Social protection systems play a key stabilising role for individuals and societies, especially in the recent context of heightened uncertainties. Income stabilisation and related social policy objectives hinge on the extent to which social protection is accessible for those requiring support....

The Polish tax and benefit system is presented in the context of a recently developed microsimulation model, SIMPL. The model allows simulating direct taxes, social contributions and public benefits in Poland for the years 2003 and 2005. It is based on the Household Budgets Survey data (Badania...

Proponents of a basic income (BI) claim that it could bring significant reductions in financial poverty, on top of many other benefits, including greatly reduced administrative complexity and cost. Using microsimulation analysis in a comparative two-country setting, we show that the potential...

Basic income advocates see a universal income grant, no questions asked, as bringing many potential benefits, not in the least as an ironclad protection against poverty, if set high enough. It is hard to know with any certainty what a world with a sizeable basic income would look like but we can...

We interpret social transfers broadly as a set of measures to reduce or relieve poverty, and study how well this purpose is served in the countries that participated in the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions in 2007. Motivated by the findings, we characterise a social...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improve social welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost of the variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the net welfare benefit of...