In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

This paper evaluates the linkage between social security strategies and redistributive effects in EU social transfer systems. It is argued that the various European systems produce different patterns of redistribution that may be explained by the adoption of different mixes of social security...

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of various regulatory and institutional settings of European schemes of social assistance. For this purpose, two sets of classifications of European schemes of social assistance are introduced that classify the systems according to regulatory...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes except for Luxembourg according to features related to...

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....

Using counterfactual microsimulations, Shapley decompositions of time change in inequality and poverty indices make it possible to disentangle and quantify the relative effect of tax-benefit policy changes, compared to all other effects including shifts in the distribution of market income....

The purpose of this paper is to explore and compare the effectiveness of Minimum Income (MI) schemes in protecting people of working age from poverty in the European Union. Using the EU-wide microsimulation model EUROMOD, we investigate (a) coverage and (b) adequacy of MI schemes in 18...

To assess the impact of tax-benefit policy changes on income distribution over time, we suggest a methodology based on counterfactual simulations. We start by decomposing changes in inequality/poverty indices into three contributions: reforms of the tax-benefit structure (rules, rates, etc.),...

We compare the distributional effects of policy changes introduced in the period 2008-2013 in twelve EU countries using the EU microsimulation model EUROMOD. The countries, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and the UK, chose different...

Very low work intensity and at-risk-of-poverty are two of the three indicators used for monitoring progress towards the Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion reduction target. Their timeliness is critical for tracing the effectiveness of policy interventions towards reaching this target....