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 according to features related to centralisation is...

The traditional way of measuring government redistribution across countries is to compare the income households report that they receive from private sources with the income they receive after government transfers have been added and taxes and social insurance contributions deducted....

This paper surveys the rise of income inequality in affluent nations. Social programs are critical to keeping inequality in check, but their sustainability is increasingly threatened. A possible solution is high levels of employment.

There is confusion in the literature concerning the relationship between income inequality and redistribution in a cross-country perspective. The reason for this is that different contributions in the literature are not referring to the same characteristic. This is shown by addressing...

We use a range of data sources to assess if, and to what extent, government redistribution policies have slowed or accelerated the trend towards greater income disparities in the past 20-25 years. In most countries, inequality among “non-elderly” households has widened during most phases of...

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction in the extent of redistributive fiscal policies if the maximal tolerable size of government has...

This paper describes the size, nature, and redistributive effects of welfare state expenditures in ten advanced industrialized nations and relates these differences across nations to disparities in the economic well-being of country populations as a whole and three (mutually exclusive and...

There is a long-standing controversy over the question of whether targeting social transfers towards the bottom part of the income distribution actually enhances or weakens their redistributive impact. Korpi and Palme have influentially claimed that "the more we target benefits at the poor, the...

This thesis is an empirical investigation of the relationship between income inequality and redistribution and their impact on the poorest segment of population. It is examined by two models in which we use transformed Gini coefficient as a measure of income inequality and sharegain (difference...