Public policies supporting families with children differ among countries but with the same goal of improving the well-being of children. Using a microsimulation model, this article assesses the cash support which families receive for their children in Croatia, Greece, Germany, the Slovak Republic, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The impact of policies across the income distribution on different family sizes, child-rearing cost compensation and child poverty is estimated. A method for the calculation of child-contingent payments for each child by order of birth in the family is proposed as a complementary indicator of policy design. The results confirm that a combination of universal and targeted support (either from family or social assistance benefits) is the most effective in poverty reduction and cost compensation. While high support for larger families greatly reduces poverty, generous universal or even lower support for large families has proved to be at least equally effective.
Over the last few weeks, there has been media debate about a further increase in the upper means-test threshold for child benefit. 2 The previous 40% increase made in 2018, which received a lot of media attraction, failed to cause an uptick in the expected number of beneficiaries and children receiving the benefit. In anticipation of the new change, likely to come into effect in January 2020, this article explains what child benefit is and how it is calculated, and tries to discover possible reasons for the failure of the 2018 measure. One of them is inadequate information provided to potential beneficiaries, hence one of recommendations would be that all parents and guardians should check their eligibility for child benefit.
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