Public Transfers to the Poor: Is Europe really more Generous than the United States?

M. Dolores Collado () and Iñigo Iturbe Ormaetxe ()
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Iñigo Iturbe Ormaetxe: Universidad de Alicante
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Inigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe

Working Papers. Serie AD from Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie)

Abstract: Fighting poverty is one of the main goals in the most societies. This is usually done by the transferring resources to the poor. There exists a widespread view that the European countries are more generous to the poor than the United States. We study whether this is really the case. Firts we review the evidence on aggregate spending and we do not find convincing support for that view. Secondly, we analyze microeconomic evidence from the Current Population Survey and the European Community Household Panel and find mixed results. In particular, when we use the concept of relative poverty, we find that average transfers per poor person in the United States are 54% higher than in the European Union. When we exclude the old from the sample, this difference reduces to 20%.

Keywords: Poverty; Public Transfers; Redistribution; Welfare State (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 H53 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2008-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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