Australia's Child Care Subsidies: A Distributional Analysis

In recent years the provision of child care services has increased rapidly in social and economic importance. Despite this, relatively little is known about either the distribution of the receipt or value of existing child care subsidies or their impact on family incomes in Australia. This paper describes the use of a microsimulation model of Australian Commonwealth government child care subsidies to analyse the distribution of the subsidies and to determine which types of Australian families are the major beneficiaries. The child care subsidies modelled are Childcare Assistance and the newer Childcare Cash Rebate.