We assess the level and distribution of compensation for households with children provided by child support policies in Croatia, Slovenia and Austria. The child support policies in which we are interested include child and large family benefits, subsistence and housing benefits, and tax relief for dependent children. Using a microsimulation technique of “policy importing”, we show that the adequacy and evenness of the Croatian child support could be substantially improved if Croatia’s current policies were replaced by their Slovenian and Austrian equivalents. We propose improved versions of Verbist and Van Lancker’s (Soc Indic Res 128(3):1299–1318, 2016) indicator of horizontal equity in the sense of construction, aggregation to the population level and interpretation.
