In Chile, the influence of the socioeconomic make-up of classrooms on achievement has been extensively studied in mathematics and language, but less in currently important non-traditional subjects such as civic knowledge. This paper analyses the effects of the socioeconomic composition of classrooms on students' civic knowledge achievement in Chile, using the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2009 and a multilevel methodology. This research finds positive influences of higher socioeconomic intakes of 36% of one standard deviation in test scores. These results suggest that in the socioeconomically segregated Chilean education system, these effects would contribute to widening the civic knowledge attainment gap between pupils attending affluent and less affluent schools. In addition, this research finds that, on average, students with a higher individual socioeconomic status are more sensitive to these influences and that socioeconomic composition effects are more acute in the private-voucher sector than in the public sector.

Social cohesion in the EU (European Union) is usually assessed on the basis of GDP per capita and relative poverty rates. These indicators show that the ‘European convergence machine’ led to greater social cohesion between old and new Member States (EU‐15 and NMS) until the onset of the crisis. In this article we offer an alternative perspective by directly comparing EU citizens’ disposable household incomes. Using four waves of EU‐SILC data, we explore what happened between 2005 and 2011 in the EU‐15 and NMS regarding changes in the lowest household incomes in relation to the EU‐wide median. Results show that, overall, the convergence machine seemed to work well for the lowest incomes in the NMS, but not so much for those living in the EU‐15. At the same time, differences in living standards remain quite large. This points to important continued challenges for EU policy initiatives in the social domain.

Although employment growth is propagated as being crucial to reduce poverty across EU and OECD countries, the actual impact of employment growth on poverty rates is still unclear. This study presents novel estimates of the association between macrolevel trends in women's employment and trends in poverty, across 15 OECD countries from 1971 to 2013. It does so based on over 2 million household-level observations from the LIS Database, using Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca (KBO) decompositions. The results indicate that an increase of 10% points in women's employment rate was associated with a reduction of about 1% point of poverty across these countries. In part, this reduction compensated for developments in men's employment that were associated with higher poverty. However, in the Nordic countries no such poverty association was found, as in these countries women's employment rates were very high and stable throughout the observation period. In countries that initially showed marked increases in women's employment, such as the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Canada, and the United States, the initial increases in women's employment rates were typically followed by a period in which these trends levelled off. Hence, our findings first and foremost suggest that improving gender equality in employment is associated with lower poverty risks. Yet, the results also suggest that the potential of following an employment strategy to (further) reduce poverty in OECD countries has, to a large extent, been depleted.