The Distributional Impact of in Kind Public Benefits in European Countries

By Alari Paulus, Holly Sutherland, P. Tsakloglou. Social Science Research Network, 2009

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

International comparisons of inequality based on measures of disposable income may not be valid if the size and incidence of publicly-provided in kind benefits differ across the countries considered. The benefits that are financed by taxation in one country may need to be purchased out of disposable income in another. We estimate the size and incidence of in kind or "non cash" benefits from public housing subsidies, education and health care for five European countries using comparable methods and data. Inequality in the augmented income measure is dramatically lower than in disposable income, with the effects of the three components varying in importance across countries. Adapting equivalence scales to take proper account of differences in needs for health care and education across population members reduces the scale of the effect, but does not eliminate it.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c1aa31100db72a110a3c3e3a4432ec40c77f2ef8

Citations in the corpus

• Automatic Stabilizers and Economic Crisis: US vs. Europe (2012, unknown): “Part of the EU-US taxation gap can be explained by the fact that non-cash benefits are on average higher (in relative terms) in Europe than in 24An exception is Paulus et al. (2010) who impute in-kind benefits in EUROMOD for 5 countries. the US (see e.g. Marical et al. (2006), p. 12).”