Development of the social dimension of Europe was advanced by the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, and this paper considers the future direction of social policy. The first step towards a social agenda could take the form of benchmarking, based on national competencies in this field, with Member...

We compare the distributional effects of austerity measures that have been introduced in 6 EU countries in the period of large government budget deficits following the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn. We explore the effects of policy changes presented as austerity...

Over the past 20 years, microsimulation models have come to play an important role in policy analysis, identifying gainers and losers, and characterising the effect on incentives. A natural development of national models is a Europe-wide tax benefit model. The present paper reports results from...

Due to the worsening of economic crisis across European countries, the problem of poverty and the ways to tackle it returned at the centre of political and scientific debate. The level of poverty increased after the crisis, especially in Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece....

We provide evidence of the relative cost-effectiveness of different types of policy instrument in reducing poverty or limiting its increase, comparing within and between seven diverse EU countries. We do that by measuring the implications of increasing/reducing the instrument size within its...

This paper focuses on measuring the extent to which publicly subsidized transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean redistribute income. The redistributive power of 56 transfers in eight countries is measured by their simulated impacts on poverty and inequality, and by their distributional...

Bourguignon and Fields ("Poverty Measures and Anti-Poverty Policy") and Gangopadhyay and Subramanian ("Optimal Budgetary Intervention in Poverty Alleviation Schemes") have derived optimal budgetary rules for the redress of poverty through direct income transfers when poverty is measured by the...

This paper is a review and commentary, from both ethical and informational perspectives, of some known results in optimal anti-poverty budgetary rules for two kinds of intervention, direct income transfers and wage employment programmes.

This paper analyses the relationship between growth patterns, poverty, and inequality in Brazil during its globalization process, focusing on the role played by the labour market and social programmes. Methodologically, the paper makes two contributions to the literature. One is the proposal of...