Adding child care policies in EUROMOD
Abstract: In this report we document the expansion of EUROMOD with child care policies in a selection of EU countries. Child care policies have become increasingly important over the past years, especially to help families reconciling work life with their responsibilities of raising children. The rising participation of women in the labour market urged welfare states to develop and expand child care policies. Concrete child care targets for European countries were set at the Barcelona Summit of 2002. Several countries reformed or expanded their child care policies in the last decade. There are, however, still substantial differences across EU countries in terms of type and coverage of child care policies. To enhance research possibilities with respect to the distributional impact and work incentives of child care provisions, we expand EUROMOD with child care policies. We have extended EUROMOD by calculating the parental fees for formal child care and other possibly related measures such as the tax treatment of these fees. In this note we describe for each country the child care policies in a selection of European welfare states and discuss the assumptions needed for implementation in EUROMOD. The selected countries are Germany, Finland, Lithuania, Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.
