In an interview with Sprank, Sandra Phlippen, Assistant Professor at Erasmus School of Economics and Head for the Netherlands of ABN AMRO’s Group Economics, discusses her mission to ‘keep things together’ and puts income inequality in our country into perspective. Sprank is the magazine for decision makers in the social domain in the areas of work & income, participation, care and welfare.
According to Phlippen, the answer to the question whether the gap between rich and poor has widened in the Netherlands depends on the way in which it is viewed. ‘The income inequality, in terms of disposable income, has hardly grown over the past ten years. The poverty rate of 4 percent is also relatively low. However, I do see that a greater division between people with more and less certainties. I am also concerned about the group at the bottom, that has less and less to spend. Poverty is deepening.’
Furthermore, Phlippen says that in the Netherlands we should be proud that intelligence and hard work largely determine where people end up on the social ladder. ‘What you do see nowadays, is that many highly educated parents pull out all they can to push their children up the ladder after they have entered secondary school. Low-educated parents often do not do this, so there is a chance that children of the highly educated are more likely to go to pre-university education (VWO) and those of low-educated end up at Higher General Secondary Education (HAVO), after their first year at secondary school.
The full interview with Sandra Phlippen in Sprank, February 2019, can be downloaded below (in Dutch).
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- Assistant professor