National Report: Belgium

audience: researcher, professiona

The Paradox of Redistribution Revisited: For What it Matters, Targeting is Associated With Higher Levels of Redistribution The Paradox of Redistribution Revisited: For what it matters, targeting is associated with higher levels of redistribution [First dr

ABSTRACT This paper aims to show that Korpi and Palme's highly influential claim that "the more we target benefits at the poor, the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality" does no longer hold as a robust empirical generalisation. We replicate their analysis for a broader set of advanced economies and find that the relationship has become an inverse one. For what it matters, targeting is generally associated with higher levels of redistribution. The important point is that the relationship over a broad set of countries and specifications is a weak one, suggesting that the extent targeting per se may not matter as much as we have assumed since Korpi and Palme. We show our findings to be robust across a set of alternative empirical specifications and data sources. We try to make sense of this reversal, focusing on two questions: a) have the "old" welfare states changed; b) are "new" welfare states different?

National Report: Belgium

audience: researcher, professiona

Is the neighbour's grass greener? Comparing family support in Lithuania and four other new member states

To what extent can a country’s effectiveness in reducing child poverty be attributed to the size of family cash transfers (that is, both benefits and tax advantages) or to their design? In this paper, we disentangle the importance of each of these two factors, focusing on the family support system in Lithuania and comparing it with four other new member states. Both single parent and large families are increasingly susceptible to poverty in Lithuania. This contrasts with other former communist countries, namely Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, which protect these family types much better. This paper examines whether their family transfer systems would achieve similar results in Lithuania. We employ the EUROMOD microsimulation tax-benefit model to swap family policies across countries and test whether size or design has greater effects on child poverty reduction in Lithuania. Hungarian, Slovenian and Czech policies would considerably improve the poverty situation among large families. Single parent families would only gain if Lithuanian spending on family transfers increased radically. Estonian policies would lead to mixed results: small gains for large families and losses for single parent families. </jats:p