Multidimensional Welfare Comparisons of EU Member States Before, During, and after the Financial Crisis: A Dominance Approach

Abstract

How did the financial crisis affect population welfare in EU member states in key dimensions such as income, health, and education? Using EU-SILC data, we seek to answer this question by way of first order dominance comparisons between countries and over time. The novel feature of our study is that we perform welfare comparisons on the basis of multi-level multidimensional ordinal data. We find that the countries most often dominated are southern and eastern European member states, and the dominant countries are mostly northern and western European member states. However, for most country comparisons, there is no dominance relationship. Moreover, only a few member states have experienced a temporal dominance improvement in welfare, and no member states have experienced a dominance deterioration.

Support for Governmental Income Redistribution in Nordic Countries

“…Thus, all four countries have a remarkably stable redistribution support over time even though the period from 2002 to 2018 was characterized by major changes, including business cycles and the 'The Great Recession' after the financial crisis. The middle of the period was characterized by adverse macroeconomic effects (EU Commission 2009), but at the same time the financial and economic crisis did actually not lead to a broadly based reduction in multi-dimensional welfare (Hussain et al 2020), which could be one reason behind the stable development in redistribution support. Finns top the support for governmental redistribution, with a staggering support hovering around 3.9, and only varying slightly between 3.8 and 4.…”