Forskningsprojekt Tackling Inequalities in Time of Austerity (TITA)

The program builds a holistic framework for mapping the most crucial target groups for policy measures and ensures feasible policy recommendations for reducing inequalities in society for decades to come. It makes available tools for policy-learning, both through within-country studies and cross- national comparisons. Unlike the previous Finnish research projects on social inequality, TITA analyses together multiple forms of inequality (such as income, wealth, consumption, education, family structures, health, mortality, trust and deprivation).

The interdisciplinary group of highly established researchers including social scientists, economists, pharmacists, statisticians and mathematicians combine their skills to study causes, mechanisms and consequences of inequality in new and innovative ways that will have a long-lasting national, Nordic and international impact.

TITA has a very strong policy dimension. An overarching aim of the project is to develop and evaluate ex-ante and ex-post policies for decreasing inequalities in society through income distribution, welfare service, benefit schemes, education, family policies, fertility, immigration, health and well- being.

Besides “only” highlighting potential targets of policy measures, it will both produce and evaluate feasible policy recommendations for these problems. TITA exhausts unique longitudinal and time-series data and top-of-the-art statistical methods to ful- ly explore mechanisms of inequality. In order to evaluate past and proposed policy reforms, the project applies the existing microsimulation models as well as builds new ones to cover policy fields that have previously been ignored.