Suchergebnisse

In this paper, we compare poverty statistics for Pakistan
based on data from the Household Income and Expenditure Surveys of
1984-85 and 1987-88, using a relative concept of poverty. After a brief
look at the quality of the surveys in use in Section II we recapitulate
the relative poverty concept in Section III. In Section IV we compare
the size and composition of the poor population in 1984-85 and 1987-88
by using relative poverty lines. In Section V we extend the analysis by
differentiating results across rural and urban areas and by taking into
account that the cost of living in rural areas may be lower than in
urban areas. Section VI presents a number of sensitivity analyses, and
Section VII concludes.

Using evidence from the European Community Household Panel we find that family benefits vary in their importance to household incomes and in the prevention of child poverty across Europe. In one group of countries family benefits appear to have a significant effect on the protection of children from financial poverty. The UK and the Netherlands are both members of this group, and we use the microsimulation model EUROMOD to examine the extent to which differences in child benefits explain the very different level of child poverty in the two countries. We also explore the effect of "swapping" child benefit systems between the two countries and find that there is some scope for improvements in looking beyond national borders. We conclude that the poverty reduction properties of universal child benefits may be improved without resorting to means-testing or compromising the other functions of these benefits. This analysis illustrates that comparative microsimulations can be extremely informative, and provides a flavour of the potential of EUROMOD to offer valuable pointers for the direction of social policies.

Computing the tax-benefit position of similar typical households across countries is a method widely used in comparative fiscal- and social policy research. These calculations provide convenient summary pictures of certain aspects of tax-benefit systems. They can, however, be seriously misleading because they reduce very complex systems to single point estimates. Using an integrated European tax-benefit model (EUROMOD), we substitute the typical household by a synthetic dataset, which can be used across countries. By varying certain important household characteristics (notably income), this dataset captures a much larger range of household situations. The calculations performed on this range of households not only show the tax-benefit position of many individual households but also demonstrate which household characteristics determine taxes and benefits in each country. Hypothetical calculations such as those presented here do not exploit the ability of EUROMOD to determine the impact of social and fiscal policies on actual populations. Nevertheless, they can be a valuable contribution to understanding tax-benefit systems since they allow us to separate the effects of tax-benefit rules from those of the population structure. We compute and compare disposable incomes for a large range of pre-tax-and-benefit income (so called budget constraints) of households in the Benelux countries. Disposable incomes are then decomposed to separately show the effects of each simulated tax and transfer payment. Based on these results, we illustrate the performance of the three tax-benefit systems in terms of ensuring a minimum level of household income.