Poverty indicators often disagree about whether a person is poor or not. Yet, when it comes to assessing whether a programme is successful in reaching the poor the dominant practice is to use an income poverty indicator. This paper investigates whether the choice of welfare indicator influences...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact in terms of poverty and cost of the introduction of social (or non-contributory) pensions in Europe. We use data from the household survey EU-SILC and focus on 17 countries. We simulate - in a static framework - the introduction of two social...

The absent or poorly functioning risk pooling mechanisms and high amounts of out-of-pocket payments for health care expose households to financial risks associated with major illnesses or accidents. The aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which out-of-pocket health spending impoverish...

Raising energy prices to cost-recovery tariffs has several implications. The implicit (quasi-fiscal) subsidization of the energy sector will be reduced to a large extent. Energy companies will have higher revenues, and consumers will be faced with a major increase of their energy bills and...