This paper assesses Italy’s 2019 tax and benefit reforms, analyses hypothetical reforms and proposes a reform package that balances goals of reducing poverty, encouraging employment and fiscal sustainability. Using the OECD’s Tax-Benefit and the EUROMOD microsimulation models, it shows that...

Reducing the extent of inactivity and promoting labour supply is essential to foster labour market outcomes in Hungary in the medium term. Notwithstanding specific factors linked to education, the pension system or family and disability policies, financial disincentives play an important role in...

Reducing poverty remains an important challenge, and the COVID-19-crisis may further reinforce social vulnerabilities. Although it has declined lately, relative poverty remains high in international comparison and is distributed unevenly across population groups with the elderly, people with...

Under the Universal Credit reform, the main means-tested benefits except the Council Tax Benefit will be pooled into one single benefit with one single taper rate. The reform will give people better incentives to work, reduce complexity and contribute to reducing poverty. The reform could reduce...

In 2016 the Polish government introduced a large new child benefit, called “Family 500+”, with the aim to increase fertility from a low level and reduce child poverty. The benefit is universal for the second and every further child and means-tested for the first child. Increasing out-of-work...

Little is known yet about the impact of the COVID crisis on household income and jobs in absence of real time information on these variables. A recent literature strand has sought to overcome data limitations to assess the distributional impact of policy measures taken in the EU using various...

In this paper, we exploit pension reform-induced changes in retirement eligibility requirements to assess the role of grandparental child care availability in the labor force participation of women with children under 15. We focus on Italy for two reasons: first, it has low rates of female...