On Tuesday, November 24 Prof. Michał Brzeziński (Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw)  presented on Inequality and polarization among social classes in Poland (work in progress).

Abstract:

In this paper, we study the evolution of inequality and polarization among social classes in Poland. We adopt the social class methodology as implemented in the European Socio- economic Classification (ESeC) (Rose and Harrison, 2006). The level of economic well-being of a social class is measured by average income and proportion of materially deprived members of the class. The analysis concentrates on period 2005-2013 for which detailed information necessary to compute our measures of well-being is available. The data come from the European Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Beside estimating trends in economic well-being of social classes in Poland, we also compute inequality and polarization indices, which allows to evaluate whether disparities between social classes in Poland are increasing in time. We pay special attention to the development of between-class disparities during the recent economic crisis.