Clustering European Welfare Systems through a Performance Index

Maria Alessandra Antonelli and Valeria De Bonis

No 18, Public Finance Research Papers from Istituto di Economia e Finanza, DSGE, Sapienza University of Rome

Abstract: We construct a composite performance indicator to assess the relative performance of welfare policies in the EU countries. We show that the variability of performances cannot be explained only by the amount of resources devoted to social policies, but also by the composition of social expenditure: countries with higher shares of redistributive public expenditure obtain better results in the social sector. This result confirms the association between the type of welfare system, according to the traditional four-way classification, and the performance level. However, considering a more complete set of indicators of the structure of the welfare systems, we find that European countries cannot be grouped according to the traditional classification. Considering expenditure-side indicators and financing-side indicators together, three groups form: one comprising the UK and Iceland, one the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, one the continental (and southern) countries and Ireland.

Keywords: welfare systems; European integration; cluster analysis. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 H53 I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dsge.uniroma1.it/sites/default/files/p ... conomia/e-pfrp18.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gfe:pfrp00:00018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Public Finance Research Papers from Istituto di Economia e Finanza, DSGE, Sapienza University of Rome Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Valeria De Bonis ().