Poverty alleviation is an important objective of European countries and of the United States. If these ‘rich’ states offer elaborate systems of income maintenance, why is there still a considerable amount of poverty? And why are anti-poverty outcomes so different in the United States...

<p>Poverty alleviation is an important objective of European countries and of the United States. If these ‘rich’ states offer elaborate systems of income maintenance, why is there still a considerable amount of poverty? And why are anti-poverty outcomes so different in the United...</p>

<p>Several previous papers have marked the United States as an outlier: high poverty rates, low public social spending but high private social expenditures; a rather strong belief that people are poor because of laziness or lack of will; and remarkable differences across the States due to state...</p>

The aim of this paper is to offer detailed information of fiscal redistribution in 36 countries, employing data that have been computed from the Luxembourg Income Study’s micro-level database. LIS data are detailed enough to allow us to measure both overall redistribution, and the partial...

The ageing of populations and hampering economic growth increase pressure on public fi-nances in many advanced capitalist societies. Consequently, governments have adopted pen-sion reforms in order to relieve pressure on public finances. These reforms have contributed to a relative shift from...

Most analyses of social protection are focussed on public arrangements. However, social effort is not restricted to the public domain; all kinds of private arrangements can be substitutes to public programs. OECD data indicate that accounting for private social benefits has an equalising effect...

In most OECD-countries income inequality has increased during the last two decades. In this paper, we investigate whether changes in the overall distribution of income can be attributed to social policy measures. For most (but not all) countries we find a possible relationship between changing...

The use of environmental taxes for pollution problems without spillovers is studied in a multi-jurisdictional setting. The problem is studied using the standard Mintz & Tulkens (1986) model for interjurisdictional tax competition. This is a model with 2 regions, two tradeable private goods:...

Most analyses of social protection are focussed on public arrangements. However, social effort is not restricted to the public domain; all kinds of private arrangements can be substitutes to public programs. In fact, in several countries there has been a shift from public towards private social...