This paper presents findings on the changing effectiveness of cash transfers and income taxes on inequality and poverty … reduction in four EU countries - the UK, Italy, Sweden and France. We use long time series (spanning four decades) to examine … relationship between the concentration of cash transfers net of direct taxes and their effectiveness in terms of reducing poverty …

. The paper underscores the principles of the poverty focus of social assistance and presents an overview of existence … evidence of first- and second-order effects of social assistance, particularly in the domains of poverty, education, health and …

, child poverty remains high as compared to other EU countries, possibly pointing to a weaker role of the public sector in … support also reduces poverty intensity and incidence, although not to a large extent. …

on poverty reduction and income redistribution. We also present a static microsimulation to analyse the potential impacts …, intensity, and severity of poverty are, in the best of cases, moderate and, although their progressivity is high, their …