The welfare state at your service? Towards a better understanding of the impact of public goods and services on poverty in Europe.

Publicly provided or subsidised goods and services account for about half of social expenditures in European welfare states. Obviously, this has an important impact upon the living standard of households. Nevertheless, current methods trying to include the value of services into measures of cash incomes largely fail to take into account household needs associated with these services. This project seeks to contribute to the measurement of poverty in welfare states by developing a new way to examine the impact of public services on poverty. The proposal distinguishes four research phases. First, patterns in the cost and accessibility of public services in European welfare states will be studied. Second, on the basis of a new dataset of cross-country comparable reference budgets the project aims to estimate the effect of services and cost-compensations on the budget that specific family types need at the minimum for adequate social participation. For six European countries new poverty thresholds will be estimated which take account of the needs of households and the cost for accessing essential services. Third, the estimated poverty thresholds will be extrapolated to the population by developing a new approach which combines information from reference budgets and household expenditure data. Finally, on the basis of a representative income survey the profile of the poor will be studied and compared to results based on more traditional poverty indicators.

Keywords:WELFARE STATE

Disciplines:Social work, Other sociology and anthropology