Europe's Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality

European integration is focused on improving economic performance and increasing income levels in nations across the European Union. Political leaders and the media often use income trends to measure this progress, with inequality moving more and more to the forefront of these conversations. In this book, contributing authors focus on the economies within the EU, its member countries, and other European countries closely associated with the EU. The book includes an overview of economic and social trends, using long-term processes of European integration as a way to frame the discussions.

Georg Fischer, Robert Strauss, and their contributors focus on explaining how policy makers and the media focus on national trends to measure progress among the nations in Europe. They make a specific point to look at the EU as an economic and political entity whose parts are closely interlinked rather than as a conglomerate of individual countries. The contributors consider the commonalities and differences between various institutions and policies, explaining how a decision in one country might impact another.

Europe's Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality offers a novel approach to the analysis of social and economic trends, and the resulting book identifies major policy challenges applicable in the EU and beyond.

Georg Fischer is a senior research associate at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies and an associate at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO), focusing on employment and social trends in Europe and on social convergence. He retired from the European Commission as Director of Social Affairs in 2017, and he previously worked at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on labour markets in transition economies and served in the cabinet of the Minister of Finance and in the Ministry of Labour in Austria. He was a research fellow at the Social Science Center Berlin, the Economic Cooperation Foundation in Tel Aviv, the Yale University Macmillan Center, and the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Michigan.

Robert Strauss retired from the European Commission in early 2020 after working there for 35 years. During this period, he worked in industrial and internal market policy, and social affairs with a particular focus on employment issues. Among the policy challenges he worked on were the single market for services, flexicurity, skills and employment, EU unemployment insurance, a European minimum wage, and the macro-economic effects of inequality.