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...

In this paper we analyze the effects of Minimum Guaranteed Income (MGI) schemes on labour supply of Italian married couples by applying a behavioural micro-simulation tax-benefit model. The Tax-Benefit Model applied is the static micro-simulation model of EUROMOD. A household labour supply model...

We develop and estimate a microeconometric model of household labour supply in four European countries representative of different economies and welfare policy regimes: Denmark, Italy, Portugal and United Kingdom. We then simulate, under the constraint of constant total net tax revenue, the...

Fiscal welfare, i.e. the use of the tax system to achieve social policy goals, is assuming ever greater importance throughout Europe and beyond. In housing, the favourable tax treatment of mortgage interest repayments has often coexisted alongside public programmes of housing benefit or social...