Abstract / Resumen:
Welfare and related phenomena such as poverty and inequality are multidimensional, involving not only income but also other non-monetary aspects such as health, education, or labour status. Hence, to appropriately account for the multivariate nature of these phenomena, it is necessary to measure the potential interdependence between their dimensions. To do so, in this paper we focus on the concept of multivariate tail dependence, which allows to study the contagion of deprivations and affluences in a society, that is, the risk that an individual who is poor (rich) in one dimension is also simultaneously poor (rich) in the rest of the dimensions considered. We apply the multivariate TCF to analyse the evolution of tail dependence between welfare dimensions in the EU-28 over the period 2008-2018. Several conclusions emerge. First, there is a risk of contagion of both deprivations and affluences in the EU-28. Second, the risk of contagion of deprivations is clearly higher than the mirrored risk of contagion of affluences. And third, in most countries the risk of contagion of deprivations significantly increased as a consequence of the Great Recession but did not significantly decrease during the period of economic recovery. This suggests the existence of an asymmetric effect of the economic cycle on the risk of contagion of deprivations.