The Rise of Economic Insecurity in the EU: Concepts and Measures

The Rise of Economic Insecurity in the EU: Concepts and Measures. Jason Beckfield, 2017, Paper, "Economic instability, an array of social changes, and welfare state retrenchment place the question of economic insecurity high on the scholarly and political agenda. We contribute to thesedebates by drawing conceptual distinctions between inequality and insecurity. Fundamentally,inequality concerns the distribution of resources across individuals, while insecurity concerns exposure to multiple social risks that can deteriorate living conditions. The multiplicity and dynamism of insecurity inform our development of a new measure of economic insecurity, using longitudinal data from the EU-SILC database. Substantively, we then use our new measure to analyze the distribution of insecurity in Europe."