This paper assesses to what extent differences in the characteristics of individuals (micro‐level perspective) and country‐specific factors (macro‐level perspective) can explain country differences with respect to material deprivation levels. Thus, our work aims to simultaneously consider the macro dimension and the predominantly individually‐oriented study field of material deprivation using multilevel techniques. We make use of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. Our results show that country‐specific factors seem to be much more relevant than individual effects in explaining country differences in material deprivation. We estimate that the introduction of country‐specific factors reduces the proportion of total variance due to between‐country differences in deprivation by 72.7 percent, while individual‐level variables reduce this proportion by only 9.4 percent. We also show, through interaction variables, that the effect of sociodemographic characteristics can be shaped by institutional and structural factors, especially by the level of GDP.

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In this paper, we examine the ability of social benefits to soften the level of child deprivation.We construct a dedicated child deprivation indicator which allows us to better capture children's circumstances and examine the effect on it of contextual and sociodemographic factors jointly through multilevel models. We contribute to the scarce literature on the effects of social spending on child-specific deprivation from a cross-national perspective. We separately estimate the effect of each social benefit function on child deprivation to evaluate the impact of those benefit functions directly targeted at children and those benefit functions with no explicit intention of child deprivation protection. Our findings suggest that in order to explain differences across European countries in the level of child deprivation, country-level determinants are crucial. Moreover, social benefits play a key role that remains even when controlling for country-level determinants. An additional finding is that the most effective social benefit functions are not necessarily those targeted at children.

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We evaluated three definitions of heat wave (HW) and demonstrate that selection of the reference period and air temperature threshold used in the definition can affect the reported frequency of HWs. First, we propose an alternative definition of HW that is based on a moving reference period and specific air temperatures threshold for each calendar date. Then, we present a case study using data from five observatories in Malaga Province (Spain) from 1971 to 2016. We assessed the effect of a moving reference period (rather than a fixed reference period) and the definition of daily air temperatures threshold on the identification of anomalies in the definition of a HW. The results indicate that HWs can occur throughout the year. Finally, we propose incorporation of minimum daily air temperatures in two alternative definitions of HW. Our results indicate a high frequency of HWs in the summer months, in which HWs are mainly due to anomalous high Tmin and more frequent HWs in which maximum and minimum daily air temperature are exceeded from 2014 onwards. These new methods of defining a HW provide more accurate assessments of thermal discomfort.

As recession and financial crisis spread across Europe an increasing number of people are at risk of poverty and social exclusion. Children are more exposed to the risk of poverty and social exclusion than the overall population of the EU. The current climate of economic downturn calls out for an urgent need to break the vicious circle of intergenerational transmission of poverty and social exclusion in order to improve the well-being of children in a systematic and integrated way. Using the EU-SILC 2009 module on deprivation, this paper aims to contribute to the literature on poverty and social exclusion by analysing the determinants of material deprivation among children. Special attention is given to the type of household children belong to, a characteristic that is strongly determined by adults' behaviour. We find that the level of child deprivation varies among household types. Moreover, we confirm that even after controlling for the socio-economic characteristics of the household and parents, there still exist households with a lack of certain items that are strongly correlated to children with intense deprivation. Therefore, we can conclude that there exists an association between child deprivation and the household-deprivation profile that surpasses the socio-demographic characteristics of the household and parents.JEL CODES: I32, J13

Children are generally at a higher risk of poverty than the population as a whole, although the mechanisms that lead to their socio-economic vulnerability vary widely across European countries. This paper aims to further our understanding of to what extent cross-country variations in child poverty risk are associated with different ways of social transfer targeting: pro-poor versus pro-child targeting. In particular, we address the potential impact on child poverty of countries’ intent to target transfers at lower incomes and children across 30 European countries. Using a multilevel framework, we find that not only the size of the transfer system, but also the form of targeting matters in reducing child poverty. Specifically, the countries’ intent to target children matters even more than their intent to target lower incomes, in terms of reducing child poverty. Moreover, the prevalence of multi-generational households in a country seems to be associated with an attempt to protect against child poverty in countries with lower levels of pro-child targeting.

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