Deaton Review Country Studies: A Trans-Atlantic Comparison of Inequalities in Incomes and Outcomes over Five Decades

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The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on earnings, education, skills and jobs raises key challenges for inequality and the design of policy responses. The aim of this project is to examine a broad set of inequalities in employment, human capital, earnings and family income over the last five decades in a coherent framework across North America and Europe. It will provide a major source for comparative research on inequality trends and on how the pandemic has affected them. There are 17 country-based research teams involved with extensive experience researching economic inequalities. Each team is responsible for their country-specific data, which will draw on household surveys and administrative records, but all analyses are coordinated across countries to provide harmonious treatment of variables and estimation. The project is composed of four related research strands. The first is to understand changes in a wide range of economic inequalities before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The second will examine labour market inequalities in detail. The third will highlight the role of education and training for those who do not go to university and focusses on the differences in educational systems and the impact on inequality. The final strand will look at the tax and welfare systems and their effectiveness at addressing family income inequality. The key outputs of this project will be a set of country-specific papers on the evolution and drivers of income inequalities pre-and post-pandemic; two cross-country synthesis papers, and a policy brief for each country. We will organise an international conference for academics and policymakers to conclude the project. This project will highlight key differences and commonalities across 17 economies, deepen our understanding of the drivers of inequality and the impact of the pandemic and provide evidence needed to design appropriate policy responses to inequality in the post-pandemic world.