Suchergebnisse

Substantial cross-national differences in poverty alleviation are well documented. But the extent to which different parts of the social transfer system account for this variation is still relatively unexamined. This paper analyses the redistributive effects of specific social policy institutions in a comparative perspective. The main question is to what extent non-means-tested entitlements and means-tested benefits reduce relative economic poverty in different institutional settings. It is shown that the structure of non-means-tested benefits is more important than that of meanstested benefits in explaining differences in poverty alleviation across countries. The paper also presents a new method for estimating the anti-poverty effects of separate parts of the social transfer system. This method decomposes the anti-poverty effects of a set of social transfers into independent and combined effects, which produces more valid results than prevalent methods used to assess the impact of a particular transfer on poverty. The countries included in this study are Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The empirical analyses are based on data from the Social Citizenship Indicators Programme (SCIP) and Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) describing the situation in the mid-1990s.

Welfare state regimes vary in their strategies of redistribution. Some welfare states have extensive taxable social insurance schemes, while others rely more on non-taxable means-tested benefits. In order to assess the distributive effects of different programme types, it is necessary to analyse social insurance after taxes, something rarely practised in comparative research. In this paper, we evaluate distributive effects of social insurance after taking taxes into account in 10 welfare states. The main question is to what extent income taxes affect the contribution of social insurance to income inequality. The conclusion is that taxation may have important consequences for both inter- and intra-country comparisons of income redistribution, especially if countries with similar social policy systems are compared. The analyses are based on micro-level income data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS).