How Tight Are Safety-Nets in Nordic Countries? Evidence from Finnish Register Data

Olivier Bargain, Herwig Immervoll () and Heikki Viitamäki ()
Additional contact information
Heikki Viitamäki: VATT, Helsinki

No 3004, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: The non take-up of social assistance benefits due to claim costs may seriously limit the antipoverty effect of these programs. Yet, available evidence is fragmented and mostly relies on interview-based data, potentially biased by misreporting and measurement errors on both benefit entitlement and income levels used to assess eligibility. In this paper, we use Finnish administrative data to compare eligibility and actual receipt of social assistance by workingage families during the post-recession period (1996-2003). Possible errors due to time-period issues and discretionary measures by local agencies are carefully investigated. Non take-up is found to be substantial - between 40% and 50% - and increasing during the period. Using repeated cross-section estimations, we identify a set of stable determinants of claiming behavior and suggest that the increasing trend is mainly due to a composition effect, i.e. a decline in the proportion of groups with higher claiming propensity. We finally discuss the targeting efficiency of the social assistance scheme.

Keywords: take-up; social assistance; poverty; register data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 H31 H53 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-08
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://repec.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp3004.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How Tight are Safety-Nets in Nordic Countries? Evidence from Finnish Register Data (2007)
Working Paper: How Tight are Safety-Nets in Nordic Countries? Evidence from Finnish Register Data (2007)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3004

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().