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Across countries the aims of transfer policy and the instruments used to affect these policies vary significantly. Moreover, within each country there are tensions between effectiveness goals (minimizing poverty and inequality) and efficiency goals maximizing the impact of given levels of resources). This paper develops a series of measures which capture these cross-national differences in order to examine whether there are trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness goals, and whether these patterns can be related to a wider understanding of different welfare state regimes. The findings presented here suggest that there is a strong trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness, when considered in relation to the income inequality goal; while the evidence is mixed in relation to the poverty alleviation goal.

This paper compares the ability of prime-age, able-bodies workers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Netherlands to keep themselves and their households out of poverty by working. The authors look at poverty rates based only on the head's earnings they then include the earnings of all members of the household. In both cases, many households with a head who works full-year, full-time remain in poverty, though more do when the head works less than full-year, full time. The earnings of heads can be supplemented by the earnings of spouse and others, and also by public sector tax and transfer policy. In particular, the effectiveness of the tax and transfer system in supplementing earnings varies across countries. Work is found to be an important strategy for avoiding poverty.

Several recent studies have documented the rising earnings and wage inequality and the widening inequality in the distribution of family income in the United States over the past 15 years. We examine the effect of government tax and transfer policies to offset some of these disequalizing changes, using a sample of six nations observed in two periods during the 1980s. We ask the following questions: in addition to changes in earned income inequality, how do other components of market income affect market pre-government income inequality? How does government tax and transfer policy affect the distribution? And finally, what were the trends in market driven inequality, government intervention, and disposable income inequality during the 1980s? The results of our exploration indicate that the U.S. redistribution system is decidedly weaker that that found in other nations.

This paper examines empirically the relationship between gender and poverty in eleven industrialized countries that form part of the Luxembourg Income Study. For each of these countries, Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty rates, based on a relative poverty line, are calculated separately for men and women. The overall poverty rate for adult men and women is decomposed into male and female poverty shares. These poverty shares are compared to the relative population shares of men and women. The main conclusion is that when the poverty experience of all women is compared to the poverty experience of all men, women are over-represented amongst the poor in some countries and under-represented amongst the poor in others. The latter part of this conclusion is in sharp disagreement with conventional views about the relationship between gender and poverty in industrialized countries.