Three European countries with very different tax-benefit systems have recently substantially increased the level of support for children: Austria, Spain and the UK. Austria mainly makes use of universal benefits; Spain, tax concessions; and the UK means-tested benefits and tax credits. This article addresses the question of whether the chosen strategies are in fact the most effective for each country. It considers what would have happened if these countries had transformed the architecture of their systems in either of the other two directions. It makes use of EUROMOD, the European tax-benefit microsimulation model that is designed for making cross-country comparisons, to explore the distributional and, in particular, child poverty effects of budget-neutral alternatives. The results show that three factors -the level of spending, its structure, and the way it impacts in a particular national context -affect the outcomes to varying degrees.
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AbstractEven though interest in non take up of social benefits is considerable in many European countries, the topic is under-researched in southern Europe. The paper provides preliminary estimates of the extent of non take up of two pairs of means-tested retirement benefits in Greece and Spain. The benefits examined are (i) the minimum pension supplements pensioner social solidarity benefit ΕΚΑΣ and complementos por mínimos, and (ii) the social pensions pension to uninsured elderly and pensión de jubilación no contributiva. The paper finds that non take up of social benefits in the two countries is rather extensive, examines the methodological difficulties inherent in the analysis of non take up, and concludes with a discussion of the results and their implications.JEL Classification: D31, H31, H53, I38
We explore the redistributive effects of taxes and benefits in the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) using EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. As well as describing redistributive effects in aggregate, we assess and compare the effectiveness of eight individual types of policy in reducing income disparities. We derive results for the 27 members of the EU using policies in effect in 2010 and present them for each country separately as well as for the EU as a whole. JEL codes: D31, H24, I38.
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