Guio, Marlier and Nolan (eds.), Improving the understanding of poverty and social exclusion in Europe, Eurostat
Abstract
Τhe aim of this chapter is to explore alter¬native ways to define social transfers and measure their effects on income poverty reduction in the EU-27. Using microsimulation techniques, they at¬tempt to analyse the effects of treating social ben¬efits and pensions in net or gross terms, the role of different types of benefits and the impact of pol¬icy interdependencies when constructing hypo¬thetical scenarios in which some transfers are set to zero. They find that the average contribution of net transfers to income poverty reduction is small¬er than the corresponding contribution of gross transfers. Depending on whether transfers are con¬sidered gross or net, the ranking of countries also changes substantially in terms of the anti-poverty effectiveness of their monetary social provision systems. Non-means-tested benefits seem to ex¬plain most of the total impact of benefits on in-come poverty reduction.
