WWMC · Who and What is the Middle Class
7РП — „Хора“ (Действия „Мария Кюри“)
- Период
- 2013-08-01 → 2017-07-31
- Финансиране от ЕС
- 100 000 €
- Участници
- 1
- Схема
- MC-CIG
Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.
Накратко на български
Благосъстоянието на средната класа в развитите икономики се анализира чрез нови теоретични рамки и данни от Eurostat. Това помага за по-доброто разбиране на социалния статус и жизнените условия на хората в тази група.
Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.
Резултати накратко
Periodic Report Summary 2 - WWMC (Who and What is the Middle Class)
The project’ success exceeded expctations. With the help of the Marie Currie grant, Tel Aviv University established a research lab for the study of the middle class. Professor Itai Sened received a major gift from the Boris Mints Insitutute to match the Marie Currie funding. He was named the head of the Institute shortly thereafter and the head of the new School of Social and Policy Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tel aviv University. With the added support he oversees four Ph.D. students and seven MA students. Professor Sened introduced to the core curriculum of the department of Public Policy a course on the welfare of the middle class taught at the regular program and the executive program, designed for executives in the public sector, ranking officials in the local and central government. Students get insight directly from cutting edge research by Professor Sened and his research students at the lab. Professor Sened and his students appeared in numerous academic conferences and soilicited lectures in eastern and western Europe discussing their findings, and have thus fully reintegrated into the European academic and practitioners communities. In terms of scientific progress, the PI and his students have completed the major goal of the project, namely to put together a new theoretical and measurement framework for the study of the welfare of the middle class in OECD and other advanced economies. They have now moved on to the empirical part of the project where based on the the large and significant eu-silc data base (Eurostat, 2017). This data base has been purchased and independently scrutinized by many scholars, including the team of Professor Sened and seems to exhibit the required quality for the research. Two pilot studies of the case of Israel and the case of the U.K. have been completed. Four papers have been published and four more papers are under review in different refereed journals. Finally an ERC grant proposal has just been submitted based on this research effort. The main scientific finding that is highly applicable for policy making in advanced economies, is that the current methods of judging the size and strength of the middle class by the traditional methods of cut points in the income distribution of household was shown to be misleading and inadequate for policy making. The research team built a new measurement method based on the understanding that the middle class is a group of individuls whose rights and privileges are protected by the state in ways that help the group become a lot more productive and contribute to the welfare and economic prosperity of society as a whole. The spread of the new neo-libral and globalization ideologies hurt this class tremendously, way more than previous estimates suggest. The new theory and evidence has been comprised to better understand the phenomenon but also offer specific policy remedies that, if implemented, might help return this economic engine of growth to the strength it enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century.
Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз
Цел на проекта
The middle class attracts much attention in recent years, but little is known about who and what is (in the) middle class. We use new institutional social sciences theory and state of the art latent class analyses to answer both questions. We argue that what defines the middle class are institutions that protect access to education, health care, asset accumulation, descent income and personal safety. These are necessary conditions for being a productive member of the middle class. While poverty often ensues off a deficiency in one of those conditions, the very rich can probably forgo them. We use latent class analyses to learn the level of protection one needs to become a member and at what level of affluence can one afford to forgo these protections. Pilot studies demonstrated the feasibility of the project. We want to use larger data sets of different EU and OECD countries to study determinants of middle class membership in a cross geographies, time series. Our study will yield important information on what policies could strengthen the middle class. For example, the Achilles Heel of the U.S. middle class is access to health care. Health insurance is provided through employers, so if you lose your job you lose your health care coverage and a slippery slope to poverty ensues. About six million Americans lost their middle class status since 2007-8. They lost assets, jobs and health care, but the latter was the most significant in reducing Americans to poverty. We estimated that two millions regained the status with the enactment of Obama’s Affordable Care Act allowing parents to keep off-spring on their insurance policy until the age of 26. European countries have universal health care but the middle class is more vulnerable to unemployment swings. The ‘short work time’ program in Germany has been effective in helping Germans keep their middle class status. Our study will allow scholars and policy makers to sort out specific vulnerabilities of the middl""
Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).
Участници
- TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY · Tel AvivКоординаторИзраел
Връзки
Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз