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Anti‐Poverty Effectiveness of Taxes and Income Transfers in Welfare States
Author(s) -
Kim Hwanjoon
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
international social security review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.349
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1468-246X
pISSN - 0020-871X
DOI - 10.1111/1468-246x.00107
Subject(s) - microdata (statistics) , poverty , welfare , economics , poverty reduction , demographic economics , public economics , development economics , labour economics , economic growth , environmental health , medicine , population , census , market economy
This study aims to compare the anti‐poverty effectiveness of taxes and income transfers among western welfare states. It is shown that countries' poverty outcome can be decomposed into the level of market‐generated poverty, the overall level of welfare efforts, and the poverty reduction efficiency of taxes and transfers. Using the LIS microdata, the decomposition analysis suggests that welfare states differ widely with respect to the anti‐poverty effectiveness of taxes and transfers and that cross‐national variation in such effectiveness is mainly attributable to differences in the level of welfare efforts rather than in poverty reduction efficiency.