José Ignacio Antón

Measuring More than Money

Job quality is a crucial link between the economy and well-being. This original book proves that it can and should be measured, proposing a theoretically based multidimensional ‘Index of Job Quality’ that is tested in the EU member States. The index proves particularly useful to measure the differences in job quality by country, occupation, gender and age.

Health care utilisation and immigration in Spain

The aim of this work was to analyse the use of health care services by immigrants in Spain. Using a nationally representative health survey from 2006–2007 and negative binomial and hurdle models, it was found that there is no statistically significant difference in the patterns of visits to general practitioners and hospital stays between migrants and natives in Spain. However, immigrants have a lower access to specialists and visit emergency rooms with a higher frequency than nationals.

Distributional Implications of Tax Relief on Voluntary Private Pensions in Spain

Using taxation statistics, this paper explores the distributional implications of tax relief on private pensions in Spain in 2002. For this purpose, the author suggests a decomposition of the Kakwani index and its generalisations that allows us to distinguish between the regressivity caused by targeting and that due to benefits allocation among recipients. This paper finds that these tax incentives are regressive - mainly for the latter reason - and have negative although small distributional effects. Finally, this work presents several proposals for reform of the current system and simulates their implications for equity.

Effects of health care decentralization in Spain from a citizens’ perspective

The aim of this article is to analyze the impact of the decentralization of the public national health system in Spain on citizens’ satisfaction with different dimensions of primary and hospital care. Using micro-data from the Health Barometer 1996–2009 and taking advantage of the exogeneity of the different pace of decentralization across Spain using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that, in general, decentralization has not improved citizens’ satisfaction with different features of the health services. In our base model, we find that there are even some small negative effects on a subset of variables. Sensitivity analysis confirms that there is no empirical evidence for supporting that decentralization has had a positive impact on citizens’ satisfaction with health care. We outline several possible reasons for this.

Raining stones? Female immigrants in the Spanish labour market

The aim of this paper is to analyze how female migrants fare in the labor market in Spain, a country that has experienced impressive immigration flows during the last decade. Particularly, we explore the differential access to employment and the earnings penalty faced by this group considering the interaction between two potential sources of disadvantage for migrant women: gender and migrant condition. Our findings suggest that migrant women do face this double negative disadvantage. In both cases, we find an economically significant gap, at least for migrants from non-developed countries. Regarding the former, the larger unemployment rate of female migrants is not explained by observable characteristics. In the case of earnings differential, although human capital endowments play a relevant role, both the unexplained earnings penalty associated with gender and migrant status slightly rise across the distribution of wages, suggesting the existence of a sort of glass ceiling for female immigrants.

From Sending to Host Societies: Immigration in Greece, Ireland and Spain in the 21st Century

In a relatively short period of time, new immigration patterns have changed the geography of immigration of the EU15, bringing three old emigration countries, Ireland, Spain and Greece, to the forefront of the new immigration wave. This article studies the analogies and differences of the recent immigration experience of this group of countries, focusing on the demographic characteristics of the immigrants (origin, sex, gender and education), labour market insertion (wages, labour market segregation and quality of matching) and overall economic performance in terms of poverty rates.

Utilización de los servicios públicos de salud por parte de la población inmigrante latinoamericana en España

Objetivo. Identificar los patrones de utilizacion de los servicios publicos de salud en Espana por parte de la poblacion inmigrante latinoamericana en comparacion con la poblacion local. Material y metodos. Se uso la informacion procedente de la Encuesta Nacional de Salud 2006 sobre la frecuencia de visitas a medicos de familia, medicos especialistas, servicios de urgencia y hospitalizaciones. La explotacion se basa en el analisis descriptivo (contrastes de igualdad de medianas, proporciones y distribuciones) y el analisis multivariante (modelos binomiales negativos y probit). Resultados. El patron de utilizacion de los servicios de salud por parte de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos resulta distinto del de la poblacion local, salvo en el caso de las hospitalizaciones. Los resultados del analisis multivariante indican que solo se aprecian diferencias estadisticamente significativas en el caso de hospitalizaciones (probabilidad de hospitalizacion 2.8% superior para latinoamericanos en ultimo ano) y de urgencias (0.205 visitas mas que los espanoles en el ultimo ano). Conclusiones. No se aprecian diferencias importantes entre el patron de utilizacion de los servicios de salud de inmigrantes latinoamericanos y poblacion nacional, con la excepcion de una mayor utilizacion de los servicios de urgencias por los primeros.

Supplementary private pensions and saving: evidence from Spain*

This paper analyzes the effect of private supplementary pensions (and the tax reliefs that aim to stimulate such plans) on national saving in Spain. It tries to test the alleged positive effects of private pension plans on savings. Using a longitudinal dataset and fixed-effects methods, we find that tax-favored contributions to a pension fund are not associated with a lower consumption level, which implies that this policy does not increase national saving. The empirical results on the impact of contributions on private household wealth are less clear.

Working Life and Retirement Pensions in Spain: The Simulated Impact of a Parametric Reform

This article aims to offer an ex ante evaluation of the impact of a parametric reform of the Spanish pension system that would involve increasing the reference period used to calculate benefits, an approach proposed many times by various actors in the socioeconomic field. Such gradual change may be categorized as a non-structural reform of the pension system. This contrasts with reforms of a structural nature that have been very popular in Latin America and elsewhere, involving the creation of defined contribution individual account schemes. As regards the parametric reform proposed in this article, the main findings indicate that it would have a small but negative impact on pension income for pensioners and would reduce income distribution.

Knocking on heaven’s door: Changes in the world of work and the middle class in Spain

While recent studies have highlighted the phenomenon and risks of increased inequalities between the top and the bottom of society, little research has so far been carried out on trends relating to the median income range that generally represents the middle class. This volume examines the following questions: what are the main transformations in the world of work over the last 20 years in terms of the labour market, social dialogue, and conditions of work, wages and incomes that may have affected the middle class? How has the middle class been altered by the financial and economic crisis? What are the long-term trends for the middle class in Europe?