Inequality

Richard Layard is one of Britain's foremost applied economists whose work has had a profound impact on the policy debate in Britain and abroad. This book contains his most influential articles on education and inequality, and on the lessons of economic transition in Eastern Europe. It is published along with a companion volume, Tackling Unemployment. The two most obvious ways of tackling inequality are through education and by redistributing cash. But in each case we need to weigh up the gain in equality against any loss of efficiency which may result. Layard shows how to do this. He focuses on lifetime incomes as the natural basis for thinking about inequality, and shows how lifetime incomes are affected by education. Viewed in the context of lifetime rather than annual income, education is a more powerful tool when compared with cash redistribution. Layard also looks at the efficiency cost of cash redistribution by investigating how taxes affect people's work effort - especially the labour supply of women. However, he argues that to some extent people's efforts to better themselves through hard work are self-defeating. If each person tries to do better than his neighbour, they cannot all succeed. If redistributive taxation reduces this kind of fruitless effort, its efficiency cost is less than might appear. Other essays cover the hypotheses that 'screening' encourages over-education, that universities under-teach, and that the new media will make existing teaching methods obsolete. The final essays cover the experience of post-communist reform - privatisation, stabilisation and restructuring - and the key issue of why the reform has caused so much pain.

ISBN 0333722310   DEWEY edition DC21 ISBN13 9780333722312 (What's this?)   Pages 544 Publisher Palgrave Macmillan   Weight (grammes) 973 Imprint Palgrave Macmillan   Published in Basingstoke Format Hardback   Height (mm) 222 Publication date 22 Mar 1999   Width (mm) 141 Non-book description 416   Spine width (mm) 42 DEWEY 330.01   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly

		Preface
		Acknowledgements
1		Why I am an economist		1
Pt. I		Education and Inequality
2		Introduction		15
3		On measuring the redistribution of lifetime income		20
4		Family income distribution: explanation and policy evaluation		51
5		Education versus cash redistribution: the lifetime context		82
6		The causes of poverty		91
7		The effect of collective bargaining on relative and absolute wages		105
8		Human capital and earnings: British evidence and a critique		126
9		The screening hypothesis and the returns to education		155
10		Capital-skill complementarity, income distribution and output accounting		172
11		Married women's participation and hours		198
12		Why are more women working in Britain?		228
13		On the use of distributional weights in social cost-benefit analysis		258
14		Human satisfactions and public policy		266
15		Economic theories of educational planning		283
16		University efficiency and university finance		310
17		The cost-effectiveness of the new media in higher education		332
18		The pool of ability		354
19		The Thatcher miracle?		368
20		Lifelong learning		376
Pt. II		Economic Transition
21		Introduction		399
		More...

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