EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Impact of Social Transfers on Poverty Reduction in EU Countries

Miežienė Rasa (rasa.zabarauskaite@dsti.lt) and Krutulienė Sandra (sandra.krutuliene@dsti.lt)
Additional contact information
Miežienė Rasa: Lithuanian Social Research Centre, Labour Market Research Institute, Goštauto str. 9, Vilnius01108, Lithuania
Krutulienė Sandra: Lithuanian Social Research Centre, Labour Market Research Institute, Goštauto str. 9, Vilnius01108, Lithuania

TalTech Journal of European Studies, 2019, vol. 9, issue 1, 157-175

Abstract: Available studies indicate a strong negative correlation between poverty and social expenditures in EU countries. It means that the country’s at-risk-of-poverty rate tends to erode with increasing social expenditure. However, the studies have demonstrated that the impact of government spending on poverty may vary according to the sector of spending, how well it is targeted, and the way in which it is financed. Some countries manage to achieve a rather significant poverty rate reduction even with relatively low, in the context of other Member States, social expenditure (percentage of GDP). This suggests that in order to reduce poverty rates, it is important to consider not only the amount allocated to social spending, but also the areas the social transfers are channelled to. The article aims to analyse how the composition and the extent of social spending/transfers may affect poverty reduction in EU countries. The analysis showed that social protection transfers reduce the percentage of people at-risk-of-poverty in all countries, however, to a very different extent. Regression analysis demonstrated that social exclusion and family/children expenditure was found to be the most important predictor for a relative antipoverty effect of social transfers: even a small percentage increase in such expenditure allows quite a significant increase in the relative antipoverty effect of social transfers.

Keywords: EU; poverty reduction; social protection expenditure; social transfers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/bjes-2019-0009 (text/html)

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:vrs:bjeust:v:9:y:2019:i:1:p:157-175:n:9

DOI: 10.1515/bjes-2019-0009

Access Statistics for this article

TalTech Journal of European Studies is currently edited by Tanel Kerikmäe and Matti Rudanko

More articles in TalTech Journal of European Studies from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla (peter.golla@degruyter.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-29
Handle: RePEc:vrs:bjeust:v:9:y:2019:i:1:p:157-175:n:9