This article presents for the first time a comparative study of the cost of disability for households in 31 European countries. In order to do so, we exploit the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, its special module on housing conditions for 2007 and 2012 and employ two alternative methodologies, one based on how difficult it is for households to make ends meet and the other related to the access of households to a set of services and assets. The comparative nature of the present analysis shows these national estimates of the cost disability from a broader perspective than previous research. One important finding of this study is that there is a significant diversity in the cost of disability across European countries, with Scandinavian countries at the top of the ranking and Eastern European states at the bottom. We discuss some possible explanatory reasons for the pattern of costs across countries found in our analysis.

Spain has one of the highest levels of early school leaving and educational failure of the European Union. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the anatomy of early school leaving in Spain and its characteristics. In order to do so, in the first part we discuss the measurement problems related with this concept and the evolution of drop‐out rates in Spain. We argue that the published figures of early school leaving slightly underestimate the phenomenon, and discuss the impact of the increase in immigration rates on the level of educational failure and its very unequal distribution in terms of gender. In a second part, using data from the Labour Force Surveys of 2000 and 2007, we explore the factors behind educational failure by means of a logistic regression. The results of this model confirm the explanatory power of social reproduction hypotheses, but also show that there are important aspects of the patterns and recent evolution of early school leaving which cannot be explained by a single theoretical approach.

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