This paper assesses the impact on household incomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and governments’ policy responses in April 2020 in four large and severely hit European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK. We provide comparative evidence on the level of relative and absolute welfare...

Means-tested transfer schemes in Europe and elsewhere tend to include not only income tests but also asset tests of various sorts. The role of asset tests in minimum income protection provisions has been extensively researched in the Anglo-Saxon context. Far fewer authors have assessed the role...

The paper analyses the incentive and the redistributive effects of introducing either a family based or an individual in-work benefit in Italy. The reforms are financed through the abolition of the existing tax credit targeted at inactive people. In-work benefits are means-tested transfers given...

Belgium has seen major changes in its tax-benefit system over the past twenty years. These changes have, to a large extent, co-determined the evolution of disposable incomes of Belgian households on one hand, and their incentives to work on the other. In this paper we assess equity and...

This paper asks what governments in the EU Member States and some US states are doing to support workers on low wages. Using model family simulations, we assess the policy measures currently in place to guarantee an adequate disposable income to working families, taking into account minimum...

We assess the impact of redistributive policy on child poverty across 29 European welfare states, using EU SILC 2005–2012. We distinguish between spending on pensions, spending on other cash transfers and taxation. For each of these instruments of redistribution, we further distinguish three...