Suchergebnisse

A standard analysis of the anti-poverty effect of taxes and income transfers is to compare pre-tax-transfer poverty and post-tax-transfer poverty. A critical shortcoming of the standard approach is that it treats pre-tax-transfer poverty as given and ignores the potential effects of taxes and transfers on pre-tax-transfer poverty. Analysing cross-national variations, this study examines the potential endogeniety of pre-tax-transfer poverty. The results suggest that both the generosity and efficiency of the tax/transfer system may influence levels of pre-tax-transfer poverty. If this is true, the standard approach overestimates the anti-poverty effectiveness of generous and/or targeted welfare systems.

This study aims to compare the anti-poverty effectiveness of taxes and income transfers among western welfare states. It is shown that a country's poverty outcome can be decomposed into the level of market-generated poverty, the overall level of welfare efforts, and the poverty reduction efficiency of taxes and transfers. Using the LIS micro data, the decomposition analysis suggests that welfare states differ widely in respect to the anti-poverty effectiveness of taxes and transfers and that cross-national variation in anti-poverty effectiveness is mainly attributed to differences in the level of welfare efforts, rather than to differences in the poverty reduction efficiency.

A standard analysis of the anti-poverty effect of taxes and income transfers is to compare pre-tax-transfer poverty and post-tax-transfer poverty. A critical shortcoming of the standard approach is that it treats pre-tax-transfer poverty as given and ignores potential effects of taxes and transfers on pre-tax-transfer poverty. Using cross-national variation, this study examines potential endogeniety of pre-tax-transfer poverty. The results suggest that both the generosity and efficiency of the tax/transfer system may influence the level of pre-tax-transfer poverty. If this is true, the standard approach overestimates the anti-poverty effectiveness of generous and/or targeted welfare systems.