Communities in Action

Communities in Action
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2017-04-27
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309452961

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In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

A Spatial Analysis of Wage Inequality Among Foreign-born Workers in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

A Spatial Analysis of Wage Inequality Among Foreign-born Workers in U.S. Metropolitan Areas
Author: Chuncui Fan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

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This dissertation extends and connects prior research on wage inequality and immigration to the U.S. Focusing on evidences derived from cross-metropolitan comparisons, it finds unique temporal trends and spatial patterns of wage inequality among immigrant workers, identifies wage differentials among immigrant groups by individual characteristics, and evaluates the roles of different labor market conditions in determining changes in immigrant wage inequality and their spatial variations. These findings point to the fact that race and ethnicity and geography are two key factors in understanding immigrant wage inequality. While race and ethnicity play an increasingly important role in determining wage disparities among immigrant workers, wage inequality of immigrant workers also depends on their settlement patterns and labor market conditions in their destinations. Wage inequality among immigrants in the U.S. is a function of different types of metropolitan areas, which serve as urban contexts to accommodate racial and ethnic concentration of immigrant workers and their divergent historical economic incorporation. Using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS) data of the Decennial Census for the years 1980, 1990, 2000 and pooled 5-year ACS data in 2009, my empirical analysis shows that immigrants had wider wage gap and higher rates of inequality growth during the past three decades than the native-born workers in the U.S. There was great heterogeneity in urban wage inequality among immigrant workers. But all metropolitan areas experienced a rapid growth in wage inequality since 1980. A decomposition of wage inequality of the overall labor force in the U.S. by nativity shows that immigrant wage inequality and their local income shares both had an impact on the contribution of immigrant wage inequality to wage inequality of the overall labor force. An examination of immigrant wage differentials between educational and racial and ethnic groups finds rapid growths in three-decade wage gaps between college graduates and high-school dropouts and that between White and Hispanic foreign-born workers. Among different sources of growth in immigrant wage inequality, the contribution of residual wage inequality declined moderately while the contribution of race and ethnicity continued to grow rapidly during the past three decades. Finally, focusing on labor market level attributes, panel regression models suggest that city population size, R & D spending, structural shifts from manufacturing to services employment, de-unionization in the labor force all contributed significantly to changes in overall and residual wage inequality among both male and female immigrant workers in U.S. metropolitan areas. To certain extent, geography also explained inter-metropolitan variations in overall wage inequality and in residual wage inequality among immigrant workers. For both genders, wage inequalities among immigrant workers tended to be lower in former immigrant gateway metros than in low-immigrant metros. Major-continuous gateway cities were more likely to have significantly higher levels of residual wage inequality among male immigrant workers than low-immigrant metropolitan areas.

The State of Working America 2006/2007

The State of Working America 2006/2007
Author: Lawrence R. Mishel
Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2007
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780801445293

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Praise for previous editions of The State of Working America: "The State of Working America remains unrivaled as the most-trusted source for a comprehensive understanding of how working Americans and their families are faring in today's economy."--Robert B. Reich"It is the inequality of wealth, argue the authors, rather than new technology (as some would have it), that is responsible for the failure of America's workplace to keep pace with the country's economic growth. The State of Working America is a well-written, soundly argued, and important reference book."--Library Journal "If you want to know what happened to the economic well-being of the average American in the past decade or so, this is the book for you. It should be required reading for Americans of all political persuasions."--Richard Freeman, Harvard University "A truly comprehensive and useful book that provides a reality check on loose statements about U.S. labor markets. It should be cheered by all Americans who earn their living from work."--William Wolman, former chief economist, CNBC's Business Week "The State of Working America provides very valuable factual and analytic material on the economic conditions of American workers. It is the very best source of information on this important subject."--Ray Marshall, University of Texas, former U.S. Secretary of Labor"An indispensable work . . . on family income, wages, taxes, employment, and the distribution of wealth."--Simon Head, The New York Review of Books "No matter what political camp you're in, this is the single most valuable book I know of about the state of America, period. It is the most referenced, most influential resource book of its kind."--Jeff Madrick, author, The End of Affluence "This book is the single best yardstick for measuring whether or not our economic policies are doing enough to ensure that our economy can, once again, grow for everybody."--Richard A. Gephardt "The best place to review the latest developments in changes in the distribution of income and wealth."--Lester ThurowThe State of Working America, prepared biennially since 1988 by the Economic Policy Institute, includes a wide variety of data on family incomes, wages, taxes, unemployment, wealth, and poverty-data that enable the authors to closely examine the effect of the economy on the living standards of the American people.

When Work Disappears

When Work Disappears
Author: William Julius Wilson
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2011-06-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307794695

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Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America's inner cities--from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime--stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy. Wilson's achievement is to portray this crisis as one that affects all Americans, and to propose solutions whose benefits would be felt across our society. At a time when welfare is ending and our country's racial dialectic is more strained than ever, When Work Disappears is a sane, courageous, and desperately important work. "Wilson is the keenest liberal analyst of the most perplexing of all American problems...[This book is] more ambitious and more accessible than anything he has done before." --The New Yorker