When private goods are publicly provided at subsidized prices, government authorities have to determine the distribution of services on recipients. The distribution of services according to need is frequently referred to as an important policy goal. Thus governments are assumed to develop...

Despite a broad consensus on the need to take into account the value of public services in distributional analysis, there is little reliable evidence on how inclusion of such non-cash income actually affects poverty and inequality estimates. In particular, the equivalence scales applied to cash...