inequality - stimulating growth in the long-run.

Any history of the wellbeing of the Italians that ignores the sphere of economic inequality would be incomplete and unsatisfactory. That is why this chapter presents a quantitative reconstruction of income inequality in Italy since 1861, the year the Kingdom of Italy was founded. Estimates are based on a most innovative and unique collection of family accounts—the Italian Household Budget Database—where more than 20,000 family records have been organized and linked to modern survey data. For no other countries do such long-run, methodologically consistent and theoretically grounded series exist. In the long run Italian economic growth has been accompanied by a decrease in income inequality: this makes Italy a little-known success story. Inequality has started to increase again since the early 1990s and the barometer of the country’s social indices by now points to a clear worsening of the situation.

As Russia’s firms got more productive, living standards shot up. For one thing, companies started offering far more variety. The consumer paradise that advocates of a market economy had promised long-suffering Russians finally arrived. At the same time, higher productivity meant higher wages. Real wages increased every year of Putin’s presidency until 2014, averaging 15% per year from 2000 to 2008. At the same time, higher tax collection let the government boost pension payouts, helping older Russians, almost all of whom relied on state pensions as their primary source of retirement income. Yet higher pensions did not augur the return of an extensive welfare state, as the government eliminated many benefits. At the same time, the government kept labor protections weak, and Russia’s labor market continues to be far more flexible than many other European countries. Encouraged by his liberal economic advisers, Putin has implemented economically orthodox welfare and labor market policies, earning solid marks from the IMF. The tremendous wage growth of the 2000s, however, meant that most Russians were happy to ignore weak social protections in exchange for an ever-expanding paycheck.

The chapter focuses on how Italy’s economic growth enabled the spread of improvements in the diet of the Italian population. According to mid-nineteenth-century observers, nourishment was likely to be a daily torment for the major part of the population. In contrast, we estimate that in the aftermath of Italy’s unification (1861) the daily calories available to the average Italian exceeded 2,500, a value that is higher than that commonly used today to mark the threshold of undernutrition in developing countries. A high per-capita calorie availability is consistent with the presence of a sizable part of the population trying to make ends meet. In 1861 one person in two (perhaps even two in three) did not consume enough calories to lead a healthy life. In the case of Italy, macroeconomic data hide more than they reveal.

The point was made by Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the U.S. president, in his famous speech of March 1968: the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country measures everything except what makes life worthwhile. Even if scholars agree that the wellbeing of a nation cannot be fully described by its GDP, there is a lot to be learned from this indicator. We present new estimates of Italy’s GDP covering the whole 150-year history of unified Italy, and show how and when Italy succeeded in reaching the standards of the other advanced economies. New regional GDP estimates show a spectacular rise of territorial imbalances: in the entire history of Italy, economic convergence has been the exception rather than the rule. The last twenty-five years have seen per-capita GDP stop growing, while economic inequalities and poverty indicators have started to rise. How serious is the prospect of Italy’s economic decline?

This chapter introduces the framework underlying the 2013 World Development Report: Jobs, explains how it extends traditional approaches to employment, and summarizes how it has been applied to the country cases in this volume. The innovation of the framework is to propose that the social value of jobs may differ from the value they have in terms of earnings or output. An analytical framework is presented to illustrate these spillovers, which can apply to living standards, aggregate productivity, and social cohesion. Summarizing some of the main messages from the case studies, the chapter illustrates how types of jobs that can have significant development payoffs differ depending on the particular challenges that countries face because of their level of development, demography, or institutions. The chapter also summarizes the range of policies that can encourage the creation of “good jobs for development,” depending on the country context.

Germans were dismayed that the Allied blockade continued during armistice, and loudly protested the nutritional distress it created for women and children. Official reports of the German food supply and living conditions of the civilian population were commissioned by the Germans, the Americans, the British, and a conglomerate of European neutral countries. Less official studies were also made, and first-hand reports were published across the world. Beyond the political hurdles of sending food into a blockaded country, there were also bureaucratic issues under the Supreme War Council related to food control and distribution. Limited amounts of foodstuffs were eventually allowed into Germany starting at the end of March of 1919, and these are analysed for their caloric value. Herbert Hoover became an influential figure in efforts to change public opinion to lift the blockade.

Child involvement in economic activity is pervasive in today’s less developed countries—over 260 million working children according to the latest reliable estimates. The evidence available suggests that child work was also widespread in most European countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What do we know about Italy? No official estimates of the incidence of child work exist, nor are there any sources providing readily available quantitative information on the topic. This chapter fills that gap. We find that on the whole the industrialization of the country, which started in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was benevolent toward children: child employment dropped sharply between 1881 and 1911. The literacy of the adult population was the most powerful driving force enabling children to avoid entering the workforce—more than income, more than the role of laws and the provision of school facilities by the government.