This paper aims to analyse the social assistance systems in five South European countries: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. After reviewing the existing system of social assistance in each country, we apply a consistent methodology in order to estimate its impact on income...

Applied welfare analyses of redistributive systems nowadays benefit from powerful tax benefit microsimulation programs combined with administrative data. Arguably, most of the distributional studies of that kind focus on social welfare defined as a function - typically inequality or poverty...