Recasting Safety Nets: Reforming Social Assistance in Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom

This paper investigates the simulation of common policy reforms across different countries. Changes to the equivalence scales of social assistance systems in favour of pensions and children in Germany, Ireland and the UK were modelled. Unlike a number of previous studies of this kind such as Atkinson et al. (1988), reforms were modelled in the policy and societal context in which the reforms are set. To do this, three national tax-benefit microsimulation models were used. The analysis highlighted both the different structure of the policy instruments used across the countries, but also the importance of the national environments in which the policy is set. This paper highlights the difficulties associated with carrying out comparative research of this nature using national models which were not designed specifically for this purpose.