In 2017, Italy's government introduced a minimum income scheme, the so-called Income inclusion programme (REI, Reddito di inclusione). REI is a selective, means-tested and conditional scheme that aims at supporting incomes of those more in need. Its structure was recently modified to reach a...

This paper compares the poverty reduction impact of income sources, taxes and transfers across five OECD countries. Since the estimation of that impact can depend on the order in which the various income sources are introduced into the analysis, it is done by using the Shapley value. Estimates...

This paper proposes a class of decomposable poverty measures. It incorporates ideas of flexible minimum basic requirement norms, relative deprivation and the presence of public transfer systems. Public transfers oftentimes take the form of implicit transfers and are not usually reflected in the...

We document the extent, nature, and consequences of survey errors for receipt of cash welfare and SNAP in three major U.S. household surveys linked to administrative program records. Our results confirm high rates of misreporting of program receipt, particularly failure to report receipt. The...

In this paper, we simulate the poverty effect of the Covid-19 pandemic in North Macedonia and we analyze the income-saving power of three key government measures: the employment-retention scheme, the relaxed Guaranteed Minimum Income support, and one-off cash allowances. In this attempt, the...

Over the past forty years the economic fortunes of Australian households have fallen into two fairly distinct periods. In the “disappointing decades” of the 1970s and 1980s, real wages stagnated, unemployment increased fourfold and male full-time employment as a proportion of the population...

We document the extent, nature, and consequences of survey errors in cash welfare and SNAP receipt in three major U.S. household surveys. We find high rates of misreporting, particularly failure to report receipt. The surveys inaccurately capture patterns of multiple program participation, even...

We investigate how material well-being has changed over time for single mother headed families—the primary group affected by welfare reform and other policy changes of the 1990s. We focus on consumption as well as other indicators including components of consumption, measures of housing...

The welfare impacts of economic downturns generally have to be estimated using simulation tools because of delays in conducting detailed household surveys. This note documents a methodology with which social impacts of an economic slowdown, through its impact on the sources of household income,...

It has been noted that the failure to meet the target set by the government for reducing the head count ratio of child poverty in Britain is partly due to the success of government policy in generating economic growth. Apart from ignoring the argument that absolute poverty is not a meaningful...